As I closed down the last Zoom meeting for a seminar this semester, a far-off voice called out ‘I will miss you professor!’ and then disappeared into the black screen. ‘End meeting for all’ flashed the software prompt. And so the semester concluded not with laptops and books closed and stuffed into bags dragged up from the floor, chairs scraped under the table, and the mutterings of students with too many assignments all due at the same time—actual bodies really passing through the threshold of the room to whatever next awaits them. Maybe just the bus home. It ended without mutual good wishes; or the conversation with the quiet star who waits till everyone else has gone to ask me what classes I think she should take next semester; or the quotidian walk back to my office across campus, dodging harried students and staff, my own sense of freedom bubbling up. By the end of the semester, I had come to hate the ‘end meeting for all’ prompt; every time I hit ‘ok’ it felt like I was supporting a lie about the real meaning of the loss of all these small but significant moments of connection that make teaching possible, and rewarding.

The loss of human interaction as a consequence of pandemic lock-downs is one of our new, shared experiences. For those of us who teach in universities, the loss of in-person interaction with students has had particular consequences. One of these has been a growing and uncomfortable self-consciousness. When we first met on Zoom, the students logged in with videos on, so long as the connection held, revealing their bedrooms, kitchens, lounges, even patios—as they shaded the sun off their faces. Flatmates brought tea; cats jumped on keyboards. Siblings yelled from another room—before everyone learned to ‘mute’ themselves when not speaking. Here was a possibility of newfound intimacy with our students—or was it actually over-exposure? Others experimented with backdrops, they ‘sat’ in front of the Golden Gate Bridge or even more improbably were immersed in tropical waters. But by the end of semester most have turned off their videos, the rest of us left to stare at white names on black windows. What is the right thing to do, I wondered? Ask them to turn their videos on, so they would have to show their faces, and their rooms, both to others in the meeting and also back to themselves in the doubled gaze of video conferencing?