Today, I arrived at the school, ready to teach my classes, only to find out that the school’s internet had been down all afternoon (it had also been having problems yesterday morning, but it hadn’t affected me because the problem was fixed by the time my classed started). Making a judgement call, I returned to my house, and was able to hold my classes only a few minutes late. I have no idea what Sherrill did, or if the internet ever came back (Sherrill lost her phone about two days ago and just bought a new one today, but couldn’t set it up because of the lack of internet [her apartment uses the same modem as the school]. Luckily, she’s old, and thus seems generally able to function without a smartphone in a way I struggle to imagine for myself. Assuming the internet is functioning properly, I’ll help her set the new phone up tomorrow). Some of my students were absent and it sounds like many cafes lost internet yesterday too, so I think it may be a town-wide issue with the service provider.
This brings me to a broader point about online classes, which is that without reliable internet, they can be next to impossible. Students will drop in and out of class, sometimes mid-sentence, as their connection comes and goes. Audio quality is hit-or-miss and there are some kids who I just can’t hear. Furthermore, for many students, turning the cameras on causes their sound to lag, so I end up looking at a bunch of grey rectangles with no idea whether or not they are comprehending what I say, or if they’re even in the same room as their computer, unless I specifically call on them for an answer. The whole process of online teaching is alienating enough when it works properly; on days like today when there are technical difficulties, just getting to the end of class feels like a monumental task.
On an unrelated note, WordPress tells me that today will be my 99th consecutive day of posting. I’ll write again tomorrow, because 100 is a satisfying number (and because I still need to review Foucault), but after that I may ease back on the daily posts. I think they’ve gotten a bit repetitive and I’d like to branch out to something more narrative and literary. Maybe that will end up published here, maybe it won’t. Maybe I’ll stop writing entirely and then feel bad about it and resume the daily posts two weeks from now. But I think that after 100 days, some amount of change is needed. I wouldn’t want things to get stale.
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