Teaching Online: The Good

Hi! Been a minute since my last post. Did you think I was just going to publish that one thing, then skitter off into a corner to nurse my vulnerability hangover, and let my first blog post grow old and sad, languishing all by itself in my spiffy new blog section? No? Well, I did.

Truthfully, though, I’ve been thinking about this blog a lot since my last post, but events have conspired to keep me from posting. Funny how so many things suddenly take precedence over one’s personal projects.

Anyway, now that I’ve been teaching online for the twelve years since the pandemic started, I thought I’d share some reflections about it. This year marked my first foray into virtual teaching, and the results are… [checks data] mixed! So I’m dedicating this and my next two posts to exploring the good, the bad, and the weird of teaching online.

The Good Stuff

1. I don’t have to leave my house. I cannot overstate how wonderful this is. Not leaving my house is possibly my favorite pastime, even in lockdown. Home is where I can drop any number of the brave (and masked) faces I feel compelled to wear in public. I get to teach in my most comfortable place, and that makes the teaching so much more enjoyable. Also I do not have to find parking. This is a disproportionately huge weight off my shoulders.

2. I don’t ruminate nearly as much over my “performance.” Ugh, awkward confession time: in the before-times, I would leave a class at the end, but the class didn’t quite leave me. So many factors go into making a student’s experience great, and I felt responsible for all of them -- even the ones that are clearly always out of my control, like a student’s attitude. In the virtual classroom, however, all I can offer is my voice, my visuals, and the occasional verbal assist. Could I find some things in my online teaching to fret over? You bet. That’s like my superpower. But I’d rather trust that my students are taking ownership of their own experience. It’s very liberating.

3. My introverted self LOVES teaching virtually. It bears repeating: not leaving my house is just fantastic. But also, I find I don’t require nearly as much wind-down time after I teach a class online. I’ve got my eyes on my students in Gallery View throughout the class; I see them and feel them with me, so I know I’m not alone. But in the end, in that room, it’s me and a few devices. It takes way less energy for me to connect to people online than it does in person, and it is such a relief.

You will never hear me say that teaching online is Just The Best Ever or that lockdown has been “a blessing in disguise” (ew). But I’m learning a lot about how to make the practice of teaching work for me, and how not to run myself ragged in the process. It’s a pretty big shift from my pre-lockdown approach.

But not all is milk and honey, gentle reader. Up next, I’ll share what bums me out about teaching yoga online. Will it take four weeks to post? Come back in four weeks and find out!