Today was my first round of teaching from a remote setting. Normally, I do the rounds as a Mathematics and Physics tutor due to my past life having studied these things at university.... and it is my side job as I find it much less frustrating than teaching music! Plus, I enjoy helping the kids out as the way that these topics are taught at school is really terrible (not necessarily the teacher, but mostly the curriculum structure and the targeting of certain metrics...) which is enough to make turn people away and start to think that these topics are "difficult", when in fact they are the easiest of all the topics that are taught at school due to their simplicity and elegance. However, the focus on specific cases, rote learning and lack of understanding about first principles and concepts really makes for a terrible learning experience...
... anyway, that is a rant for a different time.
It was a day of learning the ins and outs of Zoom for both myself and the students... troubleshooting and fixing audio and video problems, and working out the screen sharing and all of that sort of thing.
Now, I'm a pretty techy and nerdy sort of guy... but I have to say that the online and remote learning, whilst being an interesting solution to our current Coronavirus inspired social distancing... is quite inefficient when compared to the usual 1-1 physical lessons. There is so much nuance and clarity that is lost in translation... of course, in this first week, I'm more than happy to attribute this to my lack of experience in the new medium, but it has left me with a bad first impression.
I'm going to spend the next couple of days improving my set up, and getting the students to be better prepared with their questions and things like that. The sorts of things that you take for granted or can quickly work around when you are in a physical setting, but become problematic in a remote learning setting!
My wife has some piano lessons to give for tomorrow... somehow, I do think it will be easier, as there will be no need to set up screen sharing or switching between screens and all of that. It will be essentially a set up and forget sort of thing... with the main problem being battery power! That said, I will be on hand to provide tech support... as everyone knows, problems WILL crop up... in the least expected places!
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