Establishing a relationship between a teacher and student that challenges the student to produce quality work while understanding their limits is difficult enough in a regular setting. Learning to navigate that relationship in a pandemic can feel next to impossible.
The absence of face-to-face interaction makes it harder to gauge how students are progressing and the appropriate pace to set for courses. While professors have found their footing teaching courses virtually in this third semester of online learning, issues of mental health and financial hardship continue to make learning in the age of COVID-19 difficult.
In my own experience, virtual learning has been more difficult. At the beginning of the pandemic, I left Johnson City and was unable to work for three months while continuing to pay my rent and utilities. I have since had to work to make up for that missed time by picking up hours at my job, often to the detriment of my classwork.
Since college age students, generally claimed as dependents on their guardians’ taxes, were left out of both stimulus bills, many around the country have had similar struggles. Many students want to be able to produce their best work but find it hard to juggle expectations in an uncertain and strange time.
It is frankly difficult to find the ambition to work toward a future in a moment best described as a stalled present – when expectations stack up but our ability to truly engage with the world is indefinitely halted. The initial shock of the pandemic is gone, but promises of the situation improving anytime soon feel more and more hollow. School work feels less like a way to prepare for our future and more like a way to fill our days while we wait for this to all be over.
I crave the order of the classroom and being able to orient my days toward a goal. While I have enjoyed the flexibility of asynchronous classes, I feel like I have personally benefited from synchronous courses that more closely resemble the structures of the in-person classroom.
I have been lucky to have incredibly understanding professors who understand the mental toll the pandemic has taken on students and attempt to cultivate a sense of community in the classroom–as one of the most difficult aspects of online learning is the inability to interact with classmates unmediated by a screen. The classroom settings I have found most successful are those that give structure while recognizing the importance of flexibility. Too much freedom and students can feel lost and unfocused, too little and we can be crushed under the pressure.
In my experience, instructors do their best when they recreate the feel of the classroom by maintaining synchronicity while being more gracious than they typically are.
