It is 8:35 A.M. You are speaking to a grid of black squares. One of the black squares coughs. One of the black squares gets a text notification. One of the black squares is today replaced by an image of a naked mole rat. None of the black squares will tell you what they found interesting in the reading.
The time has come to adopt the newest learning tool, Floobaroom. You have watched the first twelve instructional videos, in which a man in a gray suit tells you what Floobaroom does not do. The man describes the company’s other essential educational products—Wizmarang, Harmonikidz, and Starmageddon. Starmageddon and Floobaroom are similar, but you must never, ever use them at the same time. More will be revealed in the next instructional video.
You awake one morning from uneasy dreams to find your image on Zoom transformed into a photograph of the Golden Gate Bridge. You shift to the right and part of your face appears. “It’s your Zoom background,” a student says. When you lean back, only your eyebrow remains, hovering above the icy waters of the strait. “Let’s get started,” the Zoom background that used to be you says.
“Are you at work right now?” your mother inquires over text. There is no way to answer. One minute becomes two minutes. A year goes by, then ten.
Your supervisor’s latest directive is that students’ cameras should remain on. You have always been one to comply when requests are reasonable. You ask the student called J to turn his camera on. The face that appears does not match the voice you know as J and you wonder whether J has been playing a trick on you. Is your supervisor in on the trick? You nod calmly while the boy who may not be J shares a quote from the reading.
Someone must have been spreading lies about you, for without having done anything wrong, you are forced to show your living room to ninety-seven teen-agers who have a lot of questions about the Dolly Parton poster on your wall.
You are in a Zoom faculty meeting. Your supervisor mentions that the Checklist was due last week. You do not know of the Checklist. Do the others know of the Checklist? No one dares to ask about the Checklist. It was due last week.
“We have streamlined data entry for you during this difficult time,” reads an e-mail from your supervisor. “Simply write a postcard to the main office. On this postcard, please note the height of each student, along with the color you most associate with their level of achievement. Combine these colors into an oil painting that depicts your deepest fear and hang it in a place of prominence in your home.”
Your co-worker’s mouth is moving but no sound escapes. “Unmute your mic,” you say. The mouth continues to open and close. “You’re muted,” you say, louder. It is as if the mouth is eating its own sound. “We can’t hear you,” you say. “Excuse me,” a different mouth says. “You’re both muted.”
While you are explaining the next activity, cold suspicion envelops you. What if students are not listening to you at all, but are instead playing Minecraft? You fumble for the words that will jolt them back to the collective task. “Any questions?” A dark expanse of silence. Clearly, these were not the right words.
You check your phone between classes to discover that there are hundreds of thousands of new cases of the virus, our country’s fragile democracy is barely holding, and “GLOW” was cancelled. Your e-mails assure you that all will be fine if you accomplish your highest priority task: taking attendance within the first fifteen minutes of class.
Your supervisor thanks you for e-mailing about where to lodge concerns about struggling students and instructs you to e-mail this exact query to K, who will forward it to L, who will have R enter it into a spreadsheet. In order to gain access to the spreadsheet, please set up a Zoom meeting with M and recount your earliest memory of being on a train.
You once believed that your cat was a distraction from the class that you were teaching. Then you came to understand that you were a distraction from the class that your cat was teaching. “Oh God,” you think. “What a strenuous career it is that I’ve chosen!”
