I wrote ‘The Building in which I Teach’ last year, or a version of it, when  I was having my dark night of the soul, teaching-wise—a state of affairs brought about, weirdly, by an overdose of innovation.  So in this blog I’m writing a rejoinder to myself; a commentary on the woeful tone of that piece.  This is what’s called reflection on teaching practice; it’s  also called taking a more optimistic view of things.

What strikes me about that blog, as a report from the front lines of teaching, is that its shell-shocked tone comes as much from the conditions of my teaching as it does from the students’ learning (or resistance to learning).  I was having my own problems with engagement.  This is what I mean by an overdose of innovation. Making the teaching videos for the unit I’d done my own camera work, had experimented with natural lighting, location shoots and even rudimentary action-cam work;  made  informational skits and built elaborate title sequences with audio and special effects—the whole nine yards to keep myself and the students entertained by the online component of the teaching.  For me, that meant close work with timeline-based video processing software so that I’d come away from a six-hour session in ScreenFlow with headaches, with a pinched nerve in my shoulder or a crick in my neck,  and at night I’d dream up scenes for the next lot of video pods or plot out effects for title sequences. Not since I’d first learned to play chess as kid—and had walked and ate and slept chess moves—had my unconscious been so obsessively engaged. In this case, in a mode of teaching.  I had done all that painstaking  video-processing labour with timelines in the displaced, dis-embedded time of the filmed lesson.  I was in that time, one week ahead of the content, stuck in a scene or obsessing about an effect, which left me out of sync with the real-time of teaching: the face-to-face moment of being there in the room with the students.  It wasn’t that I came to class unprepared — it was that I was somehow not all there, some part of me being stuck in that other-time of the screen.

Feedback on the unit showed that the students experienced the video lecture pods  as talking to them in the moment, and as accessible in the moment (what teaching-and-learning jargon call ‘on-time’ and ‘just in time’ learning), but for me the physical,  intellectual and imaginative labour of making the video lectures had the opposite effect— it was not so much timely and on-time as throwing me out of time. As a mode the purpose-built video lecture  it has its own ontology, and I went through those semesters of innovation in ontological shock: adrift and unstuck from the time of teaching.  I wasn’t in the building where I teach: but not in the way the logic of my teaching nightmares suggests. There’s no widening gulf of water or insurmountable stretch of air between me and the class: there’s just that odd dis-embedding of time and place when teaching goes virtual.