What I've learned this week...

Teaching online is fine in theory

I had assumed, after the Clown Prince announced that exams were being cancelled, that teenagers all over the country would throw their phones in the air in a flurry of joyous excitement and dance round like happy toddlers, thanking Covid-19 for making them the jammiest students in recent history.

I also assumed that my private tutees would cancel their tutorials, as who wants to pay for lessons preparing you for an exam you no longer have to take? 

And, as my main annual income is from my examining work on two different A Level papers, I was depressed that this was being wiped out at a stroke.  My other job, as a tutor at a private tutorial centre, is pay-when-you’ve-worked, so once that shut down on Saturday, I’d be getting no income from there either.

However, things haven't quite panned out like that.  There is a chance that I’ll be able to do some online teaching for the tutorial centre if they have students who want it. Fingers crossed.  And there may be exams later in the year which will need marking, so there might be some work from that.

And it seems that students are more reluctant than expected to leave their future educational choices down to teacher-predicted grades.  Maybe they’re regretting all those times they were rude to Miss Smith, or when they laughed when Mr Brown slipped in the snow, or all those lessons when they arrived late, or all that homework they failed to complete, or the mock they didn’t revise for. When I taught in schools and colleges, teachers giving predicted grades in my experience were always conscientious and fair, but the kids don’t know that, do they? Anyway, any unfairness will err on the side of generosity – there is nothing in it for schools to get low grades!

So, my private tutees want to continue with their sessions, but do them online.  In this modern age, this should be a doddle, surely?  Well, I investigated the possibilities of Skype yesterday.  It took me a day to work out how to open up the website and contact people.  I say a 'day' but most of that time I wasn't looking at Skype, but simply doing various mundane tasks in that bunny-in-the-headlights frame of mind that everyone seems to be experienced at the moment, as our world turns upside down.  However, finally I asked my other half to go to the top floor with his laptop so we could try skyping each other.  

After several false starts, a blurred picture of a middle-aged bearded man wearing an expression of existential angst appeared on my screen.  I had a set of headphones with a microphone jammed on my head – I’d bought them following advice on Tutorhub – so I looked like a dishevelled and very stressed local radio host. And why do I shut my left eye all the time?  I don’t know I’m doing it.  It makes me look like I’m drunk. I should wear an eye-patch – looking like a pirate is way cooler than looking like I’ve been on the pink gins all morning.

Due to the headphones, I could hear him perfectly, including the loud gasping for breath resulting from climbing two flights of stairs.  He, on the other hand, could only hear a distorted time-lagged voice that was difficult to understand.  "Try wearing the headphones from the electronic keyboard!" I managed to say to him.  After ten minutes of listening to him searching for them, I realised he hadn't understood that I meant the organ/piano keyboard of the electronic instrument he bought me for Christmas four years ago (my house is full of unused Christmas presents).  He thought I meant the laptop keyboard.  Anyway, the headphones for the keyboard wouldn't plug into the laptop, so he came downstairs and found the headphones we used to use with a voice recorder he bought me for Christmas in 2017 (and lost in February 2018). Then he staggered back up two flights of stairs.  The sound of his heart pounding and his loud wheezing through the headphones was very alarming!

Once he’d recovered, we engaged in a long period of trying to get a good picture on both screens, occasionally accidentally clicking on inappropriate screen buttons or even leaving Skype altogether and having to begin again. Every so often one of us would knock the laptop off the desk or fall off our chair or engage in a cacophony of swearing.  Sometimes we'd have weird conversations:

     'The top of your head's disappeared!'

     'Has it?'

     'Can't you crouch down or something?'

     'You could raise your laptop...'

     'How would that help? It's you who needs to raise your laptop!'

     'Is that better?'

     'You're too close to the screen now. All I can see are two nostrils and your moustache - it looks like two caves above a forest...'

  

Two hours after we started, we still weren't much further on in our 'expertise'.

So, whether I’ll actually ever manage to deliver an online lesson to an actual student, I have no idea. Wish me luck!