It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom
Steven: [00:00:00] In response to the recent presidential election and the significant changes it signals, we’ve decided to re release our very first episode, It’s Okay to Look Like a Potato on Zoom. This inaugural episode, originally recorded during the early days of the pandemic, explores themes of adapting to change, fostering connection, and embracing imperfection.
Ideas that feel just as relevant today as they did then. When we first released this episode, we were navigating the abrupt transition to online teaching, striving to balance academic rigor with care and compassion for our students and ourselves. Now, as we face another moment of transition, this conversation offers an opportunity to revisit those lessons, and reflect on how we can carry them forward.
This episode is more than a reflection on teaching, it’s a reminder of the strength we find in community. It highlights the importance of staying connected to our values and identities, even when circumstances challenge us to rethink familiar practices. It speaks to the ways we [00:01:00] can provide structure and stability, not just for our students, but for ourselves in times of uncertainty.
Releasing this episode again feels like coming full circle. The core ideas, offering reassurance, finding moments of levity, and leaning into our humanity, resonate not only in our classrooms, but in life. Whether you’re a long term listener revisiting these ideas, or someone discovering this episode for the first time, we hope it provides encouragement, perspective, and maybe even a sense of comfort.
We’re honored to share this moment with you again. Thank you for being part of our community. Let’s continue to learn and grow together.
Anne: It’s great to be here with you on this inaugural podcast. The thing that you and I’ve been talking about since we transitioned to online instruction, what feels like Four or five months ago, but what I think is about a week and a half ago is what our students need and how we can help them and how do we even figure that out?
So I’m wondering what you’ve been noticing as we’ve been [00:02:00] talking to faculty members in terms of what students need and what, what resources faculty need to help students learn what they need to learn.
Steven: That’s been preeminent in my mind since I’ve been, you know, sequestered at home and then really just talking to faculty.
Faculty about what they’re trying to juggle does that does that resonate for you?
Anne: Yeah, well, I mean as you know, this call was delayed because a fuse got blown in our house because we’ve turned unused room in the attic into A space where the kids can go and be, so we’re not always, you know, in the same spaces all the time, but turning the space heater on an attic meant that when someone else went to microwave lunch, we lost all power in the house briefly.
So, you know, there’s a lot going on. And, um. It’s challenging, but the thing that was really interesting to me is that my this morning was the first day that my class [00:03:00] met, and I had really intended to use the regular meeting time of class for a quick check in. And what I found was that 18 of my 19 students were there on zoom.
And they wanted to hear me talk and they, I said, would it help you to, to, for me to just kind of go over the texts we’re reading for the rest of the semester. And they really just wanted me to kind of talk at them in a way that I would never do in the classroom. I mean, I talked for a longer time than I would, but I think just that reassurance of seeing that weird Gallery of all their faces while listening to my voice calmly describe the contents of the next few texts for the course Was a kind of good regrounding for them So that really took me by surprise because it was a pretty it struck me as pretty bad pedagogy But I think it was actually [00:04:00] pretty good care for each other because it felt like a good check in You know, it felt like, Oh, that’s right.
We are having class and we do know stuff about the material of this class. And that still can be something that brings us back together.
Steven: Yeah, I mean, I think the point about being brought back together, right? So these are existing relationships, right? So it’s not, it’s not like we’re forced to get to know each other.
You know, never having interacted before, so we kind of do have a social bond that we’re trying to reconnect rather than initiate. And I think sometimes we forget as teachers how important we are to the students.
Anne: Yes. It’s
Steven: our very presence. They can find comforting
Anne: and it was funny to me in class today that two of the students who always sit next to each other and kind of, um, giggle with each other.
We’re busting each [00:05:00] other up while I was talking and that was. Immensely reassuring like, you know, one of them was just kind of wiggling and it made the other one crack up and then, you know, a third kid changed her background a couple times in the middle. It was super distracting, but also it was just so reassuring.
