Today marks the end of an upended semester. Classes which began in the seminar rooms and lecture halls of New York City dispersed to the four winds, forced by the onset of pandemic to migrate online - at first, we thought, only for a few weeks. (Now we wonder when one of our higher-ups will give the official word that the Fall semester will have to be online from the start.) The shift, mid-course, to online instruction was a heavy lift for faculty with little to now experience in online instruction (in my case: none) and perhaps heavier still for students, who had to leave their dorms and college lives and return home - if they have a home, and it still has a space for them. Classes met in the grid of zoom, initial resistance to the new medium giving way to a tempered embrace - look at us, in this new configuration! - before fading into a kind of numbness, as every other relationship in our lives moved to the same ultimately wearying platform. For various reasons some students (and faculty in our many faculty meetings) experimented with novel backgrounds, while others chose to turn their cameras off. The university, aware that students were facing widely different challenges, decided (after a hiccup) that no student could be expected to participate and submit work as they otherwise would have, so the usual structures of grading would be unfair; all students who had not withdrawn would get an A or A-. In the end, this freed some students from pressure to participate at a time when family needs, economic and housing insecurity radically changed their capacities and priorities. Others, blessed with more stable circumstances, leaned into their classes, grateful for a way to feel active and maintain their identity as college students. I had the queasy pleasure of receiving work from many of my students through the end, much of it very good, while others flickered in and out, and some simply disappeared. Usually classes end with the bittersweet sense that we've had a powerful experience together, in this space and time, a commuitas which cannot survive our final dispersal. This semester's class relationship have (to some extent) already survived beyond that point of no return. Will they fade faster, one more zoom spread in a blur of zoom spreads, or linger longer?
