Teaching

Saharan sand coats Besançon in pale yellows that normally precede tornado weather in my neck of the midwestern woods. These smog colors and weighty air fail to impede walkers and fitness fans of all stripes on this winter Saturday almost free of rain and frost. Well into the entrails of the university’s first entirely online semester, the four walls of two apartments irritate a superficial part of my personality that insists I stretch my joints and flex my dormant muscles. By noon, our light rain jackets flutter in the breezy brown atmosphere of the riverside trail. We trek up to the fort called Chaudanne in surprisingly gentle weather. My fourth time up this windy trail to the lookout points above, I think back to a year ago when I found the energy on a crystal blue February morning to jog up the mount. Today, under the apocalyptic sky materializing in bits of muddy sand on our jackets and phones, I smile. In such an imperfect, burning world, I find myself comfortable and loved, experiencing life scenes unimaginable to a younger me. Spoiled with the pleasant parts of life. We have sandwiches and bananas to accompany our view of our town from our perch in the singing grasses.

As for my humble contribution to French society, tomorrow I begin week five of this semester’s twelve, haphazardly halved by the February break that starts next weekend. These online hours of English lecturing arrived suddenly and sit begrudgingly on my weekly schedule. The earlier start of this academic period compared to that of last Spring caught me off guard in the Paris apartment. Two days after reentering France off a rescheduled transatlantic flight from Baltimore, I log into Discord to begin my wade into the sea of the real discord among students, teachers, administration, and technology. Invigorated by a lightening week of family meals and New England tourism, I filter through bilingual piles of emails containing pleas and complaints, confusions and questions fit for IT support and the registrar. My train back to Besançon rattles through suburban France then sprawling fields until, after a delay of three hours, I reach home base in my cozy studio.

Only marginally better than the startling shift to online teaching at the end of October for the second confinement, this month’s transition to virtual hits every obstacle on this unexplored path thanks to another round of lacking administrative preparation and coherence. Flawed humans make flawed schedules that lead to confusion and rescheduling ad infinium. Secretarial work falls from above onto the shoulders of teachers now tasked with tracking down sometimes nonexistent class lists, prodigal students, and even the classes themselves, lost in the abyss of early Internet era software. The technical connection questions roll in ceaselessly in a suffocating flood of student concern and confusion. Since the last lockdown, many students find themselves back at home in the small villages scattered throughout the region or beyond in houses with poor internet connection, shared spaces or computers, and unknowable domestic situations. A grading metric just enough to account for personal and technical difficulties stemming from economic disparities remains unfound by any of us on the pedagogical side.

I find myself in the thick of the semester’s workload as I inch closer to my midwinter birthday. During our remaining week before the break, I will spend grey and sprinkling mornings, drab afternoons, and early fallen evenings moving my eyes across my screen as it becomes progressively orange to soften the blow to my retinas. My sudden increased autonomy as an instructor, provided by distance and an ironclad 6pm curfew across the hexagon, mean more work but also more meaningful and interesting content for my courses. I’ve been handed the reigns of an English class focusing on the Harlem Renaissance. Each week we read my pick of articles, poetry, and stories from artists crucial to the movement while my background in African and African American studies provides me the ability to respond adequately to uninformed questions on the racial history of the States. For my classes on written and oral expression centered more widely on Anglophone culture, I enjoy an enormous liberty in choosing material, activities, and questions for students of an impressive range of ability.

The next ordeal, one approached regularly by the oft dysfunctional departments, will be the transition back into the reality of the classroom. Between hefty emails from the direction of the university and the hefty responses from all corners of the teaching staff, contradictory information leaks down to our rang on the ladder. Groups of ten students, if they are first year students, can meet for class, if they want to, and if I, as the instructor, want to. What about the second and third year students? What about the fact that no classes have only ten students? What about the fact their preceding or succeeding classes are online and they need to be back in front of a screen with reliable internet connection? With looming and unanswerable questions, I choose to keep my instruction online for the time being, along with several colleagues.

January finished up and stored away in desktop files and emails, I look forward to this new month of love and aging. My last time out of Besançon, in a Paris closed for covid, disappears in the rearview of last year. The week in Maryland’s capital rests pleasantly as a collection of fond memories on a shelf in my thoughts, tumbling to the forefront every time a see my hair’s new color in the mirror. This whirlwind of multi-family travel over the holidays had me eager to return to even a digital classroom that second week of the year. Now I’m as eager to take the next break and adventure out again into the region. To celebrate my birthday and its proximity to Valentine’s Day, my partner and I have booked a weekend stay in Annecy, a picturesque city on a shimmering lake a long jaunt south. Keen to poke around a new town during some time without work, I look forward to delving back into travel writing.

I hope you all are well.

Emily