Tales from Observing Third Grade Zoom School: Day 64
Day 64: May 29, 2020
Global cases: 6,026,418; Deaths: 366,422
Egypt cases: 22,082; Deaths: 879
Helen Rizzo
Associate Professor of Sociology
Chair of the Department of Sociology, Egyptology, and Anthropology (SEA)
I am currently social distancing with my husband, Stephen Urgola (AUC University Archivist) and our eight-year-old son, Anthony Osiris in our apartment in Cairo. I am sitting on our balcony in Zamalek which has a small view of the Nile and Agouza as I write this. And I am reading the novel, Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson as I await one last final exam submission. The title of the novel sums up my state of mind at the moment quite accurately.
In this time of endings (Ramadan, the school year, and the spring 2020 semester from hell – please, please end), I want to reflect on my experience with my family for the past two months or so through the lens of my son’s online schooling.
March 11 was the last day my son and I set foot in a classroom as March 12 was the day of the dragon storm (talk about foreshadowing!) and the beginning of the partial shutdown of Cairo due to the Covid-19 pandemic. For about two-and-a-half weeks, my son had no classes as teachers prepared to go online, but he had worksheets he was supposed to do during this time period.
A friend from high school (whose wife home-schooled their children) asked on Facebook how home-school was going. My response: “I would not call what is happening in our family home-schooling because that would be an insult to all those who actually home-school their children including all of the hard work your wife put into this for your children.”
For those two-and-a-half weeks both my husband and I were going crazy because we still had to do our full-time jobs and had no idea how to educate our son during this time period besides the worksheets. My one minor victory during this period, which I proudly announced on Facebook, was: “Successfully taught my eight-year-old son the concept of homonyms (had to look it up because I couldn’t remember the word). In particular, the difference between there, their, and they’re. Given that this is my only success in two weeks, I suck at this.
Respect to all elementary school teachers!”
On March 31, fortunately for all involved, online instruction via Zoom (aka Zoom school) began for my son. My husband and I gratefully retired our roles of being horrible elementary school teachers to becoming our son’s personal assistants which included the following duties: 1) making sure that he gets into his different classes every 40 minutes from 10am to 1:40pm five days a week by scrambling between multiple platforms to find the right Zoom link for each and every class; and 2) making sure he does his homework (again by checking multiple platforms to find the assignments — this dramatically increased my empathy for my own students who were living this same nightmare), while still doing our own full-time jobs (taking multitasking to all new levels: who needs work/life balance).
For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.
Thus began the race of who could learn necessary Zoom features first – eight-year-old kids or their teachers. My son’s science teacher took the lead in knowing how to use the mute all function on the very first day. When she started class, she let them say hello to her and each other and, given that they hadn’t seen each other in over two weeks, it was utter chaos with about fifteen of them trying to talk at once. Then she did mute all and it was amazing that sound of silence!
In math class, the kids took the lead in figuring out the chat function, especially private side chats. It was all fun and games until one of the boys sent one of the girls a nasty message with extremely foul language and she told on him. The amount of curse words eight-year-olds know in English, which for many of them is not their first language, was actually quite impressive. Most of the teachers learned the disable chat function pretty quickly after that.
I tried to figure out how I could apply these lessons learned about Zoom to my own courses from observing my son’s classes and sadly came to the conclusion that what works for eight-year-olds would not work as well with university students. First, I had absolutely no use for mute all. I had the opposite problem: my students came to class with cameras and microphones off. I had to beg them to turn the cameras and microphones on briefly just to say hello and to make sure that I was actually talking to other human beings and not just myself.
I experienced some regret teaching my students the chat function (so they could ask me questions or to the whole class) after learning about the dangers of the private chat function from my son’s classes. But then I figured if they were doing private side chats, at least they weren’t bothering the whole class like they would be if we were all together in a face to face classroom. Does Zoom have a function that can force students to participate in class? That will be my summer project in preparing to possibly teach online again in the fall.
The perfect ending to my son’s Zoom school experience was provided by his science teacher. She taught them how to make paper airplanes on the last day. A teacher’s revenge? I will leave it for you to decide. Now I must go prepare for my new role as summer camp counselor … Keep us in your thoughts and prayers!
