Zooming from class to class

Debates with My Daughters

At one point in time last week, there were four simultaneous Zoom meetings going on in the Pai household. Five concurrent live-streaming sessions, if you count Victor playing Minecraft with his friends on his iPad. Wife and I had work meetings. Fairy’s school started online classes and she’s been ‘going’ to school regularly. Airy’s music and language lessons Zoom effortlessly.

I have taught live online classes for over eight years and have tons of feedback from my working-adult graduate students, but I was curious to know what the two digital-native girls felt about the whole business. Despite their differences in attitude, taste and temperament, the girls both thought that their learning experience was actually better online. Fairy said there were fewer disturbances as both teacher and students could focus on the lesson. Airy agreed and noted that she could easily give the teacher undivided attention. The divas of the devices were engaging with their teachers on their own turf.

Were they not chatting with their classmates? Talking to your buddies is also a very important part of the learning experience, especially when the conversation is broadly about the topic currently being taught. It teaches you the important life skill of being loud enough to be heard but quiet enough not to be caught.

Surprisingly, they both said they don’t talk in class. I raised a single eyebrow as high as I could, but they stuck to this story. I fear that they are on the verge of abandoning the time-honoured tradition of talking-in-the-class-while-the-teacher-is-teaching. That would be ironic, because teenagers text each other most of the time. Maybe it was the illicit thrill of passing chits under the noses of our teachers that made my generation build elaborate, ad hoc person-to-person communications networks in our school days. Perhaps the girls are not chatting in class because it’s so easy, undetectable and therefore not a big deal.

Some of their classmates have discovered the “my mic is not working” excuse of online classes. This is the 21st century equivalent of “dog ate my homework”. It happens in the classes that I teach. Even adults think this excuse is believable. They don’t realise that what appears to be a clever new trick to them is not at all so for their teachers, who’ve seen it all before. I suppose the undeniable plausibility of it makes it an excuse of first resort for the underprepared student.

What the girls said they missed were the extra-curricular activities and social life of school. I was relieved to hear this. Braving spousal disapproval, I often tell them the real reason to go to school is to hang out with friends, although the classes can sometimes be useful.

There’s a school fest to be organised, games to be played and class trips to be made. Both girls were looking forward to some of these things and are already quite disappointed with the prospect of the event calendar being cancelled or abridged this year. That hasn’t stopped Fairy and her classmates from having serious video conferences planning the scheduled gigs. And Airy doesn’t like the idea of the first day of high school being spent in front of a computer.

Schools should continue online sessions even after the coast is clear of the coronavirus. Some classes can well be conducted remotely, reducing the number of days children have to turn up at school. Road traffic, carbon emissions and early morning rushes will come down. Not all classes and not all schools will be able to do this, but those that can, should give it a shot.

I suspect kids will actually like it, especially if their mics sometimes mysteriously do not work.