No Going Back

By Tim Chartier @timchartier, Davidson College

I grew up just outside Philadelphia. My childhood memories include games of tennis ball baseball in a parking lot, sledding down the largest hill in town while dodging snowballs launched from my friends, and Philadelphia classics like hoagies, soft pretzels, and steak sandwiches. After high school graduation, my parents and I moved to Michigan. Having shared so many stories from my childhood, I was excited to return to my hometown with my wife, Tanya. As we toured the town, I was flooded with memories while also feeling a distinct sense of disorientation. I had memories of hitting the ball such a long distance for home runs in our tennis ball baseball games. However, the parking lot wasn’t as long as I remembered. In fact, many things were shorter and smaller than my memory. Tanya laughed, “You remember your town as a young child. You are here as an adult.” My town was both familiar and quite different. 

With the promise associated with Covid-19 vaccines, the hope of returning to widespread face-to-face teaching becomes more than a dim light at the end of the long pandemic tunnel. Our society and our world left what was familiar for the world of a socially distant and sometimes quarantined culture. I can look forward to going back to the way things were. When I do return to face-to-face teaching, might it feel both familiar and quite different?

When my wife and I visited Philadelphia, we toured various locations that live vividly in my mind. Yet, what she saw didn’t match my mental images. Things had simply changed. It was impossible to truly show her the town I knew. It had evolved and there was simply no going back.

As we anticipate our post-pandemic world, it’s important to note the ways we’ve changed. We’ve lived in a socially distant world, taught and learned remotely, attended conferences from home, and engaged with students and colleagues virtually. As we move to more face-to-face interactions, our reliance on the virtual world will reduce. Will it be removed? Time will tell. I do believe we may find that in some areas we simply can’t go back.

This was evident in a recent meeting of the Allegheny Mountain Section of the MAA. As I sat in a session, a professor demonstrated interactive ways he uses GeoGebra in class. Another professor in the session noted enthusiastically, “And, we will never have to rely on in-class tutorials alone! I’m going to be using Zoom videos for software demos from now on.” There was a collective cheer. Then, a participant added, “And wow, mine have gotten so much better through the year. I can now make them quickly, and they are so helpful to my students.”

What else might people take with them out of the pandemic? I turned to the MAA community via MAA Connect and posed the question

“What modes of teaching, office hours, meetings, or such do you want to take with you?”

Here are some of the answers.

Julie Eaton (University of Washington Tacoma), Deanna Haunsperger (Carleton College), Mark Fitch (University of Alaska-Anchorage) and Jeff Kallenbach (Siena Heights University) had students introduce themselves via video. Haunsperger posted,

“I had my students turn in a video introduction of themselves on the first day of class. What I liked was that I could go back a couple times the first week or two to make sure I knew everyone.”

Peter Avanites (Rockland Community College) touched on many of the struggles of our time of remote teaching and noted,

“Although I would be very happy if I never had to teach remotely again, I believe that the pandemic did serve a purpose. It made me reflect on what I had been doing before the pandemic and realize that the personal connections made with students are just as important as covering the material in a course syllabus.”

Fitch responded, “Let's emphasize the thinking/learning skills, hitting enough topics to present to the learners a vista they want to explore on their own.”

Comments ranged from what we teach to also how we assess. Haunsperger expressed her interest in oral exams,

“I also tried using oral exams this semester (see Della Dumbaugh's Math Values post) and I was really amazed with how much better I could tell what students know and what they hadn't mastered yet.”

Ksenija Simic-Muller (Pacific Lutheran University) and Johanna Franklin (Hofstra University) both commented on cumulative assessment. Franklin suggested,

“This year, I've been giving noncumulative finals and asking students to find two homework problems that they got fewer than half the points on, one from the first third of the course and one from the middle third, redo them, and explain their corrected solutions to me. It gives each student a chance to demonstrate how much more they know at the end of the semester than they did earlier.”

Eaton, Franklin, and Darren Narayan (Rochester Institute of Technology) all commented on office hours via Slack, Discord, or Zoom. Narayan acknowledged,

“Even as I return to in-person teaching, I plan to keep offering office hours via Zoom. I will still have regular office hours, but office hours on Zoom are much more convenient, especially when students are off campus and they need my help.”

Regarding technology innovations some of us utilized while teaching remotely, Sommer Gentry (United States Naval Academy) suggested,

“I will continue to use PollEverywhere questions even when I'm back in the classroom. I have loved designing interesting questions that generate classroom discussion and create a need for understanding.”

Fitch responded,

“Use of a shared document (Google Doc/Sheet, Jamboard, ...) provides a way for students to glance at each other’s work during group work when there are not enough whiteboards in a room. There is an equity question here, however, as each group will need sufficient tech to implement this.”

Simic-Muller noted,

“I have learned a lot about Universal Design over the past year, and have for the first time created accessible documents and videos for students, which . . . I know will be useful moving forward.”

Jenny Sheldon (The Ohio State University) commented,

“The pandemic has been, in some sense, teaching me the power of ‘are you okay?’ When a student didn't turn in an assignment, was missing from class for a bit, or a similar type of situation, I decided this year to just reach out to the student with a quick email. . . . This year, I was able to better connect with students in difficult circumstances, and help them to do what they could to demonstrate what they knew regardless of their circumstances.”

Many others posted good ideas as well. Check out MAA Connect for the full list.

As we move through the remaining months of the pandemic, let’s use our summer months to reflect on our unusual 2020-21 academic year. What have you done that proved successful? If we can’t go back to the way things were, what do you want to keep with you?