That they’re just as naughty and full baloney as they were before, uh, the virus came in and changed everything. So that was interesting to me is that they have as little respect for me.
Steven: So, I mean, I, I think you’re, you’re hitting on a real tension that I’ve noticed conversations with faculty around our social and emotional imperatives.
And how do we measure up against covering the content and what our outcome expectations are and how do we, you know, how do we approach [00:06:00] weighing that when we’re thinking about,
Anne: Right. And that was one of the things that my expectations were really low for class today because as I think you know, um, on Thursday, which was our first day online when my class met, I had no audio for my call.
So it was a complete disaster. And that had been such a total failure that all I really wanted was to be able for them to see and hear me on this. Check in. And when we got past that pretty quickly and they all seemed ready to work and they’d done some of the fairly simple homework that I had assigned them, but they’d done it in a substantive way, then I did say, okay, here’s what we’re going to do now.
We’re going to go into breakout rooms. And here are the two questions I want you to discuss in your small group. And I want you to come back able to tell us the conclusion that you came to. You have five minutes. And I was as Okay. firm and rigorous as I would have been normally in [00:07:00] class, but that only happened kind of 50 minutes into a 75 minute session.
Right? And then they did it. And, and we had a fairly substantive discussion for the last 15 minutes. And so now I feel like I can begin to plan something that’s a little bit more like, I mean, I don’t even know what to call it because it’s a very strange. but a little bit more rigorous going forward because I’m assured that they have the technology and the capacity to participate in this medium.
And when I screen shared with them and showed them some of the other tools that are available to them for online learning, the tools were unfamiliar to them and they were not interested in trying them out. Which was interesting to me, so, you know, we’ll just see. I mean, I’m giving them more time to think through what they want, but I know part of what they want from their professors is [00:08:00] kind of a consultation, but ultimately that the professor makes a decision.
Right? And there’s a kind of moment where there’s too much consultation, too much. Hey, guys, what do you think? Hey, what do you well, we could do it however you want. That in itself is destabilizing in a very unstable time.
Steven: I think what you’re saying is we need to provide some kind of structure and order.
So I know that when I log in and my professor is there. There’s rules, there’s procedures, and I know who I am in this space. Right. Because everything else can seem like kind of chaotic. Maybe what we’re saying is that we can reinterpret structure and rigor as comforting to them. Clear expectations of what we’re going to do and what our roles are.
Maybe they need some kind of order communicated to them that we haven’t abandoned your learning, right? We’re still committed to that project, we’re just going to do it in a different way.
Anne: Absolutely. I [00:09:00] think that’s really, really important. One of the things that you and I have been talking about a lot as we think about going forward with classes, you know, in this kind of semester that’s got a real before and after to it, right?
We’re about halfway through a semester that’s started. in a face to face learning environment and that’s ending in an almost entirely online environment is thinking about course goals. Can you talk a little bit about backwards design and how that can help us think about the extent to which course goals need to be revised, perhaps, and the extent to which course goals might be able to stay the same going forward?
Steven: I think in this current situation, the important thing to bear in mind is the student learning objective. Not the mechanism by which we get there. What I’m trying to say is that, let’s say that I have this activity that I do, I really enjoy doing it, I’ve had great success with it, the students seem to [00:10:00] like it, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to do it online.
Right. So really the project here in our current situation is to think about, well, Is there another way to get there? So think about you’re in the car on a family trip and you’re, you know, you’re headed to your destination and oh, there’s traffic on the expressway. Well, is there another way to go? So I’m not committed to the expressway.
I just want to get there.
Anne: Right.
Steven: So part of it is to try to think creatively about how do I reach this learning goal? What’s another way to get there? We’re not going to be able to do. Maybe this role play or this presentation, maybe we can, but in order to do it in an online environment, it might be technologically demanding.
And the time it takes to make that activity possible may use up other time that would impact other learning objectives that my hoped for activity wouldn’t cover. So it’s like a trade off. So part of the work, I think, is to like redirect our [00:11:00] thinking from the content. and the activity to the learning outcome.
