The first day of classes is always nerve-racking. Trying to find where your lectures are, not knowing anyone in your class or even trying to decide if you like the course or not are always stressful.
While first-day stress is normal for me, the stress associated with the start of this year was not. While I didn’t have to worry about finding my way around, online classes brought a whole different kind of anxiety—a kind of overthinking I associate with what I call ‘Zoom university.’
Normally when you get to your first class, you can observe who you’ll be surrounded by for the next semester. This time around, all I was thinking was, “Should I put my camera on? Maybe I should mute myself?”
Later on, when one of my professors asked us to put our cameras on and unmute ourselves, I started to panic.
I live in a busy house with lots of people around, and it can get very noisy. While unmuted, my dog let out a bark that not only scared me, but totally interrupted my class.
It didn’t seem to bother the other students, most of them laughed, but I turned a bright shade of red from embarrassment.
In 2019, Owl Labs reported the biggest challenges for remote workers during hybrid meetings tended to be interruptions or being talked over (67 per cent) and IT issues (59 per cent). My own experience could not have better reflected these percentages.
We are encouraged to ask questions when we have them, but in online lectures, I have no idea when I should talk. If I have a question, I don’t want to be rude and just blurt it out. Yet, when I would attempt to ask my question, it seemed like someone else would talk at the exact same time, every single time.
Valerie Strauss, a Washington Post reporter, published an article in March about the issues online classes might bring.
“In classrooms, education is a social process, with students having to learn how to deal with one another,” she wrote.
It’s hard to have a good conversation with the class when online because there is no way to gauge the flow of the conversation. Someone always talks over someone else. It feels like the discussion is always being interrupted.
At one point, I tried to just hold up my hand and hope the professor saw, but that did not work either. I started to feel defeated by online classes, so I decided to stop trying to talk and listened to the rest of the lecture.
“Older students may suffer even more from social isolation,” Strauss also wrote, “because friends play a far more important role in their lives.”
This is something else that struck a chord with me this week. Not having the presence of other students around makes it seem like school hasn’t really started yet.
One of the best parts of going to campus was making plans to grab coffee with my friends before class. Now, I don’t even really leave my house since I don’t have a reason to.
At times, I found myself looking at one of my classmates on the screen, thinking I was making eye contact with them. I would quickly look away before remembering they see a different arrangement of people on their screen, and likely didn’t even realize I was staring right at them.
These things are easy to laugh off, because they had no clue. However, I can’t help but feel a bit down when I realize how much I miss those awkward moments in class.
I suppose the bottom line is this: online classes make me overthink everything I do, and this first week has more than proven this year is going to be a strange adjustment.
Our whole lives we have been expected to go to school and learn in person. Now we must relearn both how we socialize, as well as how we absorb material, in order to get by in school without actually being in school.
It is clear this is going to be a difficult school year—but at least we’ll be in it together, figuring out Zoom university as a collective of Carleton students.
Featured graphic by Sara Mizzanojehdehi.
