I use the same Zoom settings for each of my classes.
I teach eighth graders, so I keep a secure classroom. Students enter muted. Students may chat only with me. They unmute themselves only with my button-clicking permission. They must show their presence uniformly as last name, comma, space, first name. I consider this level of control to be essential to what I want to conjure and execute.
Zoom is where I command their attention. Zoom is where I inspire and guide thought leading to action. Zoom is a port, a gateway, a theater.
They ask: Mr. Covey, do you have a MySpace? Why, yes, I do. (dabs)
I always have a waiting room, as well. I am charmed to say that Zoom provides a choice in its settings that allows a musical chime to play when students arrive in the waiting room. It sounds like two bells but the sound itself is not important. It is the announcement of the arrival of a consciousness. Everything that consciousness is capable of and has the potential for being or doing is waiting for entrance into my learning space, a projection of my own consciousness. More arrive. More are coming. A tension grows as each presence arrives and is announced.
There is also a chime, the ping of a triangle, when each student enters into the Zoom classroom. It does not ring until they are fully there. It waits for full integration and awareness.
Moreover, lastly, there is the whoosh of that signals leaving, similar to a belled trumpet.
These beings arrive, present but not fully formed. They patiently wait to take form in my consciousness. I wait until I am prepared to accept them. When they leave, they are simply gone. They could be anywhere. Nothing remains except memory that quickly fades in whatever comes next.
And all the while, entrances and exits are heralded by musical tones.
The consciousness of each sentient being arrives and exits to music. It is there, and then it is not there.
Star Trek was right again, and I am talking about the original TV series.
We are talking about the transporter.
Zoom is today’s expression of the Star Trek transporter.
The communicators became flip phones. Mr. Spock’s tricorder is an ipad. That device in Uhura’s ear is not far off from what people stick in their ears now. Every time I get my temperature taken for public health reasons, the medical people use devices that look like that salt shaker McCoy used to in order to diagnose and treat earthly beings and everything else.
Star Trek was right on so much that we now accept as normal that one could argue the beneficent qualities of binge watching the show whenever necessary to reestablish emotional order- yes, order and tranquility borne of essential understanding- in these times of chaos.
Yes, the Zoom classroom experience is a working transporter aboard the Enterprise, the first one, NCC-1701.