Kelly C. George, Ph.D.: 0:00
I'm willing to bet that a lot of us university teachers are experiencing a weird duality right now. I have a four and five-year-old, and I'm homeschooling them while I'm also online schooling my college age students -- the ones I teach for a job. But at the same time, I see my children's teachers trying to teach them online. So my four and five-year-old literally have Zoom calls with their preschool and kindergarten teachers. I mean, this is deeply strange, trying to teach a four-year-old video conferencing etiquette. And, of course, just like when you have a room full of grown-ups--or separate rooms full of grown-ups--on a zoom call you usually have to mute all of them if you want to get anything done. So there's my four-year-old looking at a tiny screen with his preschool teacher's image talking to him. And, of course, he's doing the same thing he would be doing in person. He's flailing around, he's raising his hand. He just wants to be heard. But he's literally muted. And of course, this is hugely frustrating to him. And as a mother, it's something that I have to figure out how to manage. But as a teacher, I'm also looking at my son's preschool teacher, and I will tell you, I see something there in her eyes and it looks like sadness. And I think I know why. I keep looking around me at all these screens and just seeing such thirsty people on the other side. And I mean thirsty in the way that that word is used by young people today, right? Like "thirsty" means you're hungry for attention or even hungry for validation, that there's something about this moment where all of our typical tools for validating ourselves, and I think for a lot of us validating our work, are suddenly gone. When I'm in the classroom, I rely on seeing students laugh a little bit or capturing their attention away from their cell phones for a moment because maybe I have managed to say something that piques their interest. We all thrive on feedback. That's how communication works. And yes, of course, we've been using these digital tools for ages now, right? 10 years or so. We're supposed to be all up-to-speed on how they work. But really, adapting to digital only feedback is a big deal, and I think it's a big deal for our identities, and I think it's a big deal for how we feel about ourselves. I've just read an article this morning about, more or less, the eminent collapse of some sections of higher education. And the reason, of course, is because now parents and students alike are faced with a financial dilemma. Do I continue to pay these extremely high tuition fees so that my son or daughter can sit in his or her room and look at his laptop or her laptop with ear buds in? Is that really worth the money? And what the article talks about is that, of course, what we've known all along, but this is revealing is that the real exchange of money in higher ed is not about the labour that teachers are doing. It's not about learning. It's about the college experience. And the college experience, as we've known for a long time, is about facilities. It's about your new student center and your football field. And yes, it's about your fancy library, too. It's about friends, an extra-mural, inter-mural, extracurricular activities, and I suppose it's about learning. But in terms of the value exchange, we'll just have to see what kinds of choices students make in the fall. So I think one of the things that's happening is we're realizing we're going on teaching in a disaster and many of us are feeling frustrated, teachers and mothers and fathers and students alike, because we're just not getting that itch scratched. We're not getting the connection. We're not getting the learning, I don't think. We're not getting the experience, maybe that's a better way to put it. And it's showing us that maybe we're not teaching in this moment so that students can learn. Maybe the real reason we're teaching in this moment, maybe the political rationality for online teaching in a pandemic is not about teaching students right now, it's about hedging a bet that maybe we can figure out how to prove our worth in the future. Maybe if we just keep on going even as the boat is sinking. Maybe on the other side of this, our institution gets to still be in operation. So I think it might be that what teachers air realizing and maybe the sadness that I see even in my son's preschool teacher's eyes, is that she might be realizing what I'm realizing. That the tuition money that her school gets and the tuition money that my school gets is about the playground and the fields and the student center. That at the end of the day, value isn't us, and that's why your teacher looks so depressed.