Teaching in the Modern World

Teaching in the Modern World

In my backyard at my Ithaca house, the house I call Homeward Bound because it adjoins the Cornell University campus where my mother, all of my children and I all attended, there sits a wonderful rock and copper life-sized statue of a reclining Socrates, decked out in full toga, teaching his students most emphatically with hand gestures and such. This always struck me as the epitome of the Socratic Method of teaching, where you engage the student in a critical thinking dialogue and thereby drill the subject matter home into the psyche of not only that person, but also all those observing the transaction. We have all had more than our share of talking head lectures or even video lesson plans that try to engage us asynchronously, perhaps even with slightly upgraded technology. You can certainly learn a thing or two on You-Tube, but there’s a reason those videos are short and sweet. Recently, on joining the faculty of University of San Diego’s Business School faculty, I had to take a number of required Human Resources lessons on diversity and harassment. I am newly a resident of The Republic of California and have heard about the liberal and far-reaching political correctness attributes of the state, but those long and laborious video lessons did a very good job of convincing me that all that I have heard is true. Since I wish no one had to be taught these lessons after kindergarten-age, and yet I realize that many do need the remedial work, I was happy to go through them as required. While I may or may not have learned anything I didn’t already know or find cause to modify my behavior based on what was taught, I do think the video classes were well-done and worthwhile. The question I wonder about is whether that is a good method of teaching?

I will presume that there are vocational courses and then there are broader educational courses. For strictly vocational lessons, it may just be sufficient to tell people things that they need to know, so a video presentation works OK. If I need to learn how to detach and attach a cotter pin on a motorcycle foot peg (something I actually had to recently do in attaching a new pair of foot pegs on my motorcycle), a you-tube video might be fine. In fact, I had to watch three You-tube videos to get the exact functionality I was looking for (tricky little buggers that those little U-clips are on cotter pins). But if you need to have students internalize knowledge, I’m not sure show-and-tell works all that well.

So, the question becomes, how do you become an effective teacher in the era of COVID, a Socrates of the modern era. Engaging people via Zoom should not be an impossible feat, but I think its safe to say that it doesn’t necessarily just happen naturally. The other day, my wife Kim told me that she is planning out a virtual fundraiser for a charitable organization of which she is the head of the board. This organization is about singing and its specifically designed to enrich and educate singers about how to improve and advance their cabaret singing careers. Their tag line is “KEEPING THE ARTS ALIVE BY HELPING VOCAL ARTISTS THRIVE.” Catchy slogan. The first thing you can imagine is that it has been an abysmal year for any performing artists since the combination of gathering people in dark and crowded rooms to watch people thrust their lung materials out in your direction is not a winning combination with an aerosol or airborne infection at large. However, business has been booming at this little singing school as they have switched from live to virtual classes.

If you have ever watched a car race like a NASCAR event, you know what a “Yellow Flag” is all about. When something adverse happens on the track that does not close down the track, but requires some time to rectify the problem, the officials will post a yellow flag that intends to keep the race going at reduced speed wherein racers must maintain their position (that is, not try to pass), but are expected to keep moving. They are, however, allowed to go into the pits to get normal work done and refuel. Wise racers usually use this yellow flag moment to pit because they do not lose any positioning and prepare themselves to be as ready to go the distance as they can possibly be thereafter. It is competitively a smart thing to do.

I use that analogy because COVID has put the live singing and performing world on hold. Cabaret is about live performance much more than other singing, which are perhaps more about recording and thus asynchronous performance. So, while the yellow flag is out for the Cabaret world, the singers seem to using the time to hone their skills and be as prepared as possible for when the world goes back to hosting live performances. There is no assurance that will happen, but most of us have a hard time assuming that the world has changed forever due to COVID. People who sing prefer to think that there is a day when their honed skills will be allowed to find expression in the live performance world. Therefore, more singers seem to be finding virtual or Zoom learning to be a valuable means to sharpen their skills.

As an adjunct faculty member in a graduate business school I have to start by understanding the needs and desires of my ultimate “clients”, who are indeed the MBA students seeking to learn something from the likes of me. My employer is the University, so I must start by following their lead, but that has not been so easy in these fluctuating times. Everyone wants the learning to be live, but the need to be compliant with state law regarding gatherings and social interaction combined with the University’s desire for keeping everyone as safe as possible has made for some flip=flopping over the issue of whether the course I was scheduled to teach would be live or online. Ultimately, I was given the choice and I chose to keep the virtual approach for my course. It was a course to be taught over fifteen hours on two consecutive weekends (Friday night and Saturday morning). Fifteen hours of teaching is daunting for anyone not used to being on-stage for that period of time (especially in 3.5-4 hour chunks of time). Teaching on a “new” platform like Zoom (not so much specifically the Zoom platform, but the virtual teaching methodology in general) is an even more potentially daunting thing. I’ve taught for ten years in what is presumably an even more “tough” environment like COrnell’s graduate business school, but I was live and not virtual. Could I get the message across as fluidly? Could I get the interaction and therefore the engagement as easily? Would the course be as lively in this format? Most importantly, would the students learn as much in this approach?

I’ve now done my fifteen-hour, two-weekend class and I have a number of observations. To begin with, where I never used to take attendance in person, there is a tendency to do so to be sure you don’t start before everyone is online. That is a helpful thing and students seem to feel they have to justify to the professor if they are not in class. That may seem old-fashioned, but as a teacher, there is no doubt its a good thing. Secondly, I felt more focused on forcing everyone to speak up every session, so I simply called on everyone for questions (not answers necessarily, but questions…to show me that they were thinking). Only once did I have to serve up a question for a student that couldn’t think of one. Engagement is about staying in the moment and thinking, so it helps to keep people thinking about good questions they need to formulate. And in terms of my degree of animation, I feel that watching a mirror image of myself added to my sense of importance about how I came across to students. All tolled, I think doing classes by Zoom was actually MORE effective for my course work, my sort of students, in the business school sort of curriculum where students generally want to get their money’s worth of education. This was, overall, a great lesson for me about teaching in the modern world.