Three of City Tech’s buildings in downtown Brooklyn.
BY AARON BARLOW
When I told my students on Wednesday that we would indeed be moving all of our activities online for the rest of the semester, they groaned. I was a little surprised. I thought they would like the idea that they could finish their classes from home. I believed that they would imagine online college easier, and that it is just as good as the classroom experience.
Putting aside the normal pandering, saying such things as how much they will miss their professors and each other, my students made a number of very good points. They said that the act of going to school is important to them, that it structures their lives in a way that even synchronous online classes could never match. They said that the physical interactions with professors and other students energize them, making their studies more interesting even when they have to slog through dense material or those courses that don’t interest them at all.
They were most upset over loss of the lab hours (this was before it was announced that many labs would continue on campus), a Hospitality Management student looking at his hands and saying the heart of his education beats in the kitchen, its blood flowing to his hands through those of the chefs instructing him there. And, speaking of blood, a student in a Biology course was almost in tears: her next lab was to be the dissection of a sheep brain, something she had really been looking forward to. Anatomy and Physiology students in each of my afternoon classes complained that they had been about to start work with human skeletons, something they keenly anticipated.
Most of all, though, the students were worried about the loss of each other.
Ours is an urban campus, one without the amenities of residential colleges with their fancy student unions and posh lounges. When I walk down from 10th-floor classrooms to my 5th-floor office, I have to step around students lunching or reading on the stairs or leaning into the alcoves on the landings studying the streets below or focused on their phones. The campus isn’t made for hanging out or for raucous impromptu discussions or other informal gatherings. If anything, it was built for the changing ideas of urban efficiency as each building arose—but with a universal ignorance of comfort. Yet the students learn to love their experience on campus to a degree that surprised me on Wednesday.
Each semester, I talk to my classes about the importance of the bull session to education, nostalgically looking back to my own undergraduate days and trying to alert students to an aspect of education that I thought was disappearing—at least, on campuses such as ours. Only when we were discussing the closing of our classrooms and the move to remote education for the rest of the semester did I fully realize how completely they have unconsciously recreated what I thought was gone. They use fast-food joints, gyms and other venues around campus to replace what we used our dorm lounges for. They form bonds with each other that we on the faculty rarely see, not surprising on a campus where 17,000 students are constantly moving in and out and anonymity can sometimes seem the norm.
Of course, I knew some of this. I’ve been watching friendships grow in the classroom for years. What I didn’t understand was how important the students themselves recognize it to be, students from all over the world and speaking more languages than any of us can imagine.
These students are in college where they interact directly with other students and with faculty precisely because they understand the value of that interaction. They are “Americans of all nations,” as Walt Whitman may have described them over a century and a half ago, and they want to integrate into American society (even while keeping their ancestral identities—but that’s another story). They know the value of face-to-face education and have enrolled at City Tech (New York City College of Technology, one of the schools of the City University of New York) to gain from that aspect of education while they grow in technical expertise in Entertainment Technology, Radiation Technology, Nursing, Computers, Engineering and all of the other majors that will be, they hope, their entries into the American middle class.
The same is true of students all over the country, of course. But it’s something we forget in face of the relentless pressure to move education more and more into the digital realm and away from traditional campus structures. We forget just how much our students know about the education they are receiving.
Though I fear that the mass migration of courses online for the rest of this semester will be an opportunity for EdTech advocates to push us all further in that direction, what I saw on Wednesday made me think that the opposite effect may be stronger. Students will want to be back in the classroom and will resist more than ever the forces pushing them to accept education only online. They know what they want and it is not the simply digital.
To cheer them up on Wednesday, I ended both classes by playing Fred Waring’s 1947 version of “Dry Bones” in honor of those students studying human anatomy. They left with smiles.
I hope to see them back on campus, smiling once more, as soon as possible.
Thanks for this–a wonderful piece. I teach in a small college town in rural eastern Washington, but my students are also, surprisingly, disappointed by the switch after break to online. I’m also surprised that most students who’ve already taken online classes report bad experiences in them. By far most prefer in-person classes.
Thanks! That’s wonderful to hear about your students. They may be more clear-eyed about education than many of our decision-makers.
