Five Strategies that Make Teaching on Zoom More Bearable
Start with Red Lipstick.
Photo by Unsplash
With only 3 weeks left in the semester, I am aware that we need some motivation to finish well, my students and me. And red lipstick helps.
Strategy One: Wear red lipstick
I was first inspired by Gwen Stefani on the Voice, with maybe a small dose of a fantasy mixed in that I could look like her if I added some color like she does. (Um, no.) But I liked the pop on the screen and quite simply, it made me happy. This also began as a way to draw attention away from the dark circles under my eyes and my less-than sparkling white teeth; things I have enjoyed noticing about myself now that I can see my face while I teach. I’m also realizing that I gesture emphatically. A lot. So, I’ve decided to embrace it all: red lips; big gestures; clunky screen sharing. (And by "embrace it all," I mean fumble in frustration and then wake up and do it all again the next day.)
I started the semester hopeful, as the reality set in that I was going to be teaching synchronously online (synchronously meaning in real-time with my real face on Zoom.) I self-talked and power-posed and accepted the facts as they were…for the first hour. And then, that same reality darkened as I began to feel the weight of exhaustion from all the, what? Sitting? That is one of the first baffling observations I made. I was so tired. I teach three classes at a local community college and I quickly became fixated on understanding why I was so tired from being so inert. On paper, I can understand the explanations of Zoom fatigue, but it is weird to experience firsthand because it didn’t make sense…until it did.
Gradually it has dawned on me what many psychologists and communication experts have posited for years, that in-person, human interaction offers a certain energy unmatched through a screen. I have studied this but I have never lived it first-hand. What I realized is that I am compensating for this energy black-hole by attempting to manufacture the energy from within myself. My facial expressions are a little more, well, expressive. My hands are waving about wildly within the frame. I am using nonverbal communication as a way to reach through the screen and grab hold of my students’ attention. Now, to know me is to know I’m an animated professor.
Teaching for me is aerobic. I like teaching with my whole self and body.
But like a group spin class, where I am biking my heart out (Full disclosure. I have never actually been to a spin class but I’ve seen the ads), there is an energy around me that continues to fuel my effort. And right now, in a corner of our TV room, I am missing that energy. So, I’m trying to figure out some strategies to keep me motivated. Hence, the red lipstick.
Strategy Two: Employ Smile Therapy
This next strategy that I’ve employed during my Zoom classes may sound ridiculous. And I’m okay with that because it’s effective. Anyone remember “Smile Therapy” from Ally McBeal in the 90s? Some nonverbal researchers suggest that how we manipulate our bodies can change our internal chemistry and attitude. This is not a new concept. And like Will Ferrell in “Elf,” I, too, like smiling. Smiling’s my favorite. There is nothing quite like goading thirty community college students into smiling as big as they can; challenging them to go for it and fully commit. It is quite over the top…and, like I said, effective. There is a lightness that comes across the Wi-Fi. A silliness that relieves some tension. It connects us for a minute. Then we move on to the material at hand.
Strategy three: Appoint a Chat Master
A third helpful tool in this whole Zoom thing is appointing a “chat master.” I just like saying that, chat master. This is a student in each class who reads through comments in the Chat feature during our time together. Students can ask questions and share observations and the chat master reads these lines out loud. Practically, this is helpful because I simply can’t effectively manage the chat and the breakout rooms while sharing my screen and attending to the faces I see looking back at me.
Having a chat master is also helpful when I declare spontaneously, “What are you distracted by? Write it in the chat. Right now.
Do it. Do it.” (Like Ben Stiller in “Starsky and Hutch” circa 2004). I do this when I notice eyes averted or cameras off or heads sinking low.
As our chat master reads all of the answers I notice two things: one, students perk up to see what the responses are; and two, students feel a little less alone in their isolated spaces knowing that fellow classmates are also tired or chewing on a hangnail too.
Strategy Four: Remind yourself we’re in a pandemic
I say this out loud to myself. We are in a pandemic. It astounds me how quickly I can forget this. I mean. I know we’re in a pandemic. But I evaluate my teaching as if I wasn’t constantly navigating new things in a new system with students who are doing the same. I forget that like my students I, too, am distracted by being at home with my dog, and children, who are also Zooming.
So, I remind myself. Over and over again. Sometimes, my department checks in with informal Zoom meetings, and there, colleagues will say to one another: it’s a pandemic, the rules are different. This helps me remove the weighted backpack of expectations for, and criticism of, myself that I carry around all the time. This ability to remind myself we’re in a pandemic helps me loosen my expectations and criticism of my students as well.
Sure, there are still parameters and a syllabus and grades, but my execution of these things is very different when I remember every one of us is managing a reality with an umbrella of stress hovering above. Remembering this also includes knowing that students might experience sudden job loss or are now doing school with young siblings nearby or have to help out at home.
Strategy Five: Crack yourself up
This last strategy isn’t for everyone (perhaps the first one isn’t either), but damn is it helpful. I crack myself up. Especially when the absurdity of it all, the shoddy Wi-Fi connections and the unmuted eating and the students still in bed, can all feel just a little too overwhelming. I have had this ability (gift? questionable character-trait?) since I was a kid.
Although a few people in my life might laugh along with me, I am decidedly my best audience and sometimes I just start to giggle, during class, at something in my head or something I’ve said.
Sometimes I don’t share it but I will tell students it is a great quality to possess, the cracking up of oneself.
These strategies aren’t just whimsical “sometimes you just have to laugh” bumper stickers. I am someone who wrestles with depression and I don’t always want to get out of bed in the morning. But it is precisely because I have this experience in my head that I am thankful I can let out some of the tension that comes with the stress of on-line teaching.
I apply my red lipstick and laugh. It’s a pandemic after all.