by Ivana Doležalová (instructor, Central European Film / Czech Cinema & Culture)
It’s not really easy to switch to online teaching – and I don’t mean because of the technical side (two months ago, I never would have believed how easily I could adapt to something like this). What’s difficult is not having direct contact with the students- not talking to them in the hallway, not going out for coffee with them or chatting after class. Of course, this is even more true for the students as they go to class from their homes, their childhood rooms. You see everything – dogs, boyfriends. One colleague told me that his student checked into class from the bathtub.
Fortunately, we have the privilege to be online with the students. Some of my courses at other schools have to be conducted “to the wall”- i.e. pre-recorded – and it’s so frustrating not to see students. I do the job, I think they learn something, but it’s not at all satisfying. At least when we’re face to face, I see them, they react. I appreciate this possibility enormously.
One of my classes is for the FAMU students, and my class is the only one they have – in normal times, they would be shooting their films now. We’ve grown really close. These poor students are sitting in their homes waiting for Monday, for me – I feel like Mother Superior in a convent.
They have a lot of time and creative energy to put into the class. They started wearing hats to our classes – each session, they show up in a different hat; they also wear black gloves and at the end, they all wave goodbye to me in their gloves. Recently one of the students did a presentation on Stalker, a great Russian film by A.Tarkovsky – a very complicated philosophical film in which one of the characters appears in a crown of thorns. The student turned his screen to sepia – which is the same as the way the film begins – and he wore an actual crown of thorns that he had made. We all collapsed with laughter.
On one hand we are so far away from each other – I have students in New York, California, Boston, Hawaii – but on the other hand, we are so close, so connected through our online classes – by the funny moments and the serious work. I often hang out with them after class – we turn off the recording and we talk. One week we talked for an hour after class because they didn’t want to let go. I’m always touched when I see them. It keeps me going as well – I would Zoom with them forever.
Václav Havel, our dissident, later president, said that when he was in prison, once he got a pen and paper, he didn’t mind that much – he had something creative to do. Now, I’m not sure if that’s really true, but I do think that there are two ways we can choose to deal with this quarantine: either to be really lazy and not want to do anything, or get our minds off the stupid coronavirus by seeing films, reading books, thinking about something different. Now these very creative students have the time to do those things.
One of the things I learned – this generation of young people won’t be snowflakes. The experience has turned them into adults.