After completing three sessions with my Berkeley students, the work they are producing is astounding. I didn’t think that the work would’ve been this good had we not met in person previously. They were already on a roll.
But teaching via zoom or Google Meets has its challenges—to say the least. At first, we divided up the class into two sections. But not everyone would attend the appropriate section, which cause some havoc. And sometimes kids didn’t get around to finishing their poems and/or sending them into us.
We meet each Friday from 10 until 11:30, not including the one-on-one one teacher conference time we have before each class and after each class. So the one-hour class really takes us two hours just to teach. And we’re really co-teaching more than ever in this medium.
Then all my students email the poems to me in varying shapes and forms. Obviously the easiest way is when the students type up their work on their Chromebooks. But since the students are writing in their journals too, oftentimes the parents will take a bad photo and email it to me, some of which I can’t download.
One poem came in so large that I could only see the upper right quadrant of the poem and it was sideways, so of course I couldn’t read it, let alone download it and Gmail actually stalled during the download. I eventually found a workaround using both my iPad and my MacBook. It essentially involved accessing the thumbnail and using it versus the 10 MB photo that was sent. Google or rather Gmail stalls at anything over 10 MB. I don’t think most people realize that if they send a large file Gmail loses its mind.
For the most part, students are very focused and produce amazing results. One of the benefits of teaching electronically is that I can meet with students one-on-one as they’re writing, to suggest deeper edits, or to add more information.
I find myself telling stories in a different way in order to make the poetic concept more accessible to students. For example, if they have not included a strong comparison, it is far easier for me to go back and ask them to add a comparison electronically than it would be if we were the traditional classroom setting. I find myself also telling stories about how to get them to deepen their metaphors or comparisons. I don’t usually use the word metaphor.
And I find that because I’m not in the classroom and I can’t use my body language, I have to cut to the chase differently, and resort to other tricks. My worldview is much smaller than it used to be. My world stage is rather smaller, so I am limited to using my face. even working my hands in is a challenge. No body language. It is exceedingly hard to only teach with a half a face and have little use of your hands. We don’t realize how important it is to demonstrate ideas using our bodies. Perhaps it’s kinesthetic learning, but the idea that we convey meaning with more than just our eyes or hands is a critical component of teaching.
Day one of my Brave New World with such wondrous creatures in it. Because I was uncertain as to how the lesson would come across the electronica teaching format, I opted to go back to something we had done the previous time we had met in class which was over a month ago. We had created an electronic version of odes. Since they were familiar with the process, it made it easier for them to go on a scavenger hunt around the house. As we shared our items, we talked about creating 6 to 7 images, or pictures with our scavenger hunt items. We had a little show and tell, a sharing process for each person to share shared their own object, and with that I sent them off to write about their objects.
5/5
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