It’s not really clear how my institution is going to proceed for the fall semester and nor is it clear that I’ll be teaching in the fall. (One of the options that has been floated is to treat AY 20-21 as if it has three semesters rather than two semester plus a summer session, with faculty teaching in two of three; I volunteered to teach in the summer instead of the fall if we go that route.) But of course the possibilities for online instruction are at least simmering on my mental back burner and proceeding at a rolling boil on #pedagogytwitter.
One of the recent controversies has been over whether it is permissible to require students to turn on their cameras in Zoom seminar or whether that’s an invasion of privacy. Having taught my lecture class this semester to a whole screen full of blank boxes, I am definitely going to require that cameras be on. I can’t imagine an entire semester in which I don’t have the visual cues to tell tell how my teaching is landing, whether students are with me, or whether they understand what’s going on — especially when it’s a new group of students I won’t have at least had some face-time with at the beginning of the term. For seminars, there’s no way to even try to build rapport among the students if they only know each other as small gray rectangles . And in terms of accessibility, cameras-off is a challenge for students who read lips; I had a lip-reading student this semester and almost every time a student asked a question, I had to stop and remind them to put on their camera because even though I made a general announcement at the start of online instruction, it didn’t seem to stick. I understand that some students might not want other people to see their homes, be it for self-consciousness about socio-economic class, general concern for privacy, or any other number of reasons.
So in my syllabus language that requires cameras to be on, I’m going to explicitly state that they can use a background if they have privacy concerns relating to their classmates or me seeing into their homes. And I’m going to feature it, both so that students with privacy concerns don’t feel singled out and to make instructional use of the tools available. I haven’t quite worked out the details, but I’m planning to make an extra credit assignment to choose a background that somehow relates to the week’s reading or theme and keep a short record of the rationale for each choice. I hope it’ll be a way for students to engage while making the most of a sub-optimal situation.
I taught from the Zoom Mosque of Córdoba for one class session this semester.
I posted this on Twitter and it seemed to strike a chord I figured I’d post it here, too, just so that it doesn’t get lost in the constant churn of social media:
I’m hitting that particular kind of writing despair where my own over-familiarity with my materials gives the false impression that this is all obvious and that my book won’t contribute anything that everybody doesn’t already know. It’s an illusion, but it’s a pernicious one.
And I’ll just add two more quick thoughts to my 280 characters: 1) This happens a lot earlier in the process of writing a book that it seems like it should. 2) I absolutely felt like this with the last project and with other substantial articles I’ve written since, but I think the feeling is more acute with the current book project because I’m writing about authors and texts (Salman Rushdie! Yehuda Amichai!) much more widely known and so it aggravates the sense of simply pushing the things that everyone already knows around on a plate.
I finished teaching this week; I may reflect more on remote instruction over the summer as I start preparing for the fall semester, but for now I need some distance and time to recover from a semester that had already shaped up as one of the most difficult I’ve had even before the global health crisis took hold. And for the time being, I’m not doing any planning for the fall because we don’t really know what it’s going to look like. But I am really worried.
We have gotten a few emails from the administration with contradicting messages about plans for fall instruction, ranging from proceeding as normal to being able to opt out of teaching in the fall and teaching regular courses next summer instead. It makes sense that there aren’t concrete plans yet because there is so little that is known about COVID-19 still and it’s so unclear what will happen in terms of disease spread as states and cities lift lockdown orders.
I’m in the age group that’s seeing this charming consequence of the disease. I’m really scared of getting sick once campus becomes more densely populated in the fall.
The most recent email was for faculty teaching in the core curriculum, suggesting that one option might be to split lectures (typically 80-120 students) in half, with half the students attending each lecture in person and half by video to leave enough room in lecture halls for appropriate social distancing; the groups would alternate so that every student could attend lecture in person once a week.
That seems plausible on paper but it doesn’t seem to take into account any of the out-of-classroom factors. The weather has been beautiful for most of this week. It was eighty degrees and sunny over the weekend and I stayed indoors the whole time because there were too many people outside to be able to keep a distance. Even today, when the temperature was much lower, there were loads of people gathering in Washington Square Park, effectively the heart of campus, riding bikes and skateboards, running, and doing other activities and without masks or sufficient space between them. I worry that mitigation strategies like keeping classrooms half full won’t be sufficient when thousands of students return — even if a smaller than usual number return — and are going to parties, lining to get up into buildings, walking down the narrow streets of campus and the Village, and hanging out in the park.
This is worry from a place of lacking information. But I’m not sure that the information exists to be able to make the right decisions, not yet anyway. But what I do hope is that the people who are charged with making those decisions take a walk through the campus and the neighborhood on a nice day this spring or summer and think about where all the additional bodies are going to go.
