The Uncanny Valley of an Online Classroom
A dispatch from the front lines of a public high school gone virtual.
Any good dispatch from the field should answer six questions: Who, what, where, when, why, and how. To that end, what follows are these questions, answered.
Who?
Well, me.
A veteran high school teacher of nearly two decades. But not just me: tens of thousands of teachers in the U.S. and around the world who have been thrust unwittingly into a massive collective, natural experiment of teaching online rather than in person, as well as many additional educators performing their craft in a liminal space: i.e., hybrid teaching, a mix of online and in-person modes.
Not to mention countless students, who will live with the consequences of these radical changes to public education for years, or even decades, to come.
What?
Online teaching during a time of the pandemic, and it’s still undeniably strange and remarkably absurd.
All I’ve been doing for weeks now is pushing bits and bytes around on a screen; under these constraints, teaching has become a radically different job, essentially devoid of the social cues any teacher leans on to keep pace and maintain engagement.
Google Meet, to which my district is wedded, was never intended to be used on this scale, for this purpose; it was a tech feature designed to be deployed sparingly, in targeted interventions or special circumstances. Google Meet was certainly not ready for the prime time rollout it received at the beginning of this school year, bogged down by its limited functionality and buggy features; the program was never meant to be used as a primary means of classroom instruction. Like so many tech products, Google Meet was designed with the end-user in mind — if that end-user happens to be another programmer or techie well versed in the idiosyncratic manner in which person and machine best communicate. Admittedly, though, how any software ends up being used in the real world is tough to predict without actually testing it in the real world. And, as we all come to discover sooner or later, the real world is quite unforgiving and unpredictable.
That being said, Google Meet’s undoubtedly an admirable effort, but there is much room for improvement. For instance, even with a second computer monitor, I’m unable to simultaneously view all twenty-five (or more) of my students in a class period. Should I instead set up a video wall and make my living space look like CNN’s election night headquarters?
Worse yet, if I look directly at my students on-screen, then their video feed will show me looking away from them. This is a subtle but telling way in which this technology reminds us of its artificiality, its non-realness, adding to the already uncanny valley of the online high school classroom in general.
Where?
My house.
I now have a commute of feet, rather than of miles. How odd to gulp down breakfast and make a mad dash — not out to my car to drive to work, but back to my bedroom, only to flip open a laptop, center a webcam image on a modest whiteboard clumsily positioned atop a windowsill, and then wait for the characteristic low-frequency chimes of Google Meet, which alert me that students are filing into my online classroom.
When?
The first several weeks of this school year, in which I find myself in the midst of perhaps the greatest challenge of my professional career.
But I’m not alone on this — yet, confusingly, I’m literally alone, on my own. That great faculty support system, part of which includes commiserating in the faculty lounge and when we pass each other in the hallways between classes, has quieted to a whisper.
Why?
Because the threat of sparking a rise in cases, and the concomitant health harms to students, teachers, and other staff, has shifted the instruction of my public school district completely online for the time being.
Teaching this way — if it still can be called “teaching,” in the commonly understood sense of the term — is fraught with challenges, only some of which were anticipated.
Yet it is also undeniably a privilege that teachers and students can hold classes virtually at all. For if a pandemic on this scale had struck fifty or even twenty years ago, it seems highly unlikely that high school classes would have transformed into correspondence courses; rather, all teachers nationwide would be back at school by now, masked up and frightened but ready to roll. Sometimes life gives us no choice. We’re lucky to have one now.
How?
Entirely through the use of digital tools, of both the hardware and the software variety.
There’s an exacting attention to detail needed to curate all of my classes on an online learning management system such as Canvas; the curation has to be thorough enough to include all relevant documents, assignments, and due dates, but not too overwhelming or confusing for the student — who is sure to encounter as many different styles of course curation as there are styles of teaching. If even I’m having trouble separating the online chaff from the wheat, then how are students to tell the signal from the noise?
There’s also the time and energy spent fielding through a tremendous uptick in electronic communications to contend with: student and parent emails to write (and answer), new administrative directives to adhere to, faculty and staff questions and requests to sift through, documents explaining freshly rolled-out software or software tips to puzzle over. Lacking any face-to-face interactions, I have few sensory markers other than the visual: those ever-shifting and -repeating patterns of glowing two-dimensional pixels. Few sounds, no smells, and nothing appreciably tactile (besides well-worn keyboard keys, a spotty mouse, and sore wrists) to help me mentally navigate my way through the byzantine logic of these busy days.
Much of my time is also devoted to recording easily digestible micro-lessons in the form of screencasts, posted and shared with my students. This way, they can quickly review content already presented by me during live instruction or catch up on what they’ve missed if they happen to be absent. These micro-lessons are available to all, 24/7, of course, meaning that while I’m eating dinner, I might be teaching. While I’m daydreaming, I might be teaching. While I’m sleeping, I might be teaching. I’ve outsourced my teaching job — to myself.
I would have much preferred not to record myself teaching at all. As one of my colleagues observed, “There is an irreproducibility, a one-off quality, to each class period” — none can ever be completely replicated in a march toward the commodification of education, of which video lessons are part and parcel. “A class period taught by a human teacher is like a jazz concert,” he added. Even if you teach the same content five periods a day, every time you stand in front of a classroom the audience receives a different show.
But for this most unusual of school years, my administration mandated the creation of these video lessons for all courses we teach, paralleling the same content we are presenting in live instruction — in case students miss class due to connectivity issues or other pandemic-related difficulties. (Instead of “The dog ate my homework,” we’ll now have the catch-all “My wifi went out.”) Though it is a noble, good-intentioned, and student-centered directive, the accessibility of pre-recorded lessons might have unintended consequences as the school year plays out. For example, if students can simply watch comprehensive videos catching them up on what they missed in class, then will attending live online classes be disincentivized?
Besides the necessary time commitment, the biggest problem with filming videos is that they become dated quickly; don’t expect to be able to lean on such content creation years into the future, since (A) you might not teach the same classes, and (B) you might not cover the same content, or even if you do it might not be in the same order. A Word document is easy enough to modify and adjust; a video, not so much. Thus, self-made instructional videos, no matter how narrow the content covered or how short the length, are typically a one-shot deal, especially if your face appears in them. After all, consider how jarring it could be for future students to see your younger self on-screen: the contrast might be too much for them, or you, to bear.
Yet the most onerous of online tasks is grading.
I’ve never been one to complain about grading before. In years past, when grading on paper, I was consistent and methodical, like a machine, working through one page of each student’s work at a time, making sure to properly line up my (paper) answer keys with their scribbled-out responses and process the answers line by line. Yes, grading has always been tiring and time-consuming, but when I finish marking up a stack of papers I’ve never not felt a sense of accomplishment, however small.
Though I strove to model myself after an archetypal machine in order to grade student papers efficiently, ironically the machines themselves are not up to the task of grading student work like machines.
Which means that now I’m left with several bad options: spend hours creating multiple choice questions so grading is a cinch (since I would be meeting a computer’s strengths more than halfway by assigning it the task of auto-grading unambiguous questions) or whittle away hours clicking and dragging and rotating and hunting through each student’s idiosyncratic responses, submitted in text boxes, text files, picture files, or the like.
I suppose I could print out all of these student submissions and grade them on paper, but that would be environmentally irresponsible, not to mention cost-prohibitive; plus, the variety of formats in which students turn in their work would still lend great inconsistency to my grading, albeit on paper rather than on a screen.
Another option, one which seems to be a nonstarter, would be to assign significantly less work. Though tempting, this strikes me as the wrong move: sure, I want to avoid burnout, but I’ve taught these particular courses for years, and I believe I have a keen awareness of what work needs to be assigned, and what minimum level of practice must be given, to permit hardworking students a chance at the mastery of the material. Compromising the integrity of my courses might adversely affect learning outcomes later on, thereby making an already difficult school year that much worse. Put simply, I wouldn’t be best serving my students.
Wasn’t electronic technology’s great promise — and personal computers’, in particular — to save us time?
To bring us a measure of freedom from the workaday world so we could unwind and unplug?
In Working, his masterful collection of oral histories, author Studs Terkel shares the words of steel mill worker Mike Lefevre, a hard-boiled middle-aged man who imagines a day when technology can finally take over most of the manual labor he performs as a self-described “mule” so that he can have a twenty-hour workweek and be free to “get to know my kids better, my wife better….”
Working was published nearly fifty years ago, but rapid technological advances since then have only increased the expectations on us, not diminished them, regardless of our station. Even our so-called leisure time is often consumed with work, since an unintended consequence of these technological revolutions has been perpetual connectivity. Sure, these technologies offer us a convenience that our great-grandparents could have never envisioned, but such convenience is a double-edged sword. No longer restricted to medical doctors, those not paid by the hour are now nearly always on call, and working from home blurs the lines between our professional and personal lives to an especially high degree. Sometimes I wish I had to punch a clock instead.
Furthermore, technological “advances” are oftentimes misnomers, such as with online grading. The ease of marking up students’ on-paper responses is so much greater than any software-generated simulacrum that it’s high time to seriously reconsider the notion of “progress” when it comes to the electronic tools ostensibly designed for educators. Progress should not merely imply, in and of itself, the transference of a task from a physical medium to a virtual one; rather, if there is to be such a transference, it should also come with tremendous benefits to our practice that far outweigh any loss of functionality.
Delivering live instruction via online means, using platforms like Google Meet or Zoom, is now the daily reality for many teachers.
Is the technology, in and of itself, impressive? Sure. Arthur C. Clarke famously said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A little more than fifty years ago, AT&T proudly demonstrated its Picturephone, which could place video telephone calls, at the World’s Fair in New York. Back then, teachers could only dream of magically delivering lessons from their homes using a similar, state-of-the-art device straight out of Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (in fact, several scenes in that film were inspired by the Picturephone).
But today, with us all so accustomed to video conferencing that it’s taken for granted, teachers dream of being back in our school buildings so that we can actually read the room and have flesh-and-blood interactions with other people, student and teacher alike, not digital avatars — and not because we are luddites, but because we are human, so very human.
A billion years of natural selection shouldn’t have landed us here, unblinkingly staring at our screens most of the day. Screens are not a gateway to reality; they are not a window to the soul. They are screens — the very word reminds us that they screen us from the real world, the world of sights and sounds, of smells and tastes, of touch and perception, that our bodies reside in.
We who teach desperately wish to be looking into the eyes of our students, not into the pinhole lens of our webcams. We imagine a world where teachers and students can safely shed their masks and return to business as usual: away from digitally “interacting” with the disassociated binary and toward once again connecting with the analog, with the real.
When it comes to education, if nothing else, this pandemic has taught us one important lesson: sometimes the decidedly “low tech” is the best tech of all.
