Online teaching
The week of September 20th is called “Silver Week” in Japan. It balances Golden Week in early May. Golden Week is the culmination of a handful of national public holidays in such close proximity that the entire week is given up as a holiday. In September, we had Autumnal Equinox Day (“shubun no hi”) on Monday, September 20th. Then on Thursday 23rd we had Respect for the Elderly Day (“keiro no hi”).
During Silver Week this year, many (not all) public high schools closed classes and went to online classes for the first time during this coronavirus pandemic. The reason is that throughout September the country was coming out of the 5th wave of the Covid-19 infection. Daily infection numbers declined quickly and steadily. The Tokyo Board of Education decided - finally - to go to online lessons as a strategy to further crush down the infection numbers - most of which have involved younger people throughout the summer.
I had a couple days of high school teaching during the week. What I did was go to school and stand in front of a computer in an empty classroom and talk to the computer’s camera while students tuned in from home, either on their home computers or else on their smart phones. At first, I felt awkward and stupid. But I got the hang of it. The students were all given prints of my teaching materials for the day in advance. I had to prepare the lesson a week in advance for that purpose. There were some students at school - literally one or two in each class. They had no computer or smart phone and had no choice but to attend classes in a mostly empty school. Teaching online was also tiring - not the same kind of fatigue as teaching a class of living students, but tiring nonetheless. Since students weren’t there to speak to me, answer my questions, or to interact with, I just lectured for the duration of the day. Also, I could not see the students on the computer in the classroom. I could see who was logged in and watching, but I could not see their faces or hear their voices. I knew they could see and hear me, though, because a little window in the corner of the computer screen showed me what they were seeing. I could tell if my head was outside the camera frame, or if what I wrote on the board was within their field of vision or not. Stuff like that.