Shelter.Me. : Reflections from Educators During Shelter in Place
We are collecting reflections from educators during Shelter in Place and Campus Closures. We are posting art, poetry, photography and a variety of expressions on our Facebook Page and Instagram channel @Bewell.Teachwell. Longer entries, like this one from Ted Morton, a high school English teacher for over 25 years, will be posted here on the TeachWell blog. Thank you Mr. Morton, for sharing your perspective on the “modern classroom” during campus closures!
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Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost
I took too much for granted, I got my signals crossed
Just to think that it all began on an uneventful morn
Come in, she said
I'll give ya shelter from the storm
~Bob Dylan, “Shelter from the Storm”
About 15-20 years ago I started hearing education gurus at teacher symposiums and in-services lament the state of our modern classrooms. The modern classroom wasn’t modern, they said. One presenter in particular, stood on a stage in front of an auditorium of teachers and displayed on his screen photos of surgeons’ operating rooms from the 1800’s. These photos depicted little regard for hygiene during surgery; the surgeons wore no gloves or masks, and the patients were laying on a table that may have been somebody’s old picnic table. Because a modern surgery room is so much different than those in the photos, we all could tell that the photos were dated. But when he showed us photos of classrooms from the same era--desktops with attached chairs in neat rows, a podium at the front--they looked remarkably similar to our own workplaces.
The message: this had to change. The modern classroom needed to undergo a dramatic evolution so the work we were doing would match our modern world and prepare our students for that world. We could not be preparing our students very well for a rapidly changing world in rooms that still applied factory models of neat rows in rectangular-boxed rooms.
The suggestions were mostly physical changes to the room based on spatial psychology. They ranged from grandiose architectural designs of new schools and their “learning spaces” to furniture updates in existing classrooms that would accommodate cooperative learning. The best classroom, education gurus argued, would be compartmentalized so that several different phases of learning could be facilitated simultaneously.
In short, the traditional classroom needed to be, well, less traditional.
In March of 2020, these gurus got their wish--our “classrooms” are now anything but traditional--but I am not sure that they could have predicted the classroom of the future that is now our reality.
Today’s modern classroom is a bedroom festooned with soiled clothing, a brightly lit laundry room, or a garage with walls of stored camping gear and boxed-up seasonal decorations. In any case, these classrooms--or learning spaces--contain a lone student sitting in front of a computer screen. It’s not what anyone planned, but it’s what we’ve got.
When my wife and I bought a Mazda back in 2008, our kids loved their ad campaign slogan: Zoom! Zoom! The onomatopoeic slogan promised a fun driving experience. Mazda parlayed the verbal practice that generations of kids did while playing with toy cars and imagining themselves driving them: Zoom! Zoom!
But now we capitalize Zoom and use it as a verb: You wanna Zoom this afternoon with us? This, of course, is making a lot of stockholders very happy, which is an interesting twist on the modernization of education: capitalist gains for people who aren’t even involved in education. I don’t know about you, but for me the word zoom--with or without the capital “Z”--has lost its lustre. These days, the tech world is enjoying even more validation of the belief that their products are not mere luxuries, but necessities for modern functioning and existence. Is education becoming a subsidiary to technology instead of the other way around?
I did not realize back in 2014 how prophetic it was that the school where I teach became a “Google school.” Of course, online classes have existed for years now, but those were mostly based on a digital place to get and post materials. Now teachers are expected to share their homes and personal presences with the world and to compromise their privacy. As someone who does not engage in any social media platforms beyond email as a matter of principle, this makes me enormously uncomfortable. I do not trust tech companies, especially when they start offering their products for free during this time of shelter-in-place. Just like the Portishead lyric goes, “You don’t get somethin’ for nothin’.”
According to a UK-based media website called Business of Apps, participants on Zoom’s video conferencing platform went from 10 million daily participants in December of 2019 to 300 million in April of 2020. Two years after the company was founded in 2011, it was valued at $25 million. Today it is valued at $40.5 billion. As a result of this pandemic-fueled upsurge of the video conferencing platform’s usage, its stock shares have skyrocketed from $36 in April 2019 to over $155 a little more than a year later.
I am concerned about this because as a teacher I am mandated to use a product that is likely compromising my privacy. An estimated 90,000 schools in 20 countries are currently using Zoom, a company that was found to be sending unauthorized data to Facebook, an organization that I abhor. It was also discovered that Zoom was hoarding user data and routing some calls through servers in mainland China, making them subject to the laws of that jurisdiction.
I am not against technological advancements. I am no luddite. I am also not against a company profiting from its creations. It’s just that I don’t want my position as a teacher to subject me to the sort of bait-and-switch techniques that have become the norm for online technology companies. Is this just another way to demand teachers to sacrifice for the sake of their students’ educations? I don’t want to be mined.
I will stop short of suggesting that we are becoming the pods that feed the machine à la The Matrix; nevertheless, it may serve us well to keep our inner-Neo close at hand. The COVID-19 pandemic threat and the resultant shelter-in-place have left us all in vulnerable positions with ramifications much deeper than a virus infection that can kill millions of people. We are becoming increasingly dependent on technology and dependency has a tremendous potential to place people at a disadvantage, just ask anyone in the field of domestic violence prevention.
So as Dylan said, “somethin’s been lost,” and we are now in a room with a shut door. But maybe we need to view this with that wisdom about the natural correlation to a door’s closing. Alexander Graham Bell said, “When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.” Our shut door is sheltering in place, which is actually a solution, just not a very accurate one--like an antibiotic that kills all the body’s bacteria; the good and the bad. That leaves us to figure out what there is to gain from all of this distance learning, distance teaching, remote/flipped/online classroom jazz. What new solutions to education challenges will this pandemic serendipitously help us discover? Just please let us be mindful that the solution to this shut door is not more Windows.