Travelogue 932 – September 28

Lecture in the Cemetery

 

The cemetery, I call it. That’s the Zoom environment when students won’t activate their cameras. Admittedly, that’s a grim moniker during a pandemic, but that’s what it feels like.

 

It’s class time. I open the Zoom session and start admitting students. Most pop up during the first three minutes of class. Stragglers will continue to request admission until the final three minutes. Once admitted, the students appear in my gallery as black tiles with their names in white. Occasionally, one or two will politely say, “Good morning”. The majority file in in silence. A few burst in with music or with a shouting match with their roommate. I mute them, and restore the peace.

 

I know my colleagues harangue students about cameras, drawing a line in the sand. I understand how they feel, but it does seem rather arbitrary. I agree that video is a sign of respect in the new age; it shows that the meeting or the class is worth putting clothes on for; it’s a way of demonstrating attention. But signs of respect should have mutual value. They don’t get it. They’re signing in for a lecture; they don’t see the relevance of video. We would like to teach them that you don’t act this way in a business meeting, but it’s not a business meeting. I’ve had this discussion frequently with my colleagues in the business program. I don’t think telling students to treat school meetings as business meetings imparts any real learning. It’s the usual dilemma in role play.

 

And so I start the lecture, speaking into the void. I have asked for video. A few have obliged. It makes little difference, really. It’s lonely for us all in the cemetery.

 

I have sympathy for this generation. Recently I had to go to the hospital for some tests. I stopped at a nearby café afterward. I sat by the window. Across the street from the hospital is a gymnasium, a secondary school. There was a group of kids sitting on the bus station bench, doing their best to goof around on a rainy day. For this generation, that means gathering around someone’s smart phone and laughing. It also means having masks at the ready, hanging off their ears. It seems strange. Teens should be careless and annoying. It feels wrong that they should have the spectre of illness hanging over them.

Travelogue 931 – September 24

The Me Game

 

Young people adapt quickly to new conditions. My students are entering their second school year with online learning, and that’s already a long time. They have internalized the pattern of online learning, made the routines their own, found their bad habits, and forged their online personae. They know how to enter the classroom just late enough to avoid attention. Too early, and the teacher engages them in hello’s and chit-chat. It really doesn’t matter what time of day it is, teenagers are still waking. They are groggy and irritable, and they can’t endure any pleasantries. If they come in late, the teacher has to admit them, and that teacher is likely to torment them with in-class questions, as just desserts for being late. They know how long to keep the camera on before surreptitiously switching it off, drawing minimum attention. They know how many times a teacher will insist on cameras back on before his or her will is broken.

 

Students have learned a hundred effective ways to be annoying. If they interrupt someone in Zoom, their voice drowns out all others, so they know they can stop a lecture cold with a question. The teacher can’t talk through them. They know that if they don’t speak for a long time, they will sink down into the gallery and be forgotten. That has its own rewards, but it’s also a great platform for the ‘me’ game. That’s when a student issues some brief, random comment and then responds to the teacher’s query about who that was with ‘me’. When the teacher calmly explains that ‘me’ doesn’t help, the student is indignant that education has become so impersonal. Another silly game adopts a very different strategy. The student keeps his or her camera on and giggles through the lesson with the mute on. The teacher naturally calls on this person often, in order to break up the competing conversation, but all that that accomplishes is to keep that student high in the gallery so that the perpetual giggling distracts everyone far longer. For many students, the simplest strategy is to keep camera and mic off, answering ‘I have no idea’ whenever a question comes their way, in a voice dripping with ennui. The teacher shudders with aversion and never comes round again. It’s often one of those students who invites the power struggle in the final minutes by shouting a question about something covered weeks ago, like when the exam will be. The teacher replies in a polite voice with his or her finger hovering over the mouse, cursor suspended above ‘End Meeting For All’. The politeness confuses the jester just long enough to make a quick exit.

Travelogue 930 – September 15

The COVID Cityscape

Part Two

 

There’s more construction going on in the city than I’ve ever seen, and it’s been a growing, vibrant city since before I arrived, a lively city within a culture that loves things in good working order, loves modern design and neat lines. Though I had been aware that construction plans for 2020 were ambitious – some urgent modernization that would require ripping up streets almost comprehensively through the city, - I couldn’t help but speculate idly that the COVID slowdown in traffic in spring might have encouraged a spike in road works that hasn’t been allowed to dip.

 

Meanwhile, the Dutch people persist round roads like mazes redrawn daily or weekly; they persist round the barren and antiseptic spaces indoors; they persist in putting on a show of normalcy, as though December 2019 represented a sort of gold standard in human behaviour; they persist, as new cases have reached totals nearly doubling the highs reached in April, and no change in summer public health rules is even on the table.

 

It’s odd to think that few had foreseen this twist in the over-population of our planet, that density would equal personal space in some inverse proportion; that the more there were of our species, the more we would be forced to isolate, physically and emotionally. We would be pushed into abstract boxes of space by regulation; we would be forced to live sedentary lives, experiencing the world through computer screens.

