This is funny
During the last virtual training I attended, the two trainers (who did a terrific job) told us they would be holding live, in-person trainings on the classroom technology we’ll be using to teach virtually because multiple members of the faculty have requested live in-person trainings.
Apparently teachers can’t learn how to teach virtually virtually.
And see: Buffalo buffalo buffalo …
My God
I’m watching a Zoom training video, which suffers from the usual problem of the trainer rapidly and efficiently clicking tiny little icons and then moving on before I can spot which tiny little icon she clicked and where it was on the screen.
Have we learned nothing about video training in the decades we’ve been subjecting people to video trainings?
But even worse, this particular training video also has a very large subtitle at the bottom of the screen obscuring the icons being clicked.
OK, problem solved. “Closed captions” was set to “On” for some reason.
So after spending a good 20 minutes trying to figure out how not to have subtitles in a language I don’t speak obscuring the bottom of my screen, I will now spend another 10 minutes re-watching “Meeting Controls.”
Good thing I speak English. If I needed subtitles to learn Zoom, I’d be in trouble.
Also: good thing I’ve been using Zoom for book club and union meetings. I’m thinking about all the adjuncts whose first hands-on experience of Zoom is going to be the first day they use it to live stream their socially-distanced classrooms two weeks from now.
Zoom on
A couple of weeks from now, I will be hybrid-teaching college composition to a group of entering freshmen.
I will be masked; four or five students will be present, also masked; the rest of my students will be on laptops somewhere else scrolling their phones while I attempt to live stream the proceedings.
(Pretty sure there’s no way to confiscate cell phones remotely.)
It’s that last part, the live streaming part, that’s stressing me today. I have no idea how to live stream myself using my college’s technology, which has always been glitchy and opaque, and I shudder at the thought of trying to learn the ropes while also teaching the handful of students allowed to attend in person.
I’ve been sending emails to my department chair & program head asking for training … which they’re not in charge of because … that’s just the way things are. They are the people most intimately familiar with what I’ll be trying to achieve in a hybrid learning set up, but they won’t be the ones walking me through the technology I’ll have to use to pull it off.
Someone else is in charge of training, and it’s all virtual. All of it.
Virtual training on how to use Blackboard or Zoom is only marginally superior to self-training via YouTube videos and PDF files, but I’ll survive. I can practice both before we go quote-unquote live.
But virtual training on actual hardware I’ll have to use in real time inside a real classroom … as they say on Twitter, that’s a hard no. One moment’s lapse of attention, and I’ll be lost.
Speaking of attention lapses, I wonder if I can record the training?
Sounds like a job for a cell phone.
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
I’ve seen multiple stories this spring on our country’s online teaching fiasco, but I have yet to see an account of what the pandemic did to trainings.
It’s not good.
So much badness where cell phones in the classroom are concerned.
I mentioned that a couple of years ago I had a classroom cell phone problem so oppressive I actually considered leaving my job.
Of course, I wasn’t going to leave my job, but what I did do was assign “cell phones in the classroom” as the final paper topic–the final paper happening to be, fortuitously, the “simple argument” assignment. (Simple argument in my department: write a 5-paragraph essay arguing for or against X.)
Unfortunately, assigning cell phones in the classroom turned out to be a misfire since more than one student took the position that cell phones in the classroom were A-OK, the only problem being that we instructors were too boring to compete. Being more riveting than a cell phone, one student wrote, was the professor’s job.
So that was annoying. Since my policy is never to be annoyed by a student opinion, I regretted assigning the topic.
That said, the papers were a revelation.
It wasn’t so much that the new app … didn’t work. It was that people were struggling to even log in or download it in the first place.
This is reminding me of my friend who teaches in the city.
Last fall, word came down that this year teachers were to provide 21st century learning. Which meant Google docs. Everyone had to use Google docs in every class.
My friend teaches a combined SPED/gen ed middle-school class, and not one of the students could remember his/her password. Not one. So every day there would be 40 password crises, all of which had to be personally resolved by the two teachers in the room.
In case you’re wondering, the teachers couldn’t just have all the kids use the same password on one big shared Google doc (I asked) because my friend had already tried that the year before. A couple of the kids wrote bad words in the shared doc, so every student now had a document peppered with bad words, then admin saw the words and raised a fuss, plus a couple of parents might have seen them … I’ve forgotten the story now, but the upshot was that assigning the same password to an entire middle school class yielded exactly the kind of trouble anyone who has ever lived with a middle-school child would predict.
This school year the problem wasn’t just that none of the kids could remember their password. The possibly bigger problem was that they all freaked out when they forgot. So on top of individually logging 40 students into Google every day, the teachers had to talk 40 students down off the Forgot My Password cliff.
All this just to get into the system.
