"When we finish, I'll let you go early," she said.
"I respect you enough to not read the slides to you," she said.
Friends, you've heard these things before. I hope you're not as jaded as I am, but maybe you also see that they are red flags. Even though I'm cynical, I still want to believe folks when they say these things. I get my hopes up.
I'm sure you already know what happened. She did waste our time. The first ten minutes of class was her writing down all of our names to take attendance. Then, she read us a few slides.
After that, we were put into breakout rooms to discuss a paper that most of us had finished the previous week. It took another five minutes to figure out how to open the breakout rooms. Once we were in there, the students who had joined us from another section were a little salty because their professor had not given extended time on the paper, so the extra discussion time didn't help them.
Salty was the consensus. In fact, one of my classmates texted me various salty gifs and memes throughout the class.
One of the lessons in our course reading was about proper pacing of lessons, so it was ironic that she left us in the breakout rooms for so long that we started to wonder if she couldn't figure out how to close them.
I could write a SoL detailing my frustrations with last night's class every day for the rest of March, but I won't.
Instead, I'll consider why I (and several of my classmates) still feel so frustrated this morning. Why do we want to keep talking about how terrible it was? Does venting help? (I've read studies that say it doesn't, but it sure feels good.) Maybe just having our grievences feel seen?
Two last things:
One: We did NOT end class early. We were there from 5:30-8:00 with zero breaks.
Two: Do you have a particular pet peeve with online classes or meetings?