Katya Tikhonyuk, Graduate Student
As a relatively tech-savvy person, there were a few parts of teaching a hybrid course that worked well. A frequent issue we have in film courses is having the class in a room that really isn’t conducive to showing films, especially ones with subtitles. Having students watch these films and access presentations on their own devices that they’re comfortable seemed to be effective. Review sessions also seemed to go quite smoothly on Zoom, and it was certainly easier for students to attend via the virtual format.
This isn’t to say there weren’t challenges. It was difficult at times to stimulate active participation during our synchronous Zoom sessions. In addition, until I really got the hang of it, it was a good bit of work to put lecture together, edit them, and get them uploaded.
Angela Brintlinger, Professor
I volunteered to teach a “hybrid” course, though I wasn’t sure what that would mean and I was fairly sure we’d all be virtual in no time. Instead, we made it through almost to Thanksgiving before heading to Zoom. With 29 students signed up for my honors section of Masterpieces of Russian literature, we were assigned a classroom with a non-COVID capacity of 45, which meant that we could meet in person, just not all at once. I split my students into Tuesday and Thursday sections and recorded narrated power point lectures for weekend viewing. And since each class discussion was inevitably different, I paired each of the students with someone from the other section and asked them to email highlights to each other every week. I was hoping to create some synergy and community despite the ever-changing situation on campus. In our case hybrid meant some online content and communication, lots of reading and writing, and weekly masked meetings in our classroom.
The best day of the term was November 5. I had cancelled class on Election day, figuring that if I had had to stand in line for 2.5 hours to vote early in October, my students might run into time conflicts on the day itself. So that Thursday they all came to campus, and we took turns in the classroom, with the other half engaged in small group discussions on the Oval. For the middle twenty minutes of class we all met outside, and students sought out their email partners from the opposite section—people with whom they had only interacted in writing and online. Even though everyone was six feet apart and masked, those discussions—among students who knew each other but had never met, and without me as interceding interlocutor—were among the best of the semester. I was gratified when some students chose those contacts when creating groups for their final project.
For me, the three Zoom classes we had in the last two weeks of the term were surreal. Suddenly I could see my students’ faces for the first time, but I still couldn’t see them all at once—my laptop screen is too small for a 30-person Zoom meeting. And I barely recognized them now that they were mask-free! But the difference between spring and autumn was significant. Without the face-to-face personal relationships my spring students had formed, the autumn students seemed to really focus on the course material, and they were pretty good-natured about my attempts to juggle technology, books, notes, and hand sanitizer. Sometimes they had trouble concentrating—one student asked me after class if I could send the notes I created for an absent student to her as well, as she’d been feeling anxious during class, had zoned out, and had missed the content entirely—and some missed four or even five weeks over the term. But the final projects and extra credit essays they wrote showed a deep understanding of Russian culture, an intense empathy for social isolation and mental illness—as depicted in Dostoevsky and Gogol, among others, but also as experienced by them and their peers—and a gratitude for the opportunity to be in school even in the time of COVID.
One student put it particularly eloquently in an extra-credit blog post relating the course material to our lives today. I’d like to share a few excerpts:
If last year someone had told me I would finish my senior year of high school and start my first year of college online, there is no chance I would have believed them. Over the span of nine months, words that were hardly a part of my vocabulary like “quarantine,” “pandemic,” and “lockdown” became words I heard daily. As a self-proclaimed extrovert (confirmed by the Myers-Briggs personality test), I found that isolation took an immediate toll on my mental health. I was hardly the only one, however, as isolation has proven itself to be a direct cause of poor mental health among all types of people.
While I am wary of comparing anyone to a murderer, Raskolnikov’s state of mind was not far off from what many people feel during prolonged periods of quarantine. Constant anxiety over the virus and no social outlet has had a very negative impact on many people’s mental wellness, especially those who were already suffering from mental health issues. In addition, in the same way Raskolnikov fears having to meet anyone, many people have spent so long in isolation that they forget how to talk to people, even those they care deeply about.
She concluded: “I would argue with relative certainty that the majority of students aren’t pleased with their new reality.” But I am proud of her and her cohort. They have risen to the challenge of college and COVID, and they will flourish when they have the chance to continue their studies in relatively more normal times.
