The moment it became clear that COVID was going to wreak havoc on the final quarter of the 2020 school year, I began teaching Calculus.
No one was listening, mind you. I was teaching Calculus to a screen, recording the precise lectures I would’ve been teaching in person on my computer with Camtasia. I’d done the same a few dozen times in the past decade when I needed to take a sub day. The process had become automatic and straightforward.
Despite that familiarity, this recording binge felt different. There is always an uncanny weirdness to teaching a lesson without an audience, a fact I played off of when Michelle and Ethan helped me augment Polar Area with a suspenseful slasher subplot in 2018. Even on my worst days at school, I feed off of those in attendance, letting their collective responses and energy guide mine. When it’s just me in the study, I find myself hyper-focused on the math far more often; I have to remember to come up for air in a way I don’t during class.
Here, though, my solitary instruction wasn’t a temporary thing. These lessons weren’t intended to paper over a string of absences where the class and I were apart for some short while; they were potentially substituting for the entire classroom experience. Separation wouldn’t be between them and me, either: everyone had been torn apart. My videos wouldn’t play through a projector to a lively classroom but on individual computer screens across 73 separate households.
One other element separated this recording experience: emotional turbulence. Certainly, there have been videos and live streams where emotion sneaks in, but this was different. Those other videos came during stable times; I produced this series of thirteen during a time when everything had shifted with the most sudden of lurches. One minute I was planking on a yoga mat reading a text from Shibata about Natomas; the next, our school year was basically over. The sudden realization of the fragility of everything shocked my system.
That distress came through in the videos. How could it not? In some, there’s a bit of a catch in my throat as I talk through the techniques. You can almost hear my thoughts racing around my head while I attempt to be measured and focused. During other videos, I lean into it by letting go of composure: more than a few include segments where I talk about the latest developments from the news with that fresh uncertainty that characterized March 2020. I get choked up several times.
Editing those pieces out would have been quick. Drag the mouse, right-click once, and tap the delete key. Simple. There was an argument for that, too: these were instructional videos, after all. When the pandemic ended, they would permanently reside on my YouTube channel to assist absent or confused students. But I opted to keep those segments in for two reasons.
The first was for the viewers I was recording them for. The seniors in the class of 2020 were watching those lessons amidst the same turbulence I was in. We weren’t going to have an opportunity to cope together in HL-5, so owning my own emotional processing would hopefully help them follow suit. These short interjections of raw emotion were intentional modeling, not unlike what I would offer running a mini-Challenge Day in class: here is an adult expressing difficult emotions. If he can do it with your eyes on him, you can too.
Broader still was the second reason: history. I still remember leafing through social science textbooks in elementary and middle school and seeing artists’ renderings of “ordinary” people during those times. I always wished, instead of an impressive illustration in colored pencil, that there could have been a video clip. An interview. I didn’t want to imagine this person’s experience; I wanted to see them in action and hear their story firsthand.
With time travel alone capable of manifesting that child’s fantasy for bringing long-gone history to life, I treated those lesson videos as a sort of primary document. They were opportunities for me to speak to the actual experience of living through the initial month of the COVID-19 pandemic. When the day comes for interactive digital textbooks to dissect March 2020’s turbulence, I wanted to have something ready. Deluded though it was, I therefore thought of those Calculus lessons as a preservation of history. I was fulfilling my duty to future generations.
I was proud of the work I did. Even when the district threatened discipline for teachers who provided instructional materials to students during that limbo time, I waited to publish but kept recording. The lessons were an authentic lens into where I was at that time and, I hoped, where the upended world was too.
Anyone needing a refresher on absolute convergence would receive a heaping tablespoon of historical emotion as well. Both elements would represent me for good. No matter what, I told myself, I’m never going to re-record any of these lessons.
And I didn’t.
Until last Thursday.
*****
For the second consecutive year, I have tickets to see the Oakland Athletics on Major League Baseball’s Opening Day.
That’s happening tomorrow as I write this, whereas it will have happened in the past when you finally read these words.
(Time is odd like that.)
First pitch is at 6:40 pm. It takes about two hours to reach the Coliseum, but the combination of traffic congestion and cruel slowness of security makes arriving early an imperative.
That ratchets up the challenge for me to get there. Nate and Bria are in San Jose, and I teach Advanced Placement Calculus BC sixth period. The logistics are just messy—messy in a way they weren’t last year, as Nate and I caught the A’s home opener for the first time.
I had fully resigned myself to missing some of the game on Thursday. Even under the most forgiving of drives, I would be out of school no earlier than 4:00 and fighting traffic the entire way. While I love the A’s, the experience with my friends is of greater importance, so arranging a rendezvous point that maximized our time together before the game was vital. There was just no way it could work while still teaching sixth period.
This quarter has started off so well, especially in that sixth period. More of that will be described in the massive piece I’m still editing, but it suffices to say that I didn’t want to miss their class. The Ratio Test is on the Mount Rushmore of series convergence tests anyway; I couldn’t justify skipping out on teaching it.
