The alone teacher

2020 has been a weird year. 

If it has been incredibly complicated for instructors with children, it has been completely alienating for people who live alone. I personally never left home since March 12th, 2020, except on three occasions (this is not an over-statement, I actually never went out). I did not see my partner or mother for the last twelve months (which is unprecedented, no matter where I lived in the world before) without physical contact with another human being in ten months.

All this, however, strengthened my relationship with the students.

The human understanding.

I know it might seem unintuitive, but the students felt more connected, “close and personal,” with me during 2020.

They could see my life.

They could see images, frames of a normal human experience: the fridge, the sofa, my shelves with Star Wars toys.

The sandwich that I did not finish because a student asked me something before class.

Why should this be in any way relevant to my annual evaluation, you might ask, or worth sharing as a “lesson learned”?

Fundamentally, because I think this weird, absurd, unwanted arrangement helped make them feel closer to me, to “humanize” me.

Not always do the students think about us as “people.” Rarely, actually.

We are the ones who test, who grade, who fail.

We enter a tiny portion of their lives as inevitable entities, carrying maybe a little bit of knowledge to share (if they are generous enough to acknowledge that) and a lot of perceived “judgment” and “duties.”

They never imagined us with a fridge, a sofa, shelves with Star Wars toys, or a partially eaten sandwich.

Nevertheless, I was there every day, every hour, more “exposed,” more fragile, and more reachable than ever.

From a purely technical aspect, this was very (and sometimes painfully) true: with the MS Teams application on their phone, I was just a DM (direct message) away. Like Snapchat, TikTok, or everything they use to communicate with their peers. This meant receiving messages on my phone-PC-tablet, 24/7, from basically April to December (including summer, since I taught ME 436 in July and August).

But also, it meant a sense of relationship that was possible before just with the few students that were physically entering my office space. A connection, instead, now open to all. If knocking at my physical door was too much of a task for the partially curious students in a standard semester (laziness >> curiosity), having me just a “SEND” button away increased the interaction exponentially.

Ultimately, 2020 gave me many great, proud moments: the so-wanted promotion to Associate Teaching Professor, my second “Professor of the Year” Award, and especially, the totally unexpended “ISU Award for Early Achievement in Teaching.”

I certainly cannot complain.

However, if this year really taught me something as a teacher, besides having a CNN-worthy broadcast with three different devices and four web cameras live from my living room, was the sense of connection and community and human experience that the students, for once, willingly decided to share with me.

And it was beautiful.