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Monday, July 5, 2021

Opinion: Do Zoom classes confirm our worst fears about human nature? - Houston Chronicle

The pandemic has pushed professors and students to pause over practical questions, and also philosophical ones. What is at stake is not only how to teach or take classes — particularly in the humanities — but also the existential matter of why we teach or take classes at all.

A guy named Gyges, I believe, might have the answer.

Ancient writers loved to riff on this partly historical, partly mythical figure. In the 4th century BC, Plato presented him as a shepherd who, upon entering a cave, stumbles across a skeleton wearing a gold ring. Taking the bauble, he finds that it makes its wearer invisible. Thus armed (or fingered), this version of Gyges kills the king, takes the queen and founds a dynasty.

If we were freed of legal and social constraints, would we all act like Gyges, regardless of justice?

In Plato’s “The Republic,” which is written as a series of dialogues with Socrates, Glaucon, desperately seeks a reason to believe Socrates’ claim that if we know the Good, we are compelled to act upon it even if we had the power of invisibility.

During spring semester at the University of Houston, where I teach, a perfect storm of events created a laboratory of sorts to test the positions of both Socrates and Glaucon. Already besieged by the coronavirus pandemic, the Arctic blast plunged Texans into freezing darkness. In response to the crisis, our administration reinstated the online and grading policies that had been in effect during 2020.

There were two important upshots to these policies. First, students could opt for a “pass” as long as their grade was higher than an F; in effect, they could receive credit for a D minus in one or more classes without torpedoing their GPA. Second, those students who were enrolled in online classes were allowed, for reasons of privacy, to keep their cameras off during class.

While one of my classes was online, I succeeded in teaching the other on campus. Not coincidentally, it was devoted to the literature of plagues. Twice a week, I parked and walked past mostly empty garages and mostly darkened buildings, occasionally glimpsing masked, furtive students alone or in pairs. Upon reaching the classroom, 15 or so would be waiting for me.

As we were all masked and I could not read their expressions, I soon gave up on my usual lame pleasantries. Instead, we turned to our writers — ranging from Thucydides, Marcus Aurelius and Michel de Montaigne to Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley and Albert Camus — and discussed how their works helped them (and perhaps us) work through the plagues they had themselves confronted.

The moment class ended, I would sprint to my car and speed home, usually arriving in the nick of time to teach my online class. But I could not read the expressions of these students, either — not because they were masked but because nearly all of them rarely if ever turned on their cameras — or even their mikes. Our discussions almost always withered into monologues.

I later discovered that those black rectangles on my screen obscured students who were variously at work, on exercise bikes, in bed — or on Google trying to find answers to my questions.

Of course, yet other students wished to do their best, but faced real personal challenges. They deserved to pass, but I ultimately passed all of the students. Does this mean Glaucon was right?

After all, these invisible 21st-century Gyges failed to do justice to the books and writers I tried to expose them to, yet they were effectively rewarded for it. Did this not reveal the raw and rapacious character of human nature?

Yet my experience with my on-campus class gave me another answer, one that would perhaps have pleased Socrates. While these students had the option of Zoom, they instead chose to be visible (if masked). A half-dozen or so, in particular, made another choice. Most of them were college seniors who were already on their way to grad school or a job. And yet they carefully read and made me rethink works I thought I knew. Rather than transactional, they were instead aspirational students.

Did this make them “better” people? Of course not. But the aspirational students do remind us of a value that risks becoming invisible in our era. Namely, that what the Greeks called eudaemonia, or happiness, is found not just in a flourishing investment activity, but also in flourishing intellectual activity.

Zaretsky is a historian and professor in the Honors College, University of Houston. His new book, Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in Times of Plague, will be published next year.

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"Opinion" - Google News
July 05, 2021 at 03:06PM
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Opinion: Do Zoom classes confirm our worst fears about human nature? - Houston Chronicle
"Opinion" - Google News
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