I do not hate teaching online. I’ll be the first to say that Zoom audio doesn’t always work. Tech connections are harder to forge than in-person ones. Discussions are missing some human-ness. Many kids have never shown me their face even once. I miss the embodied-ness of school.

But there are lots of good moments–good days. Days that, as my friends say, “feel like teaching.” There was the boy who changed his voice to sound like Mickey Mouse and then pretended he didn’t know–so we all cracked up. There was the time we played the alphabet game and Hannah used “hairy toad” as her description–so literally no one could get through the alphabet afterward without smiling. There are the virtual rooms students have built and invited me to visit. There is my own virtual room, which was a delight to make.

Plus, I get teach from what used to be my home studio. For now, it’s a classroom, and I’m cool with that. I’m not managing bodies or behaviors in the same way I would be in-person. I love going upstairs for lunch with my family and getting to see our birds in the middle of the day. I like that I mostly get to teach barefoot, drink tea whenever I like, and put ice in my water when I want it.

These are small pleasures that I don’t have in my brick-and-mortar classroom, so I’m savoring them for now.

I mean, it cant be wrong that I LOVE being able to go to the bathroom whenever I need to go.