I think also this ties into what you were saying before about providing a sense of continuity for the students. That we don’t want to suddenly reconceptualize what the course was going to be because that’ll sort of make them feel kind of a sense of loss, right? Like, well, I thought I was going to learn these things, and now you’re telling me I’m not learning them anymore.
Anne: Right.
Steven: Can I really learn a new instructional methodology and adopt Master a whole new way of thinking about teaching and learning in the next four weeks.
Anne: Well, I, I know that I can’t. I mean, I know that I can’t. And I’ve been playing around with some things. And one of the things that’s been most kind of reassuring to me is thinking about all the extant ways that we’re already communicating with our students online.
And thinking about how to profit more [00:12:00] deeply or extend or expand our use of those things. So almost all of us are communicating with our students over e mail already. Okay, so that’s one way that we can certainly keep doing e mail in this moment, right? And so then I’m thinking if I add one new tool. To the couple ways that I’m working with my students online, that seems like something I might be able to do on some days, but on some days I just feel totally exhausted.
I mean, I find meeting with people on a zoom call much more tiring than being in people’s presence and I get off a zoom call and I have less energy than I did. When I, when it began. And so I’m trying to be really patient with myself around those things. And so, and one of the challenges I faced in redesigning my freshman and sophomore level course right now is that I had done this incredibly experimental thing that I really love, which is that the midterm assignment is [00:13:00] design your own syllabus for the rest of the semester.
And so the rest of the semester was blank. And my students all. Written their design syllabus and the day we were gonna bring those designs together into a collaborative mutually designed class was the first day that we went online. And so I went into spring break with a completely blank slate. But, you know, we’ve been working on Google Docs together, and my students, um, I put up a blank slate on Google Docs, and I kind of threw in some of the suggestions that they had individually given me, and asked them for their notes, and Read through their notes and was able to come up with something that I feel I can do going forward and that that honors the interest that they [00:14:00] expressed in terms of what they want to learn for the second half of the semester, but felt like a heavy lift.
And it felt like I had really given myself like an extra degree of difficulty.
Steven: There’s something I that I wanted to ask you earlier about just this kind of being in your home. Right. In your personal space. Right. Interacting with students synchronously, seeing them, they’re seeing you, you know, there’s your office or your living room, there’s your cat.
Right, your child in the background. How does that feel in terms of like boundaries and
Anne: well, I’m lucky to have a study with the door that closes that’s huge. And that’s partly because I make my children share a bedroom because, uh, My career is really important to me, and I have been thinking a lot about those boundaries.
And Zoom allows you to make a virtual [00:15:00] background, which is really fun. And I love that as a way of masking exactly where you are if you don’t want people to see the laundry basket behind you. But, um, my laptop is old enough that it’s not supported on my laptop. So, these problems are really, um,
Steven: So, if you have a laundry basket in your office, that’s like a work life balance thing you may want to, you know, think about.
Anne: I don’t have a laundry basket in my office, but I’m, I’m badly backlit. And, um, that’s a source of, of, of some embarrassment. I, uh, follow, uh, uh, Chanel Miller, the writer, uh, uh, memoirist on Instagram. And she has really wonderful cartoons about stress and anxiety and resilience. And the other day there was just a single panel cartoon of And it just said it’s okay to look like a potato on zoom [00:16:00] and i’m going to adopt that as my mantra
Steven: Maybe that should be the name of our podcast
At least that’s that’s going to be our I think the first episode It’s good. It’s okay to look like a potato on zoom.
Anne: Totally. The first episode. I think that’s exactly right. My
Steven: no, we’re trying to move toward understanding by design and like learning objectives, but we really do keep coming back to this human component and how do we get ourselves and our students to a state of readiness?
I think one of the things that I’m picking up on from faculty I’ve been working with is You know, they were expert, right? Right. Three weeks ago, expert, in their field, in their classroom, interacting with and advising their students and colleagues. They were expert. And now, suddenly, they feel a sense of, you know, incompetence, [00:17:00] technologically, certainly.
And that loss of confidence strikes at the heart, I think, in some ways. Of their identity. I see myself as a teacher, and if I can’t do that effectively, if I can’t serve my students in a way that I feel proud of and deeply connected to, that’s a real loss.
Anne: Yeah, and I think that, you know, many of us remember that.
Charming, hilarious video of the young journalist scholar in Korea who was doing an online interview on, you know, a video interview when his toddler burst into. His room and he had to kind of bat the child aside. And then the wife came in. There was another baby and a walker coming in. And what was mortifying to him was hilarious to the viewers and very humanizing.
And my nephew is a sophomore at the University of [00:18:00] Washington. In Seattle, and they’ve been online for a couple weeks longer than we have, and he’s seen people’s cats and people’s children in the background, and he loves it. He’s so interested and relieved to have his professors be humanized. But for us as faculty members, I think it feels really vulnerable, and it’s good to know that a generous student feels happy and reassured to see us in the context of our own home, but it doesn’t make it, uh, super easy to share that with our students.
Um, and it doesn’t make it super easy to, uh, feel vulnerable. And that loss of a sense of control and expertise is really acute. I mean, I really felt it when my class didn’t go, was impossible to conduct the other day. It was really hard. And so, you know, these, these kind of conversations about, [00:19:00] Compassion have been incredibly, compassion for ourselves have been incredibly sustaining to me as we make this transition.
And then I think the makes me think we should pivot to the question of thinking about our most vulnerable students. You know, I was very struck by how the resilience of the students I saw. But there are some students, and we’ve been talking about this in the town halls, for whom this may mean the end of their ability to access college.
And as we think about moving online and continuing to deliver the kind of education that our students deserve, we also have to be thinking at the same time on a slightly different track about How we’re reaching out to those students who are not able to continue [00:20:00] or the students who are facing struggles that make simply doing the reading hard.
Steven: You know, there’s something we sort of touched on earlier about we have an idea of who our students are. And that idea may not, may not really map on to the lived reality of, of many of the students that we, that attend our classes. We may have certain assumptions in our planning, in the, the tools that we’re selecting.
The way that we’re making our course and ourselves available that are unrealistic for, for some portion of our students and so it’s really hard to balance a live interaction online can, can most closely replicate in my mind perhaps what being in the classroom is and if you can’t attend, you know, here’s this sort of plan B and I don’t know how to solve that, you know, how to solve that problem, how to be equitable and Take into account the varying accessibility issues of the various [00:21:00] students that are in my courses.
I think a good place to start, though, is to think about them. And I guess, my wife is a kindergarten teacher, and kindergarteners have no prior knowledge, right? So, it’s like teaching a room full of Frosty the Snowman, if you know this reference. Right. It’s like they totally have no context. You have to build a set of shared experiences that you can use to reflect upon and talk about and mull over to activate their thinking.
But you also have to share with them why you’re doing what you’re doing because they don’t know. Right. If you don’t do that, then you’re just ordering them around, right? They’re not learning. They’re just following orders. I guess if I were making recommendations, I would say, let the students look behind the curtain.
This is what I’m doing. This is why I’m doing it. This is what I hope you’ll get out of it. This is my intention. And to kind of talk collaboratively about, well, what are your expectations for, [00:22:00] you know, how do I perform well, professor, in a Zoom session? Like, what does that, what does that mean? I’m here.
What’s a good job? I think we all need some sense of what’s a shared vision of competence both as a teacher and as a learner in this new space because I knew before in my classroom or I thought I did, but I’m not so sure what that is now.
Anne: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that’s right. That makes a lot of sense to me.
The other thing that I’m thinking about, and maybe we can, um, kind of close, I’d love to hear your reflection on this Um, idea, but I’ve been reading and thinking about, um, the work of Jim Lang, who’s the director of the Teaching and Learning Center up at, um, Teaching and Learning Center at Assumption College up in Worcester, and he has that book, Small Teaching, and I just got his book, Small Teaching, online, and he has a new [00:23:00] book coming out on attention and distraction, and he’s really thinking about the fact that, We are all really distracted right now, and our attention is pulled in many different directions.
