Respecting your audience, and Rule 1 of teaching

Rule 1: Never condescend, nor even give the appearance of condescension.

I've had to watch a bunch of videos and zoom sessions already, with more to come, as we prepare for the school year.  These have been / probably will be valuable, in the sense of promoting discussion among faculty, of communicating necessary information to students and faculty.  So far, sessions have been respectful of my time - no one is reading powerpoints at the attendees, for example.  It's been good.

Today's presenter - who turned out to be pretty danged awesome - nevertheless turned me off from the beginning.  

While people were joining the zoom session, the presenter had already shared his screen which included five bullet points:

• Try to be as present as possible
• Remove distractions if possible
• Get a beverage
• Get note-taking items
• Prepare to participate

Wait, Greg, aren't these reasonable cultural expectations for attendees at a zoom presentation?

Of course they are.  That's not the issue.

By telling us that which any professional educator should already know, the presenter communicated to me a sense of distrust.  "I know you naughty teachers will not pay appropriate attention to our meeting..."  

The presenter further communicated a hubris about their own power and influence.  "...but if I give you specific rules about how I expect you to pay attention, then presto, you teachers will follow these rules and pay attention.  Perhaps you just authentically didn't know that you should pay attention in a meeting, so I'm relieving you of your ignorance.  Or, perhaps you will sigh and say 'aww, man, I was planning on playing Candy Crush for the next few hours, but dammit, these are the rules, so I'd better go get my note-taking items."

Greg, you talk about culture building... doesn't culture building start with a foundation of what the interaction rules are?

Culture does begin with a foundation of shared expectations.  For our boarding students, most of whom are new or new-ish to living away from home with other teenagers, we start by discussing specifics about how a dorm community should function.  If I were teaching third grade, I would likely begin the year with an open discussion of how we should behave toward one another.  

However... culture building also considers the audience.  The audience for my physics classes are 14-18 year old students who have been in school for many, many years.  The audience for faculty meetings is a room of professional teachers - if they don't know that during a meeting they should "try to be as present as possible," then, well, they shouldn't have been hired in the first place.

Greg, you also know that in a typical meeting a quarter of the faculty are, in fact, playing candy crush.  Or possibly pac-man.

Quite possible.  There are but two effective remedies for this: (1) Make the meeting so worthwhile that most attendees forget about video games and focus, by choice.  Make the audience want to be attentive.  (2) Find one or two people who are blatantly disengaged, and have a conversation with them.  Do they want to be a part of the faculty, or not?  

These are the same remedies, by the way, that I recommend if you have similar issues with students during your class. 

Unfortunately, today's presenter chose ineffective and maddening option (3): give the audience perky-toned yet condescending "rules" for the meeting.  A commonly-used equivalent is the all-faculty email reminding everyone how meetings are important and we should make an effort to focus.  The candy crush players don't change their behavior in response to option (3).  

Rules do nothing but irritate the professionals.  And that was our first impression of the presenter.  He had a mountain to climb to win me over.

Now, I'll be fair to this presenter - he did win me over.  His 90-minute meeting was fantastic, to the extent that when he stopped I said "oh, wow, that was short, he could've gone on longer." How I feel at the end is a major way that I judge any performance.  So this presenter passed with flying colors.

But he could have made things so much easier on himself.  And, how many other folks in the meeting did he lose just by implicitly questioning their professionalism?

 

What equipment do I use to record my physics shows?

I've fielded the question enough times that it's worth a blog post.  In my AP Live videos in spring 2020, in the upcoming AP Daily videos, in my summer institutes... what equipment did I use for recording?

The main camera is a logitech "Carl Zeiss Tessar" model mounted on a tripod facing my demonstration table.  It helps that my whiteboard is low-glare... the reflection from the windows and lights is not bad.  I "enable high definition" in the video settings in Zoom.

I also have a document camera on the edge of the demonstration table.  To switch between cameras, in zoom I say share screen --> advanced --> content from second camera.  This brings up the document camera.  But then I see a button in the top left of my screen to "switch camera" - click that, and I seamlessly switch from the doc cam to the logitech.

As for audio... both my doc cam and the logitech include a microphone, and I can put audio to the speakers in my classroom.  But the sound quality that way isn't great.  So I use a plantronics headset, as pictured in the top right.  The sound is as good as I've ever heard!  The only disadvantage is that I am wired to a USB port.  I've several times stepped on the wire and accidentally disconnected.

Speaking of USB ports... that's three items that need ports.  I had to get a multi-port hub.  And it's important that my internet connection is hardwired to the desktop computer I'm using - otherwise things can get annoyingly slow on Zoom.  

I'll give a shoutout here to Woodberry Forest's academic technology guru Cronin Warmack.  He's been extraordinarily helpful offering whatever technology I need, and helping to make sure it actually works.  All spring and all summer, I had working computer, internet, printers, copiers, network storage, software applications... that's not a trivial thing.  

At my previous school, the head IT guy was offended that I requested the technology that I had been promised at my interview.  While that school's administrators always had working equipment, it seemed beneath this guy even to respond to a mere teacher's concern, let alone to actually act upon it.  And I am aware that many schools operate exactly this way regarding the most basic tech.

Not here... Cronin (and Aiden and Jason) have kept Woodberry running online.  I appreciate their work.