This semester, I’m giving my students the option to submit a video “Conversation with My Past Self” in lieu of taking the Final Exam. I was inspired by this video that I saw on Julie Nolke’s YouTube channel, in which she sits down at the breakfast table and chats with the January 2020 version of herself. The conversation is equal parts hilarious and unsettling.
Nolke’s video got me thinking about how our move to “remote learning” and “social distancing” happened so fast (and its sunset date has remained so mysterious) that I think many of us are still living our lives as if we’re suspended in amber. We’ve been doing this long enough now to have made whatever adjustments were necessary to get along in the New Normal, but we haven’t really reckoned with the New Normal as normal. We’re still looking forward to the end of it, when life will go back to “normal” normal, the Old Normal.
And as long as we continue to believe the Old Normal is out there somewhere, waiting to be retrieved and lived, we don’t have to reckon with the fact that everything has changed, permanently, in the last six weeks. But, there will be no going back to “the way things were.” The funny thing about learning something, anything really, is that it puts a kind of distance between the past Ignorant You and the new Learned You.
If only I knew then what I know now…
Here’s the thing, though: sometimes we aren’t aware that we’ve learned something new because we haven’t taken the time to reflect on that distance between our past selves and our present selves. Nolke’s video made me realize that right now is a perfect opportunity to do so, and that doing so might actually offer us a chance to articulate some insights about our present moment that we didn’t even realize we had.
Below is the assignment for the video “Conversation with My Past Self” that I’ve given my students this semester. Feel free to steal it if you think it might work well in your course. (Actually, feel free to steal anything on this blog that I’ve tagged #OpenSourcePedagogy!)
Instructions: Imagine you could sit down and have a conversation with the January 2020 version of yourself. How would you explain what is happening now (in March 2020)? What moral or political concerns do you have now that January-2020-You should know about? What advice would you give your past self?
For this assignment, you will create a video “Conversation with my Past Self.” (If you’d like to see a rough idea of what I’m looking for, check out this video.) Your completed video should:
- be between 1-3 minutes long
- involve a conversation between both versions (January 2020 and March 2020) of yourself. Unless you have an identical twin, this means your video will require some simple editing. Both Mac and PC laptops/desktops come with user-friendly video editing software already installed. You can also use the free online video editing software ClipChamp. Please email me if you have any technical questions about video editing.
- answer all three of the questions listed above in the Instructions.
- Is it the government’s responsibility to provide income for people who are out of work through no fault of their own?
- Who counts as “essential workers” in our society? Should essential workers be paid more?
- When healthcare resources are limited, who should get them first? Or, stated differently, who should we “let die” first?
- Should people’s debts be forgiven or suspended when they are unable to pay?
- How much surveillance is permissible in a time of national crisis?
- Is it possible that some state-sanctioned measures, like “social distancing,” are good for our physical health but harmful to our mental health? Which should we prioritize more?
- If a deadly virus began infecting the prison population, should all prisoners who are not on Death Row be released?
- Is online education just as valuable as in-person education? Should it be just as expensive?
- Does the federal government have the power to mandate vaccinations?
- If a company’s profits are earned at the expense of public health– for example, inflating the cost of N95 masks or ICU beds by 500%– should the government intervene to control price-fixing? What, if any, conditions need to be met