PART 1 - The New Norm

Before properly starting the story about Marty's experience of teaching through a pandemic, I need to address a few administrative matters.

I'm not sure if you have ever personally taught in a formal setting or not. I believe that to be a hard-prerequisite to having a qualified opinion about the art of teaching. For me, I "taught" for four years. The quotes are there for a few reasons. I taught a single class per year (in Fall or Spring but never both). The students were highly motivated and engaged. There were less than a dozen students in each class. By most standards, this is teaching nirvana and barely resembles what most do. I had all of that going for me, and it still rates as one of the most difficult professional endeavors I've ever undertaken.

And what made it hard is not necessarily what you might think made it hard. The challenge was not in any single moment or requirement that happened in the preparation or delivery. And it wasn't with the students. The challenge was in the constancy of it. Absolute relentlessness. It was the way I had to string so many successive moments together, without pause and all with complete foresight and clarity, and not for some but for all. When that bell sounds at the beginning of a semester, someone aims a firehose six-inches from your face, turns it on full-blast and keeps it pointed directly at your nose for sixteen consecutive weeks. That is what makes teaching hard.

Something else I have some experience in is converting an in-person curriculum to a virtual format. This is another area where I think some background in the matter is required to competently speak to it. My experience was not as much in practice as it was in theory. I would help and advise people on doing such a conversion. Suffice it to say it is a non-trivial shift that entails a nearly full-rebuild of the curriculum, of its practical, or actual if you prefer, delivery at least.

I recall one time a faculty member at the university I worked at scheduled an appointment with me. He asked if I would help him convert his in-person curriculum to an online format. This was a few weeks before the end of the summer. I asked him if this was for the Spring term or next academic year. He said it was for the Fall term scheduled to start eleven days from our meeting. I asked how long he knew he would have to do this. He said he was just told a few days prior. He asked around, learned I taught that sort of stuff, and reached out for help. The scary part of that exchange to me was that the school's leadership responsible for directing the curricular experience of its students thought that that was a fair request to make of this individual. That moment from 2012 made everything that happened in the last seven months less surprising to me. I get that we are all being asked to make sacrifices, but society's general expectations of what should be possible in industries they have no experience in, has me a bit rankled.

Now there is one more factor that comes into play in this pandemic-story about Marty. Something to know about her is she is not one who cuts corners. Like. Ever. In the house she grew up in, she was known as Marty the Martyr. These slights rolled off her just as would a comment about her gender or hair color. It is just who she is, and she has no other gear in which to operate. So when she was told to move her curriculum online, that's what she did. And to her, that did not mean sending students links to NatGeo videos or four-page worksheets. It meant delivering virtually (1) the lecture they would have received in class as well as (2) the hands-on experiments they would have done together. If it sounds like a time-consuming endeavor, it is because it is a time-consuming endeavor. Especially for someone who has still never owned a phone and occasionally finds using Gmail a challenge.

NEXT: Part 2 - Marty catches a break