At least that was my instinct. A conversation with Sarah, the Mariners super fan I teach the Accelerated class with, turned to the new baseball season last week. Sarah’s Mariners have just a tiny bit more hope of success that the A’s do—when I say tiny, think the length difference between a blue whale and a baby krill—but, of course, my team is a few hours away, whereas she works multiple states from hers.
Our conversation spurred a new thought in my head. Trusting her as I do, I asked point blank what had only just crossed my mind.
“Would it be wrong to miss sixth period to make sure we get to the game on time?” I asked cautiously, trying to suppress my excitement and remain neutral toward the idea.
“Pfff. Of course not!” she replied with trademark enthusiasm and zero hesitation. “People cut out for all sorts of things. That’s totally fair.”
Emboldened, I sought to find a sub to cover my class. As for the lesson I’d be missing in just that period, well, heck: I had a historical document already published on my YouTube channel. All it would take is a few short clicks and, voila, a lesson covered via hyperlink. My complete Opening Day experience would no longer be a pipe dream. I should have been thrilled.
But I wasn’t. Even with Sarah’s ringing endorsement, the entire plan felt unfair. I would be shirking my duties to spend time with my friends at a baseball game. I’d be coasting on the earnest work of a version of myself that no longer exists as well—on Therapy Thursday no less. Everything just felt off about it.
My excitement faltered for the first time.
How could I justify my decision to them?
But also:
How could I justify the decision to myself?
*****
I don’t remember when I first had the idea for video solutions.
To my memory, it had to have been somewhere during the 2019 school year. It wasn’t because of back surgery—that got scheduled mid-summer, and I was knee-deep in that project by mid-June—so it had to have been before. Maybe it was because of the back pain that returned with a freshly ruptured disc; maybe the thought was already bouncing around.
In any event, their purpose was obvious: I wanted to enable students to access tutoring support without me having to provide it physically. I had realized that my original problem sets didn’t offer sufficient challenge, too, so I needed to increase the intensity by rewriting each one. Ratcheted intensity, though, would mean more students would struggle with them than ever before. How could I justify the classroom routines I strictly follow if my students weren’t finishing their independent practice feeling successful and supported?
The answer was to record myself talking through the problems. I would capture and share on-demand insight mere clicks away. YouTube could allow me to do and say the same things I would in person but without being physically present. Students could use my instructions and context—problem-specific instructions and context, I might add—whether working at midnight, studying after a softball game, or TAing for an English teacher.
Long before I filmed two units of AB lessons to cover me while I recovered from spinal surgery and far, far before the phrase COVID-19 would hold sufficient meaning for me to record a baker’s dozen more, I thus devoted my summer to crafting brand new problem sets and recording solutions.
The interesting thing about my dilemma regarding Opening Day is that my first thoughts—the ones that arrived before I really had a sense of what I could, let alone wanted, to do—were not about those BC lesson videos but the AB solutions. At first, I attributed that connection to sequencing; the video solutions for Calculus AB had arrived first, after all. They were my gateway drug into the hundreds of videos that followed.
Soon, though, I discovered my thinking was far more focused than I had realized. I wasn’t focused on the AB video solutions as a collective unit at all.
I was thinking of exactly one of them.
The fourth set I produced was to accompany my fourth lesson of the course. This lesson, taught as cNotes 04 in the sequence I teach, focuses on the concept of Continuity.
I recorded that video on June 30, 2019. I wore my 51s jersey and cap while I recorded it. I was pretty consistent in my attire while filming, sticking with comfortable clothes and a baseball cap, but this was the first time my attire strayed beyond the aggressively generic.
That’s because June 30th is the anniversary of Joe Walker’s death. While I annually commemorate Katelyn’s with flowers, a visit to the memorial garden, and a letter to one of her best friends, I have observed Joe’s each year with a one-symbol text to Maia and a day wearing the uniforms from that 2016-2017 season when she, Zach, and I coached together.
For the first two years afterward, these small things were invisible. I wasn’t wearing my old jerseys to school on June 30th because there was no school. It was always just me. My observation and memorial extended no further than me.
But I was teaching on June 30, 2019, at least in a way. Future students would be watching me explain continuity and solve related problems in the coming years. Those students would see me in my gray and white top. Those students would realize an alien’s face stared back at them from the crown of my hat.
So I decided to say something about my clothing. After finishing the video proper, I lingered on the final problem. There I spoke about what I was wearing, and then I shared my motivation for picking it out of the closet. I didn’t say much, and I didn’t speak for more than a few minutes, but I did share about the experience of watching someone I love in pain and feeling wholly unable to help solve something unfixable. I talked about the importance of remembering, and I detailed what Maia taught me afterward about grief so that I could grapple with my own.
That minute message plays at the end of the video. There’s no VS link to it on the problem set PDF; nobody will land there unless they keep the video playing after the last problem ends. But every fall since then, at least one student has watched that segment. I know this because a student reaches out every fall. Some post heartfelt comments; others turn to the Remind app to send me a note. Jaide actually stopped me before class the next day and asked if she could give me a hug despite being less than a week into the class.
Tucked away behind a bunch of mathematics, my mini memorial always finds somebody. Each time, they learn something about me that transcends the subject. They also learn something about Joe, a person I knew only enough to like but whom I love by the transitive property. Unexpectedly, amid all the equating of limits and function values, they find a secret lesson about grief, friendship, and remembering.
