Teaching and Learning from a Pandemic
Dário Borim Jr
dborim@umassd.edu
The spring semester of 2020 will indelibly remain in the minds of all
people who have worked and /or lived at our school for that period. Their
family and friends may also have stored very grave memories. When I think of my
experiences while teaching in that semester, I recall most of all the abrupt transition from seeing and enjoying my students’ presence in the classroom to a
pool of doubt whether they would weather the drastic changes in how we all
interacted and, particularly, in how they would continue to learn from me and
from each other. For me, that transition proved to be much less a matter of
pedagogy than a question of numberless challenges in my students’ personal and
private lives.
As an immigrant here in southeastern Massachusetts with a son living in Morocco and, most of my extended family, in Brazil, I have been, for several years, quite used
to talking over a computer screen and managing to feel close that way to my
dear ones who live thousands of miles away. I am still a bit self-conscious in front
of a camera, but not too badly. Of course, I am not shy, though, in front of a
microphone, since I have been doing Brazilliance, my radio show, for
nearly two decades. How about my students? This technological ease at seeing
and chatting is something that, maybe, most of my students acquired very quickly
in spring 2020, if they did not have it before, anyway.
What may have been difficult for many of our UMass
Dartmouth students, however, were the financial and circumstantial parts of
that transition. Was the Internet available – and unlimited – right away to
them after they were not allowed to return to campus? Did they have to look
after some younger siblings at home? Did they have to find a low-pay part-time
job in these times of rampant, staggering unemployment, in order to help their
parents who had lost their jobs? Were
they now living in a house where there was a quiet room or an isolated room at
all? Were they sleeping in their cars for the lack of bedroom or even a couch
at a friend’s or a relative’s house? Did they have a laptop/desktop to avoid
struggling with a phone, a device that was not theoretically meant to type a
paper, let alone do research for it?
The answers to these questions for some of my
students were probably yes, to others, no, but I, at any rate, tried hard to
earn their trust, so that they could confide in me and open up about their
hardships. Some did share some aspects of their stories. One of them is a
nurse. For various reasons, some quite presumable in times of COVID-19, she had
to work many more hours than she was doing (or could be doing as a full-time
student) in the first half of the spring semester. She appeared to be
struggling with depression and fear of succumbing to the virus herself. Another
student had a few younger sisters and a jobless, stay-at-home father spoke too
often and too loudly under the same roof. One last student to mention seemed
very troubled one day. I suggested we talked after class, and I was able to
help a tiny bit. Her immigrant mother had acquired a medical problem and needed
assistance, but she had lost her health plan. With my wife on my side I did
some online research and discovered two facilities in the vicinity of their
home where they could have free care.
Those stories I heard from my students were plenty, and
I shared some of mine (like a Zoom meeting with relatives on the image above).
While my students’ stories have much to do with their experiences in going back
home and having to learn online under immense pressure, recounting them is not
the only purpose of this writing. The last
point I want to make, in short, is that despite the odds, huge odds, my
teaching under the pandemic was relatively easy, gratifying, and rewarding. It
was easy because I had been teaching both POR 301 (a class in writing and
conversing) and POR 334 (a survey-introduction class in Brazilian literature)
as blended courses, so the transition to online instruction was not a big deal.
We had activities to perform synchronously and, others, asynchronously.
In reality, through the use of the magical Zoom
platform, videoconferencing resulted in more participation in each class
meeting than I had expected. My students were more often present to online sessions
than they were to their face-to-face counterparts. It was very definitely gratifying to know the
students were there, and they were clearly interested. Unfortunately, though,
some did not keep their cameras on, probably because they had to save data on
their Internet bill. For me, it was very rewarding to witness my students’
ability to succeed, to overcome their shyness and fears, and to partake in our discussions about conjunctions, spelling, Ana Miranda, Graciliano Ramos, or
Mia Couto. Overall, I was left with a
sense that I did my job as an instructor as proficiently as I had hoped, and
that I had acted humbly but warmly as a human being who truly cared about my
students’ well-being.
