Thinking about dull knives

In our 2nd year of pandemic teaching, I now have sophomores whose faces I've never seen outside of Zoom and this is sad.

This week I went back into the classroom again, our second year masked up and socially distanced. I now have sophomores whose full faces I’ve never seen except on Zoom screens and I can’t help but be sad about this. This is sad.

At my college, social distancing means being in strange classrooms I’d normally never teach in, big lecture halls where the sound echoes and I can barely hear what students are saying through their sometimes multiple layers of masks. In other words, another year of less than ideal teaching conditions.

I feel lucky to at least be in-person, but it’s hard to explain to people who don’t teach for a living why the shape of the room or my ability to see their faces matters so much. What does it matter that, yet again, we can’t pull our desks into a rough circle or a square and look each other in the eyes while we talk about what are often the intimate details of our lives?

Back when I was in graduate school, working on my dissertation on suburbanization in a small town, I read a lot of research about the question of community and place. One of the central questions was—can true community exist without place? This was before Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or online gaming, so the question mostly centered on discussion boards. Could a group of people in cyberspace form a community that worked in the same way as a community based in physical space, like a neighborhood, apartment building, or town?

At the time, I thought the answer was a definite ‘no.’ There was no way anyone could get the same sense of belonging from blogging or playing Fortnite together that comes from occupying the same physical space. Maybe online communities could be called communities, but they were thin things. Easy to enter and exit and without any of the depth and richness that comes from being physically co-present.

Since then, I’ve made friends online. I have online communities. They aren’t the same as the community I have here in Madison, but they are still communities. I feel at times supported by people online. And also let-down. I’ve seen younger people form important friendships with people they started out playing video games with online, friendships that eventually migrate off the internet and into the wider world.

But for me, there’s still something sacred about being in a space together and this is especially true in the sort of small, mostly discussion-based classroom that I aspire to create. I realized this before the pandemic hit. I remember distinctly sitting in a classroom, one of those that I can’t teach in any longer because of social distancing, looking around at the faces of my students (around, because we were, of course, in a circle) and knowing that what we were doing was so, so special. Sharing our ideas and our experiences and taking joy in asking questions about the world. It’s amazing in the current political climate we live in that what happens in some of my classrooms happens at all and it’s no coincidence that some politicians are trying to put a stop to it.

When one of my classes really hits its stride, it’s nothing short of magical. We transform from a collection of individuals into something that is more than the sum of its parts—a community.* We know each other. We trust each other. We laugh together and do hard things together. We learn together in ways that are impossible without first carving out this sacred space.

This is why it’s hard to teach in masks and big, echoing lecture halls. At least in the type of class I’m trying to create, space matters. A circle of desks suggests we are all in this together. A sunken podium at the bottom of a lecture hall suggests the students are watching a movie, a passive audience rather than an active member of a community. That you can’t see each other’s faces only contributes to that feeling. Community isn’t impossible in this setup, but it’s hard.

There’s nothing to be done about the situation we’re in. Well, outside of mandating vaccines, there’s nothing to be done. I believe this is how we’ll be teaching for the rest of this semester and probably the rest of the year. I will confess that it makes my job that much less joyful, like I’m a chef cooking with a very dull knife. Sure, I can do it, but it’s not very fun.

Someday I hope I’ll be back in that classroom where I first realized the preciousness of what we had. Until that day comes, I’ll just keep on chopping away.

Thanks as always for reading,

Robyn

* This in, in fact, what Emile Durkheim imagines religion is—a manifestation of the magic that is community, as he writes about in one of my favorite works of sociology, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

P.S. You might have noticed I’ve migrated the newsletter to a different platform (Substack) and that it’s quite late. Turns out I didn’t want to spend my long Labor Day weekend writing a newsletter. Rest assured, though the format has changed, the content will be the same. Please do feel free to share the link for the newsletter, here, or to help a writer out and share on social media.