A series of unfortunate events

Or “why this blog exists.”

The instructional pivot we made in March 2020 made me realize how habituated I had become to a certain variety of online instruction.

It’s one thing to routinely teach graduate students asynchronously online. It is quite another to interact with undergraduate students remotely, especially after you’ve just spent ten weeks together in the same physical classroom. I mean, I knew there would be challenges–the digital divide, for example, would prohibit us from meeting “virtually” during our designated class periods–but, hey, I had a ton of asynchronous experience, and all of my on campus classes already included some “virtual class assignments,” so the disruption, I figured, would be minimal

Oh, to be so young and carefree in thought again!

Two important caveats that should have factored into my calculations: the sheer mental exhaustion of my students (they saw explanatory emails and newly generated handouts as walls of text too overwhelming to process) and the latent *limitation* of cellphone access (mobile screen friendly multimedia isn’t so helpful when data overages become a de facto course fee).

*Sigh*

From mid April 2020 well into late November of the same year, I found myself consuming almost every “pandemic pedagogy” tutorial I could find, looking for answers to engagement problems I had never encountered in an online environment before. Oddly separated from my routine academic experience (of on campus undergrad classes and online graduate instruction), I carried out a series of vitalist, pedagogic experiments. Although I had some obvious successes, the increasingly solitary chambers of my BlackBoard shells made me occasionally wonder if I weren’t just stitching together an ungainly collection of independently beautiful parts in my own “workshop of filthy creation.”

The new year brought new hope. Sure, my undergraduate students and I were still fully online in Spring 2021, but routines had been established, containment mechanisms (pandemic as well as pedagogic) were clearly working, and everyone (students, faculty, and administration) appeared more ready to focus on the opportunities provided by an online environment than its limitations (perhaps because we could all finally see that face-to-face interaction wasn’t going to go away in a “new normal”. . .)

And then a massive ice storm hit Eastern Kentucky.

Thankfully, I never lost power at the house. I did, though, lose my side porch, which was crushed by the corpse of one of the many trees felled by the weight of its own icy limbs. Obliged to wait for a remedy to this most recent setback (cleanup was impossible before a thaw), I diverted my attention elsewhere. Elsewhere was website creation–the one big pedagogical experiment I had yet to try.

After some initial (and, in retrospect, quite comical) missteps, building an independent web presence proved relatively drama-free, but, as I sit here, months later, drafting the first official blog post of my very own WordPress site, I can’t help but sense a dull yellow eye staring back at me.

Hopefully, I won’t end up repulsed by the life I have created.

You see, I am not, by nature, a blogger. A prolific emailer and an endless handout generator, sure. But an honest-to-god blogger? Not so much. That said, I have no one to blame for this monstrosity but myself, and my own (irrational?) faith in the pedagogic power of modeling.

I may or may not get around to posting other entries that could make this section of the site appear “complete.” Time will tell.