 

Well, we were having fun. After our ballet class, Baby and I stopped at our favourite café. The place retained some seating, but the space in the middle of the bottom floor was cleared, as though for a dance party. And so, dance we did. As the Ramones were played in the sound system, Baby showed me her ballet moves on the café dance floor. A set of young people sat at intervals around the long table by the windows, tapping away at their laptops. A few smiled to see the girl dancing; but even those tuned us out quickly. No one joined; no one clapped; no one sang along. The young barista, herself a picture of a generation’s downplayed hip chic, raised her eyebrows as she passed; not necessarily in the usual tight-lipped Dutch judgementalism, but in a kind of amused surprise. What seemed most silly to her was Papa clapping out a beat to the Ramones. I wondered whether she thought they belonged to her time. I wondered if she thought I was being undignified. I wondered if she thought it was too much a concession to enjoyment. It didn’t matter. Nothing much was meant by it. Baby danced, and I was happy for her.

Travelogue 929 – September 14

The COVID Cityscape

Part One

 

As hard as Dutch people try to treat the COVID-19 virus like they treat fellow passengers on the Metro or fellow shoppers on the Lijnbaan, willing it out of existence by the power of the averted eye, the cityscape and everyone’s daily experience still bear too many signs of the public health battle to support even the most stubborn Dutchman’s assessment that everything’s fine. Masks are compulsory on public transit; signs about social distancing proliferate; interior spaces are scarred, more or less irreversibly, by the mandate to keep people apart. The ad hoc has become permanent. Once pleasant waiting rooms and lobbies that were hastily emptied and rearranged six months ago now have the haggard air of the basement room quickly furnished for the prodigal son and finally abandoned to squalor. Seats are blocked by makeshift, laminated signs advising social distance. Cashiers mumble behind hanging plastic; customers are separated by small, hanging plastic windows at breathing height. Floors that should never have been bared have been exposed for months and given up on. Café and restaurant play areas for children have been cleared and left barren. All this was supposed to be temporary. Now, fatigue has made it all okay, the patchwork and the unadorned and the awkward.

 

The girls attend different ballet classes on Sunday because of the division made at age four. COVID rules allow only one parent inside, and so now we handle ballet day in teams. Yesterday was my Sunday with Baby. Parents aren’t allowed inside the class, so mamas and papas sit in the waiting room, avoiding each other’s eye in good Dutch fashion. I worked on a short story idea, scribbling notes in a notebook. I’ve returned to writing by hand whenever possible because I spend so much work time in front of a computer, and, thanks to that small diversion, I’m realizing how much society has been changed by its technology. There’s one parent in the room reading an actual book, and she looks odd. Who reads a book in public anymore? But me, the guy using a pen? In a ruled notepad? That is really beyond the pale. I feel very self-conscious. I worry it seems affected, as though I think I’m making a statement. Or it seems precious, as though the pad were my diary and I were cataloguing my failures to execute a worthy midlife crisis. Or it seems suspicious. If you see someone typing on a laptop, it would never occur to you to wonder what he or she is writing. See someone with a notepad and you wonder what it is they’re recording. Is it about me? Is this a police agent, a deep state mole? But I go ahead. On the rare occasion someone looks at me, I wink, just to fuel their paranoia.

 

The story I’m working on, by the way, is my shot at fantasy writing. I saw a call for stories about monsters, and I thought, why not? Monsters are fun. Why else are so many children’s stories devoted to them?

Travelogue 928 – September 6

The Wallabies

 

We started with the wallabies, and we finished with the flamingos. These are the two exhibits flanking the entrance to the zoo. We started the day heading left into Australia, and rounded off the afternoon in Asia, emerging by the flamingos.

 

We entered the zoo with tickets bought months ago for Baby’s birthday. It took us three months to find a suitable weekend, neither too hot nor rainy, when everyone was healthy. But the day finally came, and it was a beautiful one, pleasantly cool with scattered high clouds to take the edge off the sun.

 

The wallabies didn’t seem too energized by the weather. Maybe sleeping was their celebration. But morose wallabies didn’t get the girls down. After three months’ build-up, the girls hardly seemed to care about the animals at all. They were excited to be at the zoo, but not for the central attractions. The fun was in the opportunities to run and climb. I think Baby’s peak moment was climbing around in the big tower in the playground. The big tower is three storeys tall. You can only enter it by ladder or rope, and you can only exit by one of the high slides.

 

I was surprised. In earlier visits, Baby was entranced by the giraffes. They were her favourite animals for years after her first visit to the zoo. During this trip, I had the impression suddenly that my toddlers had become kids.

 

The flamingo pond was a good place to decompress. It’s peaceful. You can space out very effectively watching these oddball birds. Even hypnotizing: one of the colourful birds stood on one leg and swung his lowered head back and forth. I could have slept, if Little Ren hadn’t had mysterious reserves of energy.

 

Ren’s mission as a three-year-old has been to log as many miles as she can, running ceaselessly from one thing to another without apparent purpose, running without ever looking back. If your attention lapses for more than a moment, you might lose sight of her. I’ve had enough frights with her to know I must stay alert. But I’ve also had lots of practice describing small circles inside her larger ones. Conserving energy seems to be a priority among parental skills.

 

Predictably, Ren’s battery runs out once we’re out on the street. One strange lacuna in the admirable public transit plan in Rotterdam is the zoo. There is almost no way to get there without some walking. I have to accomplish that with Little (growing) Ren in my arms. It’s a beautiful day for a very slow walk.

 

The highlight this time was the aquarium. That exhibit never gets old, watching the fish glide across enormous windows or overhead. The diversity of them, the colours, the dreamlike motion, they’re always engaging.