Picture this: it’s cold, there’s grey skies outside, and you have an 8AM that is a fifteen minute walk away. Not the best feeling right? As much I miss in person classes, let’s be real here, they weren’t always the best. If I am being honest, in person classes are great when the weather is nice and the sun is shining because the world is naturally in a much better mood and place, but my college town gets a little too cold a little too quickly.
First I am going to start off with my least favorite part, waking up and walking in the cold. Who would want to do that when you can walk to your kitchen, make some coffee, and enjoy class from wherever you wish? While I totally have eaten during class, it just consists of “Can they hear me chewing?” and “Is the smell of my food bothering them?”, but when you’re sitting in your own home, who cares about that stuff! That feeling of laying in bed two minutes before you absolutely have to get up to make it on time to a lecture hall full of people, I wish there was a word to fully encapsulate that feeling. Or, how about getting there two minutes late and having to walk through a crowd of people, eyes all focused on you, while profusely sweating, dispute it being 0 degrees outside. Talk about social anxiety! Trying to find your lecture hall on a giant campus freshman year was way too stressful and no one made it easy. For the future, I recommend walking around and finding the lecture halls before your classes actually start, that way, you don’t have to be in full panic mode.
How about trying to sit in a seat that isn’t on the outside edge in a lecture hall, squishing past people with your backpack and giant winter coat. I used to try to get to my big lectures as early as possible just so that I wouldn’t have to play the “excuse me” game with fifteen people while just trying to sit down. This is a random one, but for some reason it was always on my mind—how do I know the person behind me isn’t reading my phone (if I decide to check my phone during a class, which happens sometimes). There is just no privacy, even checking emails feels wrong. I appreciate a professor’s intentions when they do this, but seriously? In a lecture hall of what feels like a million people you probably are never going to sit next to the random person you were awkwardly forced to exchange emails with. The desks in these lecture halls? Good luck fitting a notebook on those, I constantly found myself struggling with that.
Zoom is not all sunshine and rainbows either, there are definitely pros and cons to both. I am interested to see how in person classes resume next fall. There is a lot I do miss about them, I’m not going to go into that right now, but they have a bunch of positives as well.