Zoom Teaching Flashbacks I’m Still Recovering From

 There are certain phrases that still trigger a physiological response in me — “You’re on mute,” “Can everyone see my screen?” and the haunting silence of twenty-five black rectangles where human faces used to be. Zoom teaching was not simply online instruction; it was an anthropological experiment in attention, resilience, technological improvisation, and the limits of eye contact through pixelated grids. When the classroom dissolved into individual bedrooms, kitchen tables, and suspiciously angled ceiling views, teaching did not stop — it mutated. We were no longer managing desks and whispered side conversations; we were moderating bandwidth, microphones, siblings in the background, and the unsettling intimacy of seeing into each other’s domestic spaces.

The first shock was visual. In a physical classroom, you read posture, whispers, fidgeting, micro-expressions — you feel the room’s pulse. On Zoom, the room had no pulse, just icons. Some students kept cameras on, carefully curated and brightly lit, while others disappeared behind profile pictures or strategically frozen screens. Teaching to black squares required a new kind of imagination. You had to project energy into silence and trust that someone, somewhere, was absorbing it. The feedback loop that normally fuels a lesson — the nods, the laughter, the collective groan at Shakespeare — was replaced by delay and digital stillness. It was like performing a monologue into a void that occasionally unmuted to say, “Sorry, can you repeat that?”

The logistics were their own genre of chaos. Screen sharing became a high-stakes event. If you clicked the wrong tab, your credibility was momentarily suspended while thirty students glimpsed whatever non-educational document lived behind your lesson plan. Internet instability turned even the most carefully structured class into improvisational theater. “If I freeze, just wait,” became a legitimate instruction. We developed backup plans for our backup plans. Entire lessons were reconstructed mid-glitch with the calm of someone diffusing a bomb labeled “Unstable Connection.”

And yet, amid the absurdity, there was a strange intimacy to Zoom teaching that physical classrooms rarely allow. You saw pets wander across keyboards, younger siblings waving from doorways, walls decorated with posters and personal artifacts that revealed pieces of your students’ lives you might never have glimpsed otherwise. The boundaries between school and home blurred in ways that were both humanizing and heavy. For some students, the screen offered safety; for others, it magnified isolation. You were not just teaching literature anymore — you were checking in on wellbeing through a camera lens, trying to interpret tone through compressed audio.

The exhaustion of it all was different from traditional burnout. It was not the physical pacing of a classroom; it was cognitive fatigue from hyper-focus, from monitoring chat boxes while speaking, from scanning faces for engagement while managing slides. “Zoom fatigue” became shorthand for something deeper — the strain of sustaining performance without the organic energy exchange that makes teaching feel alive. You were always “on,” framed, aware of your own face in the corner of the screen like a constant self-surveillance experiment.

There were also moments of unexpected humor. The student who unmuted accidentally and revealed a full family dinner commentary. The carefully staged “technical difficulties” that somehow resolved instantly when attendance was taken. The group project breakout rooms that functioned like digital wilderness zones where productivity may or may not have survived. You learned quickly that adolescents will test boundaries in any environment, physical or virtual. The medium changed; the creativity did not.

The Hot Mess Express during Zoom era did not derail — it hovered. Suspended between adaptation and exhaustion, between connection and distance, between teaching and troubleshooting. We learned that education is not confined to walls; it is relational, fragile, resilient. Even through screens, students still asked questions, submitted essays, laughed at the right lines, and occasionally surprised us with insight that cut through the static. And maybe that’s what lingers most in the flashbacks — not just the glitches and mute buttons, but the quiet proof that learning persists even when the format fractures.

I still flinch slightly when someone says, “Let’s just hop on a quick Zoom,” but somewhere underneath the collective trauma is a strange gratitude. We did something unprecedented. We adapted in real time. We turned pixel grids into classrooms.

And then, thankfully, we logged off.