The Black Squares

Twenty-seven years of teaching, a screen that will not look back, and the one thing I thought I had learned

I asked them to turn on their cameras three times.

The third time I said “please”, which I do not usually have to say. Then I waited, the way you wait when you are sure something is about to happen. Nothing happened. A screen of names in white letters on black rectangles, all of them present, none of them there.

I have been teaching in the College of Medicine for twenty-seven years. Students I taught are consultants now. I know what a room feels like — when it is following me, when it has drifted, when someone at the back is about to ask the question that will improve the lecture. But this time, I do not know what this feels like. There is nothing to read.

What we were like

I belong to Generation X, which mostly means I was formed by people who did not explain themselves.

When a professor asked us to do something, we did it. Not purely out of fear, although there was some of that. It was that the arrangement was understood. They knew things. We did not. We gave them our attention and our obedience, and in exchange they gave us Medicine.

We did not complain. Or we complained to each other in the corridor, quietly, and then we went back in and did the work.

I am not saying all of it was good. There were mentors who confused being feared with being respected, and students who learned less because asking a question felt dangerous. I have spent much of my own teaching life trying not to be that person.

But when I began teaching, I stood in front of people very much like the person I had been, and they were good. I want to say that plainly, because it is easy to make the past sound better than it was. They were respectful. They were kind — to me, and mostly to each other. When I said we would do it this way, they did it that way. They were willing to learn the way their professor believed was best for them.

They trusted that I had thought about it. I had. I did not know how much that trust was carrying until it was gone.

What I am actually asking for

A turned-on camera is a small request. That is what makes this hard to let go of.

I am not asking them to stand and recite. I am not asking for what was asked of me. I am asking to see a face, because teaching is not a broadcast. I need to know the moment I have lost you. I need to see where the enzyme kinetics stop making sense so I can go back and say it in a different way, before you write it down wrong and carry it into third year and into a patient.

A black rectangle cannot tell me that. So I keep going. I explain a mechanism to an audience I cannot confirm exists, and at the end I ask if there are questions, and the silence that comes back has a particular quality I have come to recognize.

Then someone unmutes and thanks me for the lecture, warmly, and I feel unreasonable for having minded at all.

The thing I cannot read

Here is what I keep turning over. I do not know whether it is refusal to obey or it’s just a generation thing.

When I was twenty-two, ignoring an instruction meant something. It was a position. You were declaring yourself against the person who gave it, and everyone in the room understood the declaration. So when a class does not answer me, my whole training reads it as a roomful of small refusals, and I teach the hour on that assumption, and it costs me something to do it.

But I do not think it is refusal. I think — and I could be wrong, I am working from the outside here — that the instruction simply does not land the way I sent it. That silence does not weigh to them what silence weighed to me. That a request made into a screen is a lighter thing than a request made in a room, at both ends of it.

Understanding that has not helped. I would like to tell you that it did. It has not.

What I have not learned

People ask what teaching gives you and I have always said patience.

Twenty-seven years of the same material delivered to a new set of twenty-two-year-olds who have never once heard it, and you learn to say it again. And again. Without the sigh. You learn that the student who is slow in October is often the one who is careful in March, and that being fast was never the point.

I do not have that patience for this. That is the honest part, and I have stopped dressing it up. I have endless patience for a student who does not understand. I have almost none for a student I cannot see.

I keep asking anyway. Third time, “please, cameras on”. Still no response. What a sense of entitlement.

And I am asking, seriously, because I do not know: is this really the attitude of this generation? Or is it only what a generation looks like through a screen, to a woman who was trained to read a room?