This short message was the key to unlocking my Opening Day dilemma.
I knew what I had to do.
Several hours after my conversation with Sarah, I stepped up to my computer and opened Camtasia. Sporting a black A’s hoodie and a matching team hat, I began recording a lesson about the Ratio and Root tests for series convergence.
But I was thinking of Continuity.
*****
When sixth period arrives on Thursday afternoon, students will shuffle into the classroom for sixth period Calculus BC. They will be surprised that their teacher, whom they could swear was present mere hours earlier, is gone.
They will talk excitedly over the prospect of averted instruction—not in some mean way, but with the relief that comes from getting an hour’s break from the pressure of understanding complex math at the end of a long day.
Disappointment will reach them, though, when a link auto-posts several minutes before the bell. A few will curse the technological proficiency that means their teacher’s absence never had any hope of disrupting the curriculum, but all will withdraw assorted brands of headphones from assorted brands of backpacks and plug them into school-issued Chromebooks only in their bags because of changes forced by the pandemic. They are good students to a one who, Senioritis-afflicted or not, are open to learning and respect their teacher’s hustle. Nearly all will watch the video as directed.
After listening to an agenda overview presented precisely like every other day, their teacher will diverge from the mathematics they know will follow. A refresher on factorial arithmetic will be promised by the page, a refresher that will eventually arrive.
But not immediately. First, their teacher will deliver a message. The message will be wholly transparent and forthright, just as his messages always are during traditional Therapy Thursdays. This time, he will address a specific elephant—named Stomper—in the room: why he is not in class with them as expected.
Their teacher will explain that he left school early to attend a baseball game with his friends.
Some may roll their eyes at such a candid admission. A few will think that such a choice isn’t right or maybe even that it’s wholly unprofessional.
But their teacher, speaking from the corner of the screen, will continue. He will point out that his friends have moved so that, instead of having time and meals with them regularly, they only get a few phone calls each month. He will admit to missing spending time with those friends and worrying that the new logistical hurdles of geography will make their regular visits to the Coliseum less frequent.
He will also admit to an intense knot of dread in his chest because this might well be the final opening day in Oakland. His love for the A’s, he’ll say, is bundled up with his love for those friends and a lifetime in the sport, and he’ll say that the thought of letting go of that and seeing it disappear scares him. He’s never been more pessimistic about his favorite team in his favorite sport that he watches with his favorite people staying a part of his life. That this might be the first burst of an ending for the team is painfully obvious; that he worries this could spell erosion for that friendship goes unspoken but is understood all the same.
Finally, he’ll concede that, to many people, his decision to leave school for a game is the wrong one. For many, an expensive professional baseball game in a dilapidated stadium run by a stingy ownership group could never be worthy of leaving work. But their teacher will note that, to him, the time together in Oakland watching baseball with his friends is a culmination, a powerful moment that captures the essence of the future he always dreamt of. A future that he had hoped might last through the end of his life, but that suddenly seems tragically finite.
You might not feel the same way, their teacher’s recording will acknowledge, but hopefully you will respect the choice all the same.
And then, he’ll proceed to review the mechanics of the factorial function and thoroughly break down two series convergence tests with representative examples.
By the end of that video, those students will almost all feel reasonably comfortable applying the Ratio and Root tests to appropriately structured series. They’ll be better evaluators of factorial and exponential expressions and more appreciative of the earlier convergence tests that handle inconclusive cases as well. Asked what the day’s lesson was about, almost all will point to one or more of those mathematical elements.
Little will they know that the entire point of the video lesson they just watched was not the mathematics. All of that had previously been recorded by a younger, wider-faced version of the same person they listened to at 2x speed during sixth period. They could go find that very recording if they were so inclined.
The point of that entire redundant recording, whether they realize it or not, will have been the short message from their teacher about going to the A’s game with his friends. It is a lesson that will not appear on their upcoming unit exam nor on the AP test they take in early May.
But someday, they might be faced with a decision. An older iteration of them will be at a minor crossroads: should they get more work done and avoid making waves with their boss, or can they set aside productivity for a few short hours? Can they justify some tiny, insignificant-to-anyone-else activity with old friends, their spouse, or their kids over their professional responsibilities?
They probably won’t remember the Ratio test in that distant moment. It would be utterly weird if they did. But they might, deep down in the recesses of their memory, discover an idea incepted into their head by an absent math teacher at the beginning of a video lesson.
A math teacher who set aside teaching to watch a baseball game with his friends.
A math teacher who wasn’t there but actually taught them two lessons all the same.
A math teacher who made two right choices.
One was to re-record.
The other was to leave.
I swear that thirty students asked me how the game was today. All had smiles on their faces. I think my lesson landed.
I wrote the first two drafts of this piece at home, but I redid the last third in its entirety en route to the game. The revision happened on BART as the stadium slowly came into view; the ultimate ending I wrote while standing outside the Coliseum waiting for Nate and Bria to arrive.
A tiny thing like that makes the entire piece somehow mean that much more.
Thank you for reading.
Go A’s.