Inter-human interaction was one of my favorite experiences in college, as you know only too well. I made many friends that way that I would never have otherwise, and we had many happy and collegial times together, in and out of the classroom. (You might want to correct the spelling of “think” in this line: “what I saw on Wednesday made me thing that”).
I teach at Lehman in the Bronx. I am going to struggle mightily to learn a way to do virtual classroom with Zoom and other technology so the students can see each other, hear each other, and “meet” at the time every Monday and Wednesday that our class always met. For many of our students, first generation college students, the campus is the place where they can explore and be valued for their book-loving, intellectual side. How important is this, to them and to our country? Priceless.
Our administration is eager to get more online instruction going for the college as a whole — in part because we’re underfunded by NY State and online students are a source of revenue. So this crisis is in a way an opportunity for the administration to get us all trained and adapted to online teaching and learning. For now, we the faculty and students and staff are scrambling to deal with the crisis and protect each other (and the students’ grandparents!). But later we’re going to have to make sure that in-person, collective learning is restored for all the reasons Prof. Barlow so eloquently stated.
I am also now teaching online in Western WA where we are quarantined, but also because I was dismissed by my institution (another story). This is such a wonderful piece, Aaron Barlow, and crystalizes what I so very much miss about in-person teaching. Online teaching in Music is just not the same! Your piece is also very hopeful, that students are groaning about the loss of in-person learning and will help us return to the campus where we can all do our very best to educate and learn. Online teaching and learning is useful only as a secondary tool, not as a replacement for our noble profession.
Most of my college kids are just back for Spring Break. There are many things one could say about the “coronavirus” but most centrally the mendacity of special interests promoting it have, among other effects, turned campus functions upside down, and it is a crying if not culpable shame what it is doing to students and their families. At the University of Chicago, classes as well were moved “on-line” and live attendance cancelled (along with study abroad, conferences and other events). yet students were given eviction notice and 10 days to move out of university residences (while for staff, and especially administration, its business as usual). Of course, perceived legal liability with students is a priority, along with an all too willing compliance with State direction (are there really private universities anymore?). Sapere aude, indeed.
Part of the virus initiative otherwise, was actually consolidated collectively several months ago at Davos, Switzerland (see the article, which is largely accurate: https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-causes-effects-real-danger-agenda-id2020/5706153), while the public was consumed with impeachment entertainment. University of Chicago president Robert Zimmer was in attendance, and several key higher education institutions, including Harvard as the ideological brand “flagship” were advised, and have been organizing policy and campus programming since then. UChicago interestingly formed a molecular science joint venture with Ben Gurion and other IL universities several years ago, who have had a fascinating head start on purported vaccination ‘science.’
As for the effect on college teaching, and traditional professor functions, it will be instructive to observe the institutional responses, and initiatives. Obviously, AAUP strike and organizing activity is DOA, and the entire tenure and professorial labor construct, put into a dynamic, if fragile, tension. With Regards.
I agree that the switch to online classes is a way of testing whether this would actually work. The current Coronavirus crisis is a handy helper for admin. Once they see that online courses would be more profitable than dealing with contingent faculty protests, these classes can become permanent. Live classes would be limited to those who are already permanent faculty. Contingent faculty, now limited to an online presence, would not longer be able to meet with each other and become a headache. This is my paranoid vision of the future of higher education in the US.
You were lucky you had enough notice to tell your students in class. At our institution, the decision to suspend classes was made over a weekend with no faculty input. We had to tell our students by e-mail. At first, we were told that the campus would remain open for use of the library (with restrictions) and labs, but a few days later, that was changed to “essential personnel” only. Then, the campus was closed completely. Students and faculty had one week to adjust to online instruction. I was lucky in having been a very experienced online instructor. Some of my colleagues had never taught online nor qualified to use our online platform. Subsequently, faculty were issued instructions on new requirements for taking attendance, additional requirements for reporting student progress, updating syllabi (at first for only the courses moved online but later for courses that were already online). Faculty are waiting to learn what other demands will be made on our time. With our large class sizes, moving online is enough of a demand. The community thinks we are on vacation and being paid to do nothing. Meanwhile, students are confused and disadvantaged.