It took hours to get anything done. The class was taking 3 days to finish a lesson that had taken 1 day to complete the year before, and the kids were begging for release.
“Can’t we use paper? Please?”
A couple of months in, the school did its usual quarterly testing, and the best teacher in the school had dismal results. After that the whole thing went away.
I used to feel crushed when looking up from notes during a presentation to a packed lecture hall of colleagues intensely concentrating ….on their smartphones. It is hard not to feel discouraged.
9/4/2018 – Better than sex? Building mind wandering tolerant presentations by Lily Zhou
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
Best in class, part 1
Class without phones
Please put that away
Cell phone bans that stick
Senators and cell phones
Collecting cell phones looks harder than it is
Breakthrough
Looking at people looking at cell phones
Sad news and bad news in English class
Prohibited
Nobody likes to be pushed, cell phone edition
Virtual training for virtual teachers
I mentioned in Friday’s post that I spent years being paralyzed over the question of collecting students’ cell phones at the beginning of class. Embarrassing, but true.
My breakthrough happened last summer, when I taught at an ESL school near my house.
New teachers all had to take a series of standardized exams that were given under strict testing conditions: no cell phones, no watches (no analog watches, even), no bathroom breaks in the last half hour.
So there I was, the person who had been longing to take cell phones away from students, suddenly having my own cell phone taken away.
It was a revelation.
For the longest time, where cell phones in the classroom were concerned, I was paralyzed. I wanted to take them away, but I didn’t think I could or should.
My students were adults, what business did I have taking their phones?
And supposing I did collect phones, what would I do with them? Where would I put them? I teach college, not K-12; I don’t have my own classroom where I can hang cell-phone pockets and the like.
Even worse, what if someone refused to give me his/her phone? Wouldn’t everyone else refuse, too?
Then what?
Basically, I had a mental block.
I’m laughing——
The Senate has banned cell phones.
That’s the reality during the Senate’s impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, which will begin each day with a proclamation: “All persons are commanded to keep silence, on pain of imprisonment.”
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
To date, I’ve met one instructor–just one–whose students keep their cell phones stashed in their backpacks.
“I don’t have a cell-phone problem,” he told me.
“You don’t?”
“I tell students, first time I see a cell phone out, it’s a 5-page paper on a topic of my choosing.”
“Second time I see a cell phone out, it’s a 5-page paper for the whole class, also on a topic of my choosing.”
“I’ve seen a cell phone maybe once.”
“I don’t have a problem.”
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
Katie and I were talking yesterday about cell phones in the classroom.
She reminded me that she’d recently listened to a recording of a college class in which, every couple of minutes, the professor interrupted himself to say “Please put that away.”
It was striking, Katie said, hearing the words “Please put that away” without the visual, a much more jarring rupture in the flow. Then hearing the same request again–and again and again–brought home the dimensions of the problem in a way sitting in the classroom listening to “Please put that away” live would not.
Inside a class, everyone habituates, which is why everyone keeps getting out their cell phones, and why the teacher keeps repeating Please put that away even though putting it away leads directly to getting it back out again. The whole stop-start-stop-start to-and-fro recycles itself.
That’s the trouble with banning cell phones. You have to enforce the ban.
And enforcing the ban, unless you’re willing to take more drastic action (drastic action post t/k), means you have to interrupt the proceedings a lot.
Not fun, and not good.
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
Last September, for the first time, I collected cell phones at the beginning of each class.
I’ve always banned phones, but a phone ban without an enforcement mechanism is like a trade agreement without an enforcement mechanism. It’s not a ban.
When you ban cell phones things start off well enough, but one by one the phones make their appearance, and pretty soon you’re staring at the tops of people’s heads instead of into their eyes. You tell students to put their phones away and they do, but once they’ve broken the ban there’s no turning back. Before you know it, you’re spending your time monitoring cell-phone use while also trying to teach college composition and gin up classroom discussion of the readings. It’s miserable.
It’s so miserable, in fact, that two years ago I considered quitting. Over cell phones.
This semester’s class was the best I’ve ever taught. Far and away the best.
It wasn’t me, it was the students. They were great. They all came to class all the time (that may have been a first); they paid attention; they learned; they progressed; they were cheerful and engaged … they were a fabulous group. Every week I would marvel at how well they were doing and how much fun they were to spend time with.
For most of the semester I assumed this was a simple case of random variation. Sometimes all the stars align and a class gels, I figured.
But as time went on, random variation lost its punch as an explanation, mostly because it didn’t actually explain anything. What is happening when a class “gels”? Plus it didn’t seem fair to the students I’ve taught in the past, who were also terrific young people I looked forward to seeing each week–and who all got on well with each other and with me.
So what was going on?
Why was this class so different?
Then, just before semester end, it hit me.
No cell phones.
More t/k
And see:
Cell phone agonistes
Catherine & Katharine 