Today I will be teaching my first class of the semester. A whole new crop of students, a whole new adventure.
This is the second and a half class that I have taught online over Zoom. The fall class was entirely online, and the second half of last year’s spring class was as well.
It is an odd mix of bad and good. The bad is that it is much more difficult to get to know the students well and to get a sense of how they are doing without being able to “read the room”.
The good is that we definitely acquire certain superpowers online, which is particularly useful for a technical subject such as computer science. Live coding becomes really powerful when everybody is online, so it becomes more of a master class.
But I would still give all that up in a heartbeat to be able to teach in person again. I am very much looking forward to the day when we can do that.
The title of this post brought to mind a classroom filled with exquisitely comfortable lounge chairs and a staff of uniformed attendants making sure your student’s food & drink orders are promptly taken care of.
Alas, not during covid.
Ah, nice image. Good thing I am not teaching in our business school. Because then we would only get business class. 😉