Cons: technical difficulties. Pros: you could be the first person to go to class on a swing set (in your own yard of course).

Colleges around the country are entering the uncharted territories of moving in-person education to online platforms. At Columbia, class starts again on Thursday, after spring break was extended to allow professors more time to transition their courses to Zoom. Bwog asked its staffers to share in real-time what their Zoom classes before break (and the removal of most students from campus) were like so we could have an idea what’s in store when we finally log in to our classes later this week. Of course, our experiences are not universal so share yours in the comments!

Please Standby For Technical Difficulties

• Turned off my mic and camera so I could lurk unnoticed
• So my Zoom just ended out of nowhere. And now a bunch of people rejoined and are having a full-out conversation while we wait for our prof to rejoin.
• At the end of the class, we had to write “here” in the public chat for attendance and one kid accidentally wrote it to me in a private message
• The lecturer’s slides didn’t work in the beginning, but that was it. it was a public health lecture so he started talking about COVID-19 at the end.
• My home wi-fi is really bad so the video kept freezing for me and it was really hard to pay attention
• One of my classmates briefly turned on his video and was shirtless in his room. Halfway through, the phone at my prof’s house went off.
• Went to class for 20 minutes to figure out how everything worked. The prof has since decided that we’re not going to have live lectures though so I’m not super sure how helpful it was.

The Z In Zoom Stands For All The Zs You’ll Hopefully Be Getting Now

• Woke up 5 minutes before the call (it was an 8:10). Opened the call to see everyone else looked like they had gotten up way earlier than me and had their lives together. Had to constantly wrestle the urge to crack open a beer to see what my CC professor would do.
• One girl had her camera on and didn’t notice and fully started sleeping during the lecture in her bed
• Rolled out of bed at 8:30 for my 8:40
• Watched one guy fall asleep, wake up, and begin to fall asleep again

To Be Honest, I Don’t Really Have A Category For This One

• We spent our first Zoom watching a sex scene from a German film together

Zooming Here, There And Everywhere!

• Someone was in a Starbucks so every time they unmuted their mic to talk we got hit with a sampling of Bad Bunny et al.
• My professor made his green screen the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones.
• My Japanese professor made Kent his virtual background. It was extremely cute!
• A guy in my class had greenscreen on, and my prof completely seriously asked him where he was
• Tried to do it on a swingset. It didn’t work.

Making The Best Of It

• Everyone looked dead and my friend and I played a game called “Dorm or Dipped” where we guessed who is home and who is on campus based on the video.  My professor tried super hard but it didn’t go well because it’s weird to just be On video.  It took a while to get it up and running but the video was pretty stable.  I couldn’t focus at all. On the bright side, now I know all my classmates’ names AND someone has a cat and it’s so cute!!
  • “This is SO funny, you all look absolutely ridiculous” – my professor to us just now
• Plucked my eyebrows while listening to a lecture
• Spent my 11:40 playing a virtual drinking game with my friend.
• The line between student and professor vanished immediately. We started asking Adam Reich:
  • for a house tour
  • what his birthday was
  • what he was doing for spring break
  • if he could dunk on the child-sized basketball hoop behind him
• I’ve realized that I’m going to get so good at finding my best lighting/angles since we’re really looking straight into our own faces for hours on end.
• My French prof just gave us a really long speech about staying strong and let us talk about our feelings because all but 3 people in our class are international students.
• Painted my nails in CC (regretted it when I needed to take notes)
• Enjoyed seeing people’s cats!

All In All

• Panopticon
• I think this sums it up: