A brief howl from me, of ever-naive outrage, over the damagingly sloppy vocabulary that seems to grow like kudzu. Perhaps “metastasize” would be a better word than “grow.” Perhaps read “defiantly misleading” for “damagingly sloppy.”

In what follows, I’m talking about post-secondary education. Elementary and secondary education are different. I get that.

You’ll have noticed that in post-secondary education, “remote” learning is a word that’s come to distinguish online-because-the-pandemic-makes-us-be-online from the modality formerly known as “online learning.” I guess “online learning,” by contrast, means a permanent, baked-in revenue-generating dream modality for running robo-courses–I mean, course “templates” that are endlessly replicated at low cost to the institution, with low-paid labor to produce, tend, and propagate the replications. Oh.

Yet many “remote” educators are learning to use the new medium effectively, in ways that don’t mean isolation or alienation. Some had been working in that medium quite successfully for many years.

You’ll have noticed that the-non-remote-classes-in-physical-rooms are now referred to as “in-person” classes, as in this sentence from a recent hortatory email:

“[Our university’s] return to in-person learning is so very important for our students’ well-being and academic success.”

But there’s nothing for me to return to, as all my online classes are in-person classes. That’s me on the Zoom, live and in-person. Those are my students on the Zoom, in the chat, on the discussion forum, on their RamPage sites. We’re all there in-person.

Most of the learning spaces I’ve been in provide very poorly, if at all, for the supposed magic of being co-located. A state-mandated prison-spec windowless classroom has less character than a well-lighted Zoom conference. A lectern with a touch-pad control for a projector-and-screen combo is much less flexible and, I’d argue, conveys much less human connection and warmth than I can when I share a screen on Zoom during a synchronous class, or see my students there, not in front of a white sheet of reflective material, but in the medium with me, lighting up the chat, sharing links, sharing the simple camaraderie of a hearty “good morning” as class begins.

I’d say we need better terms than “in-person” and “face-to-face”–especially the latter, if we’re still masked when we walk into those arid rooms again, as it’s likely we will be. Truthfully, we’ve needed better terms for a long time. Or have the wrong terms proved, well, somehow useful for the bottom line, whatever it might be?

<deep breath>

What of myself do I bring to the encounter? What of my students’ selves do I ask that they bring to the encounter? Those questions have been renewed for me during this terrible yet revelatory time.

As Bob Dylan once sang (and Jimi Hendrix sang even better), “So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”