There are only a few days of 2020 left, and I wanted to jot something down here while the memory of the last three months of teaching is still fairly fresh. I don’t think it’s a particularly new or powerful observation, but, at the end of this awful year, it seems important to capture whatever one can.

Think of a bicycle wheel. At its centre, you have the hub. Out from the hub, spokes radiate, connecting the hub to the wheel rim. Easy enough. My observation is that so much of my working life during the pandemic has followed this model awkwardly.

It’s most obvious in a seminar. I, as the lecturer, sit at the hub. My students appear in their little videochat boxes, and each is at the end of a spoke. But there is no wheel rim: each and every student speaks to me, and almost never to their peers. I create breakout rooms, and stay out of these spaces, to overcome this; I also try and get students to use the chat more. Yet it still remains an environment that’s more about spokes than wheels.

Staff meetings are a similar. The meeting’s chair ends up dominating the discussion, while individuals respond to them. Occasionally we manage a bit of rimward discussion, and occasionally the hub fails to maintain the structure of the session. The former is good, the latter terrible.

So what is the effect of all this? In some respects it feels like I have intense linear relationships (the spoke), but lack horribly the diffuse, nonlinear ones (the wheel). There’s no serendipitous meetings in corridors, no popping into colleagues’ offices, nothing, in other words, that helps to make the working life of a department go round.