And this is before the pandemic, right? Just thinking about people’s phones. And when I talked to him about it, he was going to be our third speaker in the reimagining series this spring. And when I talked to him about what he wanted to talk to us about, He was saying that he doesn’t want to ban laptops and phones from the classroom, but he wants to find ways of capturing people’s attention and find ways of getting into that kind of mode of working where we’re in a kind of flow where we don’t, um, check our phones for a few minutes.
And now it strikes me that that we need that more than ever, right? As we can’t live this time when we’re [00:24:00] confined to basically to our homes with occasional jaunts to the grocery store in a state of constant anxiety. We have to keep going and we have to keep learning and growing and trying. And how do we design activities for ourselves and our students that capture enough of our attention that.
Um, we’re still learning and that we’re still in community with each other. So I’m wondering what you think about that and if you have ideas of good ways of doing that kind of work when we’re meeting
Steven: online. I think for me, what I do is to try to think of myself as a teacher, which is a little different.
First experience teaching is, is, you know, I was a high school teacher for about 10 years. And I think it’s, it’s different in some ways. I don’t know if faculty think of themselves as teachers so much as philosophers or medievalists or [00:25:00] chemists in a way.
Anne: Right.
Steven: That’s a little different from how we experience it in K 12.
One of my favorite movies is, uh, it’s a film of A Man for All Seasons. Have you seen it with Paul Schofield?
Anne: Oh, not for a million years.
Steven: And there’s this part of the film where Richard Rich, who’s played by William Hurt, he wants Paul Schofield, Paul Schofield’s character, to get him a job, court, and he says to him, you know, be a teacher, and you’d be a great teacher.
And Richard Rich says to him, he’s playing Thomas More, so Richard Rich says to Thomas More, well, who would know? And Thomas More says, you, your students, And God, that’s not a bad audience. So, I think it’s, it’s, uh, for me, in my own practice, I, I try to think about The themes that we’re touching on in, in this, you know, our, our first talk, which is coming from a place [00:26:00] of, of caring for the students, right?
Right. Especially at, at, you know, at a Jesuit university like our own and trying to, to understand that, you know, academic rigor in our learning objectives, those are part of that care to hold, to help them reach a standard that we’ve, you know, I’ve communicated and that they understand and is measurable and realistic.
But, but it’s part of kind of a, a, you know, a suite of services that we offer them.
Anne: I love what you’re saying and I love what you’re saying about being a teacher because I found that for me, too, being a teacher is a huge part of my identity and it’s been very liberating because when I’m out in my non boredom life and I meet people in my town, And they ask me what I do.
I tell them I teach. And I [00:27:00] don’t tell them I’m a professor. Because if I say I’m a professor, they expect me to lecture at them. And if I say I teach, they imagine that I’m a kind person. And I’d so much rather Lead with that kindness, then with that sense that I’m suddenly judging them, which is the perception that a lot of people who aren’t in the university day to day today have of what that word professor means.
And so then when I think about being a teacher, and I, and think about what it means in this moment of crisis, I think it’s helpful to think about that suite of services, right? Part of it is learning a lot about Virginia Woolf. Part of it is asking people if they’re okay. And part of it is, Being willing to send them a picture of my dog as I did the other day just to kind of because it was funny and I wanted them to have a moment of [00:28:00] just lightness or remembering that I’m a human, um, while they think about how we’re going to get through this next, you know, month and a little bit together.
Steven: So we should probably move into like a how do we wrap this up?
Anne: I think that’s okay for our first episode.
Steven: It’s not bad.
Twice over Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud and Spotify. New episodes update intermittently. We aim for once a week, but sometimes we just can’t get it done. You can also find us on our blog twice over podcast.com. Thanks so much for listening.
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