The Surprising Things I Don’t Hate About Remote Teaching

Yes, I can tell when you’re not looking at me!

My real classroom has always been a little bit crazy. My teaching persona is a little bit of Ms. Frizzle if she had been trained as a gameshow host. My classroom has been home to chickens, cockroaches (for research), and a steady stream of fish and plants. I’m a book dropper, a marker thrower, and a firelighter.

When I used to finish a day of real, in-person teaching, I’d feel energized. Spending the day with my students and seeing them make connections between new and old concepts would fill me up. Sure, I’d be tired, but it felt good.

I dropped by my school last week to pick up some things. It’s not that I don’t work there anymore. Or maybe it is. Now, I work from a makeshift desk in my bedroom, teaching my five daily science classes remotely.

My in-school classroom has been mostly emptied of furniture and there’s nothing on the walls. No smelly experiments, half-built Lego contraptions, or wildly drawn diagrams on the whiteboard. Instead, there are eight desks, spaced well apart, each topped with a basket of cleaning supplies.

Most of our school is remote, but a handful of students come into school one day a week for extra support and structure. On the day I visited, they were quiet, seated, headphones on, staring at the faces in a Zoom call.

All summer, I dreaded teaching remotely. Staying still and talking into a camera to students who I can’t high-five, shake, or throw things at is very off-brand for me. My email inbox flooded with companies offering me products and subscriptions to ease the pain of remote teaching. I ignored them all.

And then the summer that felt like it would never end, ended.

I clenched my jaw and logged in for the first of hundreds of remote classes that I will teach this year. I made it through one day, then a second. Now, two and a half weeks in, I’m adjusting to the new routine.

And guess what? It’s not as bad as I thought.

I still hate spending so much sitting at my desk. My Fitbit buzzes me every hour to suggest that I take a walk. Sorry, buddy, no can do. I hate eating a sad salad alone at my desk while I review assignments in Google Classroom. I hate that I can’t just pull a student to the side for a private conversation and of course, I hate how my face, my hair, and my mouth look on screen.

And most of all, I hate that remote teaching drains my energy. Instead of feeling energized at the end of the day, I feel empty. Closing my computer and feeling the silence of my bedroom wrap around me is sad and lonely.

But there are also some really good things happening too. Here are a few:

My students are learning

As a teacher, I’m used to talking a lot. In my classroom, when I talk, it feels like about 33% of what I say makes it to the listeners. Everyone is distracted by each others’ smells, clothes, and facial expressions. Then there are the noises of the building. I have to compete with the sounds of a kid having a fit next door, the delivery truck out the window, the announcements over the intercom, and the stomping feet from the floor above.

In my virtual classroom, it’s just me. What I say magically travels from my computer directly into my students’ earbuds. The next day when I ask them what I said, they remember it.

I’ve realized how much time I spend in my real classroom repeating myself and reexplaining things because everyone is always so distracted. With everyone focused directly on my face, saying the same things more than once feels a little bit insulting.

Sometimes, a brave student will unmute his mic and point out, “You already said that…”

For years, schools have been talking about personalized learning. Maybe for students, having their teachers’ faces on fullscreen and their voices piped into their noise-canceling headphones is the perfect degree of personalization.

It feels like we’re all on the same team

In my real classroom, it sometimes feels like it’s them against me. If I can’t get the projector to work, my students are more than happy to sit and do nothing.

If there’s a class clown, it takes effort and finesse for me to win control of the class back without losing it on them. I’m always searching for the balance between being too cool and being too strict. Go too far in either direction and chaos ensues.

But my Zoom classroom is different. It feels like we’re all on the same team, just trying to put in 45 minutes of class time in a way that everyone can tolerate. If I can’t get a link to work, a student will pull up the document and share it from her screen. Students will post helpful comments in the chat and if my screen freezes or I have to run to the other room for a second, they wait patiently.

One time, a student made an inappropriate political comment. Before I could say anything, another student typed a request into the chat asking everyone to refrain from such behavior. I guess it worked because it’s never happened again.

There have been a few times where I get kicked out of the call. At first, I was frantic to rejoin, worried that they’d all either leave or start daring each other to start taking clothes off. But when I rejoined, they were patiently waiting, scrolling through their phones or chatting benignly with each other.

It’s nice to feel like the kids have my back and we’re all working together for a good outcome. Even if they hate it, they’re still being helpful, and it makes it a lot easier for me to make it through the day.

My teaching is focused like a laser

In real life, my teaching is a little undisciplined. I can easily be thrown into a tangent by a weird question, an opportunity to take everyone outside, or a funny story that somebody tells. From the outside, it seems spontaneous, but often these offshoots from my real lesson are intentionally designed to recapture the attention of a wayward student or creatively introduce a new concept.

In remote teaching, there are no offshoots. There is one topic. There is one three minute video. There are ten bullet points. I stick to them like they are my liferaft in the open ocean. When I’m done, I ask five review questions. There’s no room for stories or experiments.

Teaching like this isn’t me. It’s not what makes me feel good. But what I’ve learned is that it’s easy. No wonder other teachers in my building arrive five minutes before class and leave at the end of the day empty-handed while I’m toting bags full of stuff in and out and staying until the parking lot is empty.

I’m not sure how I’ll teach when I’m back in my classroom. But experimenting with this new, sparse style has been enlightening.

I feel like a modern-day Jane Goodall

Ok, maybe this is a stretch. Jane Goodall studied primates in Africa and I’m studying high school students over a Zoom call.

But hear me out.

When I log into my classes, I pull up my students in a grid view on my large monitor at my desk. Each one of them fills their own little box with a hundred tiny clues about their personality. I watch them and collect data on what they like, where they live, what they do, and how they learn.

I collect mental data on who needs a haircut, who has worn the same shirt four days in a row, and who straightened their hair and put on a nice outfit, even though we’re all remote. I can see who is wide awake and who has to share a room with their little brother. I can see which kids get to eat a nice, mom-made lunch and which kids eat a whole bag of Fritos for lunch.

Even more interesting is watching their reactions to the videos I show. This week, I showed a short video clip about an insect that lays its eggs inside another insect. It was pretty gross, with graphic narration and sound effects to amplify the ickiness. While the video played on their screens, their faces played on my screen.

I watched their expressions change from horror and revulsion to fascination. It amazed me to see how similar their faces were in reaction to the video even though they couldn’t see each other and they were all experiencing it individually.

Remote teaching is still pretty hard, and if I never had to do it again, I’d jump for joy. But despite the suckiness, it’s been nice to find a few bright spots. Still, wear your masks, wash your hands, vote, and let’s get everybody back in school soon!

For more, check this out: