Life on-screen
The rectangle is confining as well as liberating.
Our tutor is finishing up the school year, and at the same time making preparations to go back to in-person work. He tries to take advantage of opportunities like this to review the period just past, note what worked and what didn’t, and use his conclusions to plan the next effort. He hasn’t done more than gather a few thoughts yet, but two clear conclusions are that tutoring is more effective in person, and many students find it very hard to learn exclusively from online lessons.
Online courses predate COVID-19 by decades and have been much promoted by their supporters. In principle there is almost nothing that can be presented in person that cannot be shown on one’s computer, and a great deal that is available on the Internet that would be inconvenient, costly or impractical to bring into the classroom. The combination of high-quality content and easy accessibility make virtual classes, in principle, highly competitive with the in-person kind. Why, then, should our tutor conclude that they haven’t been as successful?
There are many possible reasons, and he does plan to look at the question in detail. Primarily, though, he thinks it’s down to one dichotomy: the world is round, but the screen is flat. Students (like everyone) inhabit a space of three dimensions extending all around them; the computer screen, however big, bright and beautiful, is two-dimensional. It is always over there. It takes concentration to enter it mentally and interact, and it’s all too easy to sit back and hold it (mentally) at arm’s length.
But wait, aren’t books two-dimensional? Not the physical objects themselves, but the information presented on flat pages? And people have been happily learning from books for many centuries!
It’s true, some people have been. But learning from a book alone has its drawbacks, even for the type of student who finds that medium congenial. And not all students are good at it. The point is, though, that even in a traditional classroom, with flat blackboards and two-dimensional book pages, the student is surrounded by the class. We think it makes a great psychological difference when the student is able to be in a different place from the teaching.
We hasten to add that we are not at all advocating a return to the Old Days of a half-century or more ago, lost in nostalgia for chalk and slide rules. The ability to capture part of the world in a rectangle, first with photography, then with movies (and their digital descendants) was tremendously liberating. Instead of being told, people could be shown. And they could be shown things that they could never have seen directly, because they could not have (for instance) ridden the first stage of the Apollo rocket. That doesn’t even begin to address simulations and more abstract presentations.
The challenge for teachers and students this past year and a half has been to confine themselves to the rectangle and forget, for a time, that the world is round. It hasn’t always worked.
