Day 77: First Semester-Day Away from the Students in More Than 25 Years.
Day 77: June 11, 2020
Global Cases: 7,600,265 Deaths: 423,901
Egypt Cases: 39,726 Deaths: 1,377
Ezzeldin Yazeed
Professor, Department of Construction Engineering
I did not imagine how much the day-to-day interactions with students affect the quality of my personal life until the past two months in quarantine. I discovered that I took it for granted for the past 25 years; however, when the world locked down and we, the instructors, were forced away from our students, this divine privilege became very clear in my mind.
Over these long years of my academic career, I was always excited to start a semester. I do not exaggerate by saying that despite this age and those years, in the first semester day, I always felt like a six-year-old in his/her first back-to-school day. I was always euphoric to meet my students with their smiles and optimistic cheerful spirits.
Now, with remote-instruction already decided for summer 2020, I went to bed yesterday and I was whispering to myself about my first meeting with the students. I have already spent the past two weeks preparing my course on Blackboard trying my best to impress them and to fulfill their needs, at least from my point of view.
However, many questions rushed into my mind that night; well, I knew that usually, the first impression in the first face to face class is crucial; what will I do via this online first class? Should I ask them to turn on their cameras and introduce themselves? What a silly move; their names will be in front of me! Should I start by saying my name and my rank, etc? Who cares these days?
Moreover, they already registered in my class, so they knew. Should I play it hard and give them the face, or trying to put a nice friendly smile on my face, on the camera I mean of course? But, what face in front of this square glass plate with that small round piece called camera?
In short, I was sleepless until dawn and my first class was scheduled to start at 10am. So, I forced myself to stop and convinced that mind of mine to leave it to the students: let them be the Captains and I’ll play the Passenger this time, at least, during the first few minutes. It is worth mentioning here that I have two back-to-back classes in the summer of 2020.
Luckily, I got up today with fewer questions and once I dug into Zoom at 10am and asked those wonderful young people to start their cameras just to get to know them, their smiles and spirits gave me a boost. It went really nice; we talked about everything in the course, their concerns, other courses, and … time flew.
For The Caravan‘s previous diary entries in Arabic and English go to our COVID-19 Special Coverage page.
I got to 12:45pm just a few minutes later; time was gone just like that, and I cannot wait to see them again for the next class. As planned last night, they really made my day. I am looking forward to the coming six weeks of stay-at-home in a different way; now, I do have something wonderful to do in every single day of these six weeks; well-planed this time.
Another nice thing happened today; it is related to my twins: Yazeed and Youssef. They are also AUC students and registered for some courses this summer. They just started on Zoom with their RHET instructor right after my class ended. I was looking at them and really saw my students, whom I have just left a few minutes ago.
My house turned into an online small campus between 10am and 3pm; it will be like this for the upcoming six weeks.
After this nice day of “literally” teaching and learning, I can have a break and do lunch with my family and then, relax for the rest of the day. So, by the evening, I really did that and even watched an old movie.
Now, I am looking forward to another day in quarantine, but with different expectations for a new hope-to-be nice semester.
