Blind Date – Student body and a teacher

 I read the newspaper The Guardian, published from London, regularly. It pretends to be a diluted Marxist, or at worst a Fabian Socialist and it does a good job of it. I too have similar inclinations and it is a match made in heaven, between the newspaper and me, if I may say so!

Though it is a serious newspaper and I do go to it every evening, I like its presentation of scientific discoveries, without the over-hyped tone you get in other sources; its interviews and essays coming under “Long Read” also are of high standards; for example, in interviews, the questions are not overly long most of the time and the responses are almost always longer than the questions!

I read some less serious stuff on it also. There is a section called “Blind Date”, yes, really. I recommend it for every teacher in kindergarten, elementary, secondary high school teachers, and also for college teachers.

For this feature, I would imagine, the paper “arranges” for two people who did not know each other (it is not impossible that two people dating each other gamed it to get a free evening of food and drinks!) to meet for date. It is a fun read, as the presentation format is the paper asking each participant more or less the same questions, and the readers could have guessed how the thing went. It was somewhat voyeurish, I agree, but one found an interesting question eliciting two different responses, particularly about the things they talked about – honestly, in most of the cases it feels like the two talked over each other.

Over the past year or so, this feature is written about a “Zoom” blind date. The two people “meet” on Zoom, order food separately from each one’s delivery outfit (in England, I suppose it is Deliveroo!) with no guaranteed delivery time.

The food is eaten, a date comes to an end, questions are asked and I get to read the fluff piece.

But, the reason I am writing about it – this is serious – is the question, “Did you have any connectivity problems?” The response – be surprised – from both sides is an emphatic “YES!”, at least once during the date.

Now, I come to the title of this post – a blind date between the students in a class and the teacher, in this case, me.

I have a total of 14 “contact hours” with students on Google Class Room (supposedly better than Zoom) per week. I have not seen the faces of my students. With about forty plus in the audience, GCR perhaps gets traffic-overload if everyone’s camera is on. But, I am visible to my students.

I do not get any feedback except through the “Chat” facility on GCR that does not, and cannot carry the tone of the interaction, except when I am angry at the students for their severely inadequate participation in the class.

Then, I remember what I have read in The Guardian. A blind date, between many on one side and a sole participant on the other on GCR is far worse, is designed to fail, offering the straw-man for the management in assessing the faculty member’s under performance.

The ready excuse by the student – connectivity problem, not questioned by the management.

I am sure I am talking over the head of the other side, the student body. Read what I judged about the “Zoom” blind date – talking at different levels. This is more severe in these online classes. This is, as far as I can tell, is the situation with most of my colleagues.

If “Zoom” is doomed in The Guardian’s efforts to connect people in these times, GCR is far from a class room as the edge of the universe is from us, 13.86 billion light years, the last I heard!

Indian internet connectivity is nowhere near what it must be in England. And, in England, “connectivity issues” plague blind dates. In India I suffer severe deficiencies on the same matter, and without remediation, my blind dates are going to be deeply unsatisfactory for everyone, most importantly the management of the private university where I am teaching. They are over-promising and under delivering.

Even Deliveroo! must be doing better.

Raghuram Ekambaram