A Piece of Cake or Humble Pie?

A Piece of Cake or Humble Pie?

Marie said to her friend Jane, "I am going to order a face shield from Amazon as I think it will give me more protection." Her friend, a social worker said, "I hate wearing a face mask, when communicating with my elderly clients". And she added, "I don't think I will ever get used to it". 

Marie was not expecting to get a call from her co-ordinator at the College in Belfast a week before term commenced so she wondered if something was wrong. “We want you to deliver the module online” John said. “There are not enough classrooms to ensure social distancing.” He added, “the English module can be taught online.” Maria put down her mobile phone and tried to process this information. She had been joining a few online Zoom classes and had managed to load down the App. But she did not feel competent enough to schedule classes and to use the Share function and to set up Breakout rooms. She was invited by the College to attend an online session on how to use Zoom but she did not quite grasp it all. She was starting to panic. In the College, when she had a problem with the technology, an IT expert would come to her classroom in order to sort it out. She toyed with the idea of phoning her co-ordinator and ask if she could renegotiate her position and be allowed to do face-to-face teaching. 

Marie came to the realisation that she was not ready to embark on online teaching because she did not possess the technical ability to host a Zoom class. She decided that she would either sink or swim so she went online and watched a few YouTube videos on how to work Zoom and they were quite helpful. She did a few practice runs and after sending an invitation to her friend Jane, she was delighted when she joined the meeting. Each day she grew a little more confident but she was still very anxious. A job that she really enjoyed and looked forward to each day, now felt like a nightmare.  Marie then experimented with the Share function and after some false starts, she got the hang of it. There was a back channel known as Chat but she thought she would worry about that initially. All she wanted to do was to schedule the classes and send out the invitations and then hope and pray that her new students would be able to download the Zoom App and click on the link and join the class. 

After sending out the invitations, she waited with baited breath to see if anyone had responded and would join the class which started in a few days’ time. She had a few sleepless nights and imagined all sorts of problems and when the Monday morning dawned at the start of term she climbed up the stairs to her study in the attic of her house and felt like a condemned person ascending the scaffold. Was this how Marie Antoinette felt when she climbed the steps to the infamous guillotine in 1793? Marie stopped a few times and looked at a few of her pictures which were hanging on the wall of the landing. One was a picture of the Cave Hill mountain which was of course the inspiration for Gulliver’s Travels when Jonathan Swift was based in Kilroot in 1695.  She wondered if Marie Antoinette cast a nostalgic glance at her Palace of Les Tuileries as she travelled in the cart on the way to the Place de la Révolution. 

Of course there was no comparison! Marie Antoinette was losing her kingdom and her head. But nonetheless if Marie did not make a success of her online class, her livelihood was on the line. 

At 9.05am, a little blue sign saying ‘admit’ lit up and she was overjoyed. Then a few more students entered the lobby and she was so relieved. She was elated. Her first student had landed on Zoom. It was not quite as dramatic as Neil Armstrong taking his first step on the moon, but to Maria it marked a rite of passage. 

After her first class Maria descended the scaffold and her life was still intact. There were a few bumps on the road and a few roadblocks. One day she was showing a film clip and after about five minutes, one of the students said, “I cannot see anything”. Marie was teaching a lesson on iconic lines from famous movies and she had chosen a clip from On the Waterfront where Terry confronts his brother about fixing a boxing match:

You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it. It was you, Charley.

There were a few other glitches, but Marie managed to resolve them. She joined a few of the college’s online training sessions and she realised that her colleagues were also struggling. She came to the conclusion that prior to the pandemic, teaching was a piece of cake. Now they were all forced to eat humble pie because they had no real experience of virtual delivery. Now they were struggling to work the technology and adapt their resources for online teaching. Maybe it would help them identify more with the students who sometimes found their courses very difficult. The training sessions included topics like polls, icebreakers and breakout rooms. One of the icebreakers was an exercise where you took a word and changed it from negative to positive, for example, you could add a letter to the word ‘lean’ and make it ‘learn’.  A few other icebreakers included picking an Emoji which described your emotions and ‘hopes and fears’ for the course. Marie began to wonder if these exercises and ice-breakers were more about entertaining the students rather than teaching them. She decided she would just focus on using the Share function in order to deliver her lessons. She could not believe that you could upload a PowerPoint and the students could see the slides. She regarded this as a minor miracle.