Who was that masked man?

Yesterday I taught in-person for the first time in at least two years.

It was exciting at first but eventually exhausting and frustrating. I did get a glimmer of what it must be like for classroom teachers, hour after hour and day after day. Teaching wearing a mask, with all the students wearing masks, while basically relying on all the lecture and interaction habits I have developed over decades, proved to be tough on everyone.

It was the state journalism conference for the Colorado Student Media Association, known as J-Day, and I drove up to Fort Collins and the Lory Student Center to represent Quill and Scroll, present a session on not spreading yourself too thin as an editor and report, and catch up with some teacher friends I only see on such occasions. 

Surprisingly, about 900 students from a variety of schools showed up, enthusiastic to gather, hang out with other students who share their interests in media, and celebrate simply being in-person on a college campus -- not to mention enjoy a field trip.

Field trips now seem to necessitate high-level approvals -- one adviser told me his group ended up needing to get a waiver from the board of education to attend -- and require Herculean efforts simply to get a bus and driver for the day. But at least a solid number of programs were able to find a way.

But back to my masked teaching: Yow! I wanted to project a bit for a group of over 100 so I definitely went into "teacher voice" mode, with more volume and more careful enunciation. That requires more oxygen, it quickly become apparent, and my mask kept getting sucked into my mouth. I also ended up with a few stray fibers tickling my lips and tongue. And I kept getting warmer, which was partially exertion and the room temperature, but seemed tied to having more of my face covered.

I try to inject some humor and some "zingers" in my presentation, but found it almost impossible to discern the masked students' reactions. I might have interpreted their eyes as full of either contempt, boredom, or terror. But I just kept going.

I went over my 45 minutes by a few, I guess, at the end rushing some final PowerPoint slides and not really "sticking the landing," as we say in the conference biz. As I walked down the hall after the session desperate for a bottle of water, I was only thinking of all the places the session went wrong. In the "real world," I might have had a chance to revisit what didn't come across or what I was too clumsy to clearly convey, maybe in another section of the class or the next day.

In the world of conferences, you only get one shot.

Speaking of shots, maybe next J-Day the pandemic will have finally been tamed to the point that masks are not needed. 

Just another example of why the entire country/world needs to do the right thing.

On a purely selfish level, I have now had the booster shot of Pfizer, so I am feeling invincible.