Life Update + Updates about this blog

Hello, hello! Long time no see. When I started this blog in March 2020, I intended it to chronicle my experience of moving my Calculus 2 class online in light of Covid-19. Having said that, I did have plans for what this blog would become after my class ended: I wanted to continue writing about techniques that have helped me improve my teaching, as well as pedagogical tools that I have considered implementing but haven’t yet (and why). 

Once Spring 2020 actually ended, though, I hit a metaphorical wall: the structure that having a class to teach was giving me suddenly disappeared, and I had a hard time reinventing my schedule from scratch. So I took an unintentional 5-week hiatus from this blog and spent some time (finalizing grades and) tending to other aspects of my personal and professional life. I spent more time doing research and writing, learned to cook more delicious food, started learning how to draw and illustrate on my iPad (using Procreate).

I recreated a Brooklyn Nine-Nine poster using Procreate.

I also started coding a board game in Python, which is a side-project I’ve wanted to work on since freshman year of college and have just not gotten around to it. (If any of this interests you, tell me in the comments: I’d love to chat more about my quarantine hobbies!)

Alongside these personal projects, I got nominated for and accepted a fellowship that will allow me to work closely with math faculty specifically on ways to engage students in an online platform. As part of this fellowship, I participated in a 3-week training that was meant to “help faculty reconceptualize their course materials in order to deliver it an online course or be prepared to move flexibly between different modalities of delivery.”  

The cohort of trainees in this 3-week program included faculty and graduate students from all departments of Emory. The graduate students were mostly those who were nominated by their respective departments for this fellowship. In contrast, the faculty included everyone teaching in the Summer semester at Emory. This allowed me to have conversations with people in all sorts of subjects about effective teaching.

Starting next week, I will help facilitate a similar training, specifically aimed at the math faculty who are signed up to teach in the Fall. I’m excited to get to talk to people who have taught math for years and years, about the challenges and opportunities of teaching an intentional, engaging, and rigorous online course.

What this means for this blog for the next few weeks, is that instead of posting about things I’ve done and whether they helped, I might post about challenges I foresee in remote learning and possibly ideas about how to overcome them. Since I’ve never taught a real online class before, most of these blog-posts might feel unresolved and might end with more questions than answers. I hope that writing these questions down will help me clarify ideas in my head and help me gather ideas from the internet hive-mind.

So I hope you will engage, and if you have ideas and solutions, you will share. One of my favorite mentors recently told me that she believes teaching should be a community exercise, and that she wants to foster an environment (within our department) where anyone can go up to anyone else and ask “Hey, I’m teaching XYZ and I’ve run into this problem. How did you handle it when you taught something similar?” I hope that I can practice the same in this little corner of the academic internet.

See you guys next week, with the first installment in this series, a blogpost about synchronous vs. asynchronous delivery.

Unexpected positives of moving my class online

Yesterday was not a great day for me. Being an extrovert and being stuck at home for days is far from ideal. Combined with the fact that my regularly-scheduled Atlanta-Spring-induced allergy symptoms reared their head yesterday, which meant that I spent most of the day sneezing and sniffling, I really needed a pick-me-up. So I made a list of all of the unexpected positive consequences of moving my class online. Without further ado, and in no particular order, here goes a list of all the good things about this situation:

• I can get up almost an hour later than usual and still make it to class on time.
• I can teach in super comfortable pants. 
• If I need to sneeze in class, I can mute myself and turn off my video for a split second.
• I can teach with a cup of coffee, tea (or hot chocolate!) next to me (I’ve only done this with tea at the moment, but the possibilities are endless!)
• My apple pencil is way more reliable than a whiteboard marker. (White-board markers dry up overnight and without warning!)
• I can highlight my handwritten notes.
• I have more choices for colored writing instruments.

A snapshot from my notes from today.

• My drawings/graphs are much better in Notability than on a whiteboard.
• I can switch between writing on “the board” (i.e. Notability) and showing them a graph on Desmos without having to turn our classroom projector on or off. (Our projector screen covers the whiteboard in the room that I teach in, so I can’t have them both be visible at the same time.)
• Having recorded lectures means that my students can rewatch my lectures as many times as they need.
• My students have notes from class that I wrote, as well as ones they took.
• I can rewatch my own lectures and notice stuff I wouldn’t get to see in a real-life class. I can reflect on what went well, what I can improve for the next lesson, etc. All good things! 
• In watching my lectures, if I catch a mistake or a slip of the tongue, I can point it out afterward. I’m less likely to notice something like that in a real class.
• I can send my class recording to other instructors and get feedback from them. (I did this with a friend after our first class; we both watched each other’s lessons and gave feedback. It was beneficial, 10/10 would recommend.)
• I’m eating lunch at home instead of buying lunch on campus. (This is more generally because of social distancing, but also because when I teach on campus, I tend to buy my lunch on more days than I’d like.)
• Zoom Polls are fantastic! In Monday’s class, I posted a simple poll with two choices: Correct Answer and Incorrect Answer. Only one student picked Incorrect Answer, which would have been awkward for them in a f2f class, but not in an Online one because their votes are anonymous.
• I’m not restricted by classroom design when making students work in groups. I haven’t tried Zoom’s “Breakout rooms” feature yet, but before spring break, I was teaching my class in a room with immovable chairs, which means I could not put students in groups of size greater than 3. Even 3 was uncomfortable, so I mostly made them work individually or in pairs. Now I don’t have that problem anymore!
• I have seen that students who are hesitant to speak up in class even when they know the answer to a question have seemed more comfortable typing the answer in a chat. I might be reading too much into it, but this seems like a big positive.
• I can teach with no shoes on!
• We’ve been having gorgeous weather in Atlanta right now (in the upper sixties/lower seventies). Still, I’m sure I will greatly appreciate not having to get out of the house when the famous Hotlanta summer rolls around.
• Did I mention comfortable clothing?

That’s everything I can think of. Honestly, I’m happily surprised by how long this list turned out to be. Feel free to tell me in the comments if you’ve noticed other positives that I have missed!