“Pythagoras’s Veil 2.0”: Lutz Koepnick on the Sounds of Teaching Today
Pythagoras’s Veil 2.0
“Thousands of college instructors, after doing their job for the last year primarily from home and via video, are back to teach in real classrooms and lecture halls this fall. Instead of seeing their students locked into separate Zoom tiles on screen, they finally face them head-on again, physically present. Little about this, however, feels like a return to the old normal. Many institutions wisely mandate students to wear masks, a few like my own permit instructors to take off theirs as long as they maintain six feet distance in class. Some instructors are quick to lament that they, much to their embarrassment, at first fail to recognize students they had taught online just a semester earlier. But the perhaps biggest challenge of this new situation concerns the acoustical dimensions of student-teacher interactions, the often-neglected importance of sound, voice, and hearing to any pedagogical setting. It in my view indicates a profound need to retune our aesthetic and politics of academic listening . . . . [Click here to continue reading]