Right after spring break, my students and I piled onto a Zoom call and tried to do what, before Covid-19, we would have done in a physical classroom: enter into a discussion about a really great book.

The call went so badly that when it was done, I cried.

I experienced going online this past spring as a terrible loss. All my cues were gone: laughter, the rustle of candy wrappers, the shared eye-rolls, the thoughtful expressions. There was no ambient noise on my Zoom call, because everyone was a good internet citizen and muted their mics when they weren’t speaking. Where once I could have glanced around the room to take in my students’ body language, I was now left trying to process nine small squares of information at a time, my students’ heads floating beside and on top of each other as if we were the Brady Bunch. I talked a lot, which ran against every principle of my pedagogy. …