Reflections on Not Knowing

C. Ray Borck, Social Science

It is truly meta, this experience of writing about pedagogy during the pandemic, for the journal on teaching at the institution where I have taught for eight years. The Inquirer has always felt like a community publication. For me, this journal is a series of ongoing conversations amongst colleagues, of general and specific interest to all of us bound by the common project of teaching in this place and time, under unique, evolving circumstances. I used to receive hard copies (maybe I still do) in my mailbox in the Social Sciences Department on the north side of the 6th floor of the Main Campus building, before the physicality of our jobs vanished overnight.

I’d hold The Inquirer in my hand as I walked to my office scanning the Table of Contents looking for names I recognized. I admit, I read my friends first. Sometimes I would stop by an office down the hall or shoot off a quick email to an author, with a few comments about what I appreciated about their piece. Sending collegial emails had a different texture in those days—I was writing to someone I had seen recently, or would see soon. On the escalators, watching each other rise and fall in opposite directions, we’d catch each other’s eye, I’d smile and shout, “I just sent you an email!” You’d give me a thumbs up and then reach into your pocket for your smartphone. We had bodies, places and objects. Space and time existed with a semblance of ontological synchronicity. We had not yet begun to describe our classes primarily in terms of this synchronicity or its absence.

There was a there there.

The Vertigo of Placelessness

But now I sit, beginning to draft this piece on a bench in Prospect Park where a father (I’m presuming) just rode his three-seater bicycle past me with his two kids on the second and third seats. It is April 2022 in New York. Just last night a friend remarked that the last two Aprils have had for her an eerie quality—the flowers emerging from the ground, everything blooming at once, the air breezy but steadily gaining warmth. She said these seasonal attributes trigger memories and emotions in her from April 2020 which she described this way, “…when it was just me, walking through a completely empty Times Square, where there was no sign of life, just me alone. Just me and all the flowers.”

In our classes and our meetings, we are all dialing in from different times and places, and the longer this goes on, the less sure I am about how to describe it precisely. My writing here is admittedly haunted by an uncertainty that reflects my inability to fully comprehend or confidently describe exactly what we have been through and continue to go through. At the moment I feel almost like I am writing into an abyss—a community whose location has atomized untracably. The post-COVID way we labor is only beginning to take shape, a formerly unfathomable two years later.

The gravity and velocity of the present feels uncharted, uncertain and shifty. I am working to reflect on this thing, this pandemic, and how it has affected my pedagogy, my experience of teaching and my students. And the pandemic does have a past to look back on, and we are in a moment where the pandemic is becoming endemic, we are witnessing the process of its normalization, becoming part of everyday life. But the pandemic isn’t the past; it’s a process that we are in but have’t completed.

So I am trying to describe and analyze something as it is happening. Reflecting upon something ongoing is near to impossible with a scholarly, detached and sturdy analytic gaze. In fact something that has been on my mind a lot lately—especially when I am interacting with my students—is how the ways that we narrate the pandemic—its presents and pasts—continue to shift. I have recently become especially aware of the fact that the various stages of the pandemic’s effects appear to be cumulative, stacking up within us, finding new shape, form and meaning.

And as I learned from the pandemic itself, I’m not sure how the present will seem in the future, and I have absolutely no idea what the future holds. Of course, none of us have ever known what the future held, but we thought we did, we behaved as if we did. I certainly took for granted that the semesters would keep coming, that schools would be open, that we’d always meet our students in classrooms, with our beings in the same place, at the same time.

Initially the move to remote felt like an indisputable loss, a decided foreclosure. But at some point I had to stop thinking about Zoom and Blackboard as hostile enemies of my professional praxis and instead find ways to leverage and mobilize these technologies’ capacities for what I am trying to achieve with my students. For me, this is a combination of delivering concrete content, i.e. the facts, in intelligible ways; cultivating and nurturing a sense of inspiration and curiosity; providing opportunities for thinking critically, inviting nuance and widening vocabularies; and (hopefully) buttressing students’ confidence by communicating an unwavering belief in their inherent capacity for intellectual growth. All these goals have taken on a kind of heaviness—they feel harder to accomplish and simultaneously more necessary than ever.

Stratification of the New Normal

My partner’s mother recently asked me about my work and students and whether I thought things would go back to normal. We all recognize this refrain, we’ve been asking for months and months, When will things get back to normal?

I suspect that the normal we used to know is indeed gone, and as a sociologist I have been trained to identify and describe the ever-evolving new normals that emerge, as they always do. But I don’t think the new normal will resemble the old normal. I suspect that the ability to recuperate past normals—and rely on the certainty that there are dependable and durable immediate futures—is extremely socially stratified.

We have observed the relative swiftness with which private and other well-resourced schools have been able to deal with the pandemic and its constantly changing protocols, rules and regulations. And we have always known that our students are disadvantaged by many different injustices, among them: white supremacy, economic inequality, immigration policy. We know that these disadvantages affect all the areas of their lives—their access to education, housing, economic resources, health and safety. What we are seeing now—and will continue to learn—are all of the ways that the pandemic has and continues to deepen existing social inequalities. The pandemic has also added new layers of stratification—those who have COVID, long COVID, those who get treatment and those who don’t, those who have access to vaccines and those who don’t or won’t, those with strong wifi connections and others who try to attend their classes from smartphones with cracked faces and a low battery.

I don’t personally know any people whose lives have been as ravaged by the pandemic as my students’ lives.

During the Spring semester of 2020 when we all shifted from brick and mortar to the internet, just a few weeks into quarantine, I got an email from a student writing to explain why she had not been submitting her assignments and to find out if she could still turn in late work. There was a manic, rambling, overly-disclosing quality to her email (I trust readers are familiar with the genre). She wrote that she worked at a hospital, her job was to bag the bodies of the deceased, she’d had the job for a number of years, “but,” she wrote, “there are just so many bodies, and they keep coming and coming, we are overwhelmed, and I’ve had to work overtime.”

Absent from the expressed content of the email was anything about what I can only imagine as an untenable quantity of grief and despair. I knew from reading the news that the bodies she handled at work were disproportionately brown and black, older bodies, bodies that had lived and died in poverty—all qualities that could be used to describe her body as well.

We’ve all read devastating letters from our students, likely on one of our multiple devices, in our homes where we have separate rooms, galaxies removed from the types of devices and homes our students work with and in.

Connection & Emptiness

This Spring 2022 I went back to Fiterman Hall to teach in-person for the first time since March 2020. As the semester approached, I was surprised by how excited I felt. I realized that I hadn’t quite let myself believe that I would actually get to do it, having grown increasingly accustomed to the probability of canceled plans and dashed hopes. I had also gotten the hang of teaching online. Nevertheless I burst into the classroom like a kid at a birthday party. I had all the energy in the world; I reveled in the missed pleasures of pulling down the projector screen or the little hydraulics in the wrist necessary to raise it back up in order to write on the board with a fresh piece of chalk.

But I was horrified to realize it wasn’t the way it used to be. My efforts to pump enthusiasm into the room were greeted with an eerie stillness. These students were quieter than my former students had ever been, not just in terms of their verbal class participation, but also in how they entered a room, let down a backpack, occupied a desk. Many of these students have just entered our college after finishing their Junior and Senior years of high school online.

Leaving the classroom, week after week, Fiterman feels like a ghosttown. BMCC is certainly not the place it used to be—crowded, loud, a little bit rowdy, hallways filled with antics and laughter, a light, youthful silliness.

But even as the pandemic increases certain forms of distance but it is also making us closer in strange ways. There is a palpable intimacy when I meet with students one-on-one in a Zoom meeting, our faces fill each other’s screens, behind us is some cropped section of our home life and the bizarre yet compulsory choice to show or hide it. We are experiencing a collective, global trauma in real time, and there are unexpected opportunities for connection even as we continue to traverse these dire—real and virtual—landscapes together.

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