One of the ways that organizations have tried to maintain some kind of social connection during the shelter-in-place order is by creating Zoom book clubs. This is it!, I thought to myself. I can finally socialize in a way that is based around something I’m comfortable doing — reading!
But going to a book club as an academic is hard. I analyze text for a living. I read for a living. I ask questions about what I’m reading and explain it to people for a living. And all of those facts of my life mean that it would be very easy for me to dominate a conversation about books and talk over people’s heads. It’s not that I’m necessarily smarter, just that I have the tools to do this kind of thing a little bit more refined and in a little bit more regular use than most people. I make it a goal to blend in, but it doesn’t usually work. Even before the shelter-in-place order, I attended a book club meeting in person at a local bookstore. I shared at thought about the structure of that month’s novel, a thought I considered to be totally innocuous. I guess it wasn’t. Everyone was blown away by my insight (imagine me rolling my eyes here as I retell the story), and I had blown my cover.
The offending brow.
This week I tried a Jewish book club for people in their 20s and 30s, run by the synagogue I’m thinking about joining. Even though I found the book to be hopelessly superficial, I was resolved to behave myself like a civilian and try blend in. But my eyebrows betrayed me when one of the women in the group, during a conversation about lashon hara as discussed in the group’s book, said that she knew it was a solidly Jewish value because she hadn’t met any Jewish religious leaders who would ever engage in the practice. When the rabbi insisted that I verbalize what my eyebrows were already evidently saying by jumping about six inches above the top of my head (they do that of their own accord — traitors!), I said, “Well, it’s just that I was thinking about Ovadiah Yosef…” The woman looked kind of embarrassed. I felt terrible. I don’t think my eyebrows cared.
The offending book.
This exchange happened after a first one: The rabbi leading the group talked about imitatio dei being a Jewish value and I cringed. Apparently enough for it to be visible on Zoom. My overactive eyebrows are fairly substantial and therefore hard to miss when they jump up my face, even on a tiny screen and across a bad internet connection. The rabbi asked why I reacted so strongly to that, and I said that it just seemed like a very Christian way of formulating things. He insisted that it isn’t, that a phrase at the beginning of this week’s parsha — קְדֹשִׁ֣ים תִּהְי֑וּ כִּ֣י קָד֔וֹשׁ אֲנִ֖י יְהוָ֥ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶֽם׃ — is proof that imitatio dei is also a Jewish concept. We ultimately left it alone.
But I didn’t like it. The phrase, to me, evoked the idea of behaving in a god-like way within a salvific framework that is not operative in Judaism. So I did what any academic who has just been a total pain in the arse in a book club would do: I found a couple of articles and read them. Both are Jewish Studies-related and both use the phrase imitatio dei without comment. The second one I’ve linked to here, the one by Harvey, a noted historian of Judeo-Islamic philosophy, is published in an academic/Orthodox Jewish context, namely in the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.
I realized that it was the very Latin-ness itself of the phrase that was what was bothering me, which is strange. Rationally and in every instant of my professional life I know very well that languages aren’t inherently confessional: Jews in the MENA speak Arabic, Arabic-speaking Christians use the word Allah to mean God when they pray, a large swath of the population in medieval Spain were native speakers of a Romance language, regardless of their faith tradition, etc. I’m often aware of the King Jamesiness of contemporary Jewish liturgies in English and it catches my attention, but ultimately I see it as an example of Anglophone Jews using the language that has evolved for us to talk to and about God.*
So what to make of this reflexive jolt of Latin = Christianity? It was valuable for me to read and react to things that I think about a lot professionally, but as a completely non-academic reader who wasn’t expecting much out of the book or the discussion. My low expectations let me just react without thinking about it, because I wasn’t expecting to be thinking about anything. I don’t know that we can ever deliberate sit down and try to read like a civilian, but there is something to be said for being surprised into it or by it. Reading reflexively is reminder of something that sometimes gets lost in textual criticism: that pure reaction is a part of reading that provides another path by which to seek meaning in a text.
All the same, I’d like the lockdown to be over soon. I think I prefer my old, familiar ways of being terrible at socializing. And honestly, a social life conducted entirely the internet has been pretty rough for my eyebrows.
*I have a review essay forthcoming in which I discuss the use of phrases from the KJV to describe medieval Jewish communities in contemporary English-language scholarship. I’m critical of it there, but to me there’s something different about Jewish liturgists making a deliberate, intellectual choice to integrate through theologically non-problematic words and phrases and non-Jewish academics imposing theologically very problematic words and phrases on their Jewish subjects. I mention this here because I’m expecting a lot of criticism for the review essay and I don’t want inconsistency on this position to create extra room for more; the two contexts are quite different.
