New York Times 24.05.2020

I believe this will be one of the topics of the coming weeks. The past weeks we have been talking about what the current situation is like for us. Most of my English class participants are in home office, so we talked about what that is like for us. I documented my own gradual development into doing my classes online over the weeks with the ups and downs, and adjustments.

Turns out, many of my students are not unhappy with working from home and say they will try to keep a higher amount of work time spent in home office after the corona situtation.

One of the interesting questions for me in this connection was and is WHY many of us – among those privileged to carry on earning money doing home office – are partly even happier than they were before. We’ve had some very open exchanges on this question, which touched upon what will, might be or stay different after the corona shutdowns/lockdowns on the one hand, but also relate to and question aspects of the lives we led or lead or have been leading (I’m not totally sure of my verb structure choice here).

In the mean time, and after what felt like ages, our online meetings are beginning to be quite okay. My tolerance level for technical problems really degraded after five weeks, but in week six things looked a little brighter and I feel a little less overwhelmed, a little more confident and actually quite happy with some of our sessions.

I must thank my group members, who were so patient and helpful in making our online meetings worthwhile. I also feel that there are some advantages to meeting this way. People seem more attentive, more concentrated and focussed on listening. And listening is significantly important to the language learning/development process. Of course, I have no idea what those are doing who slip out of the picture as most progammes allow only a limited number of videos to appear on the screen. But in times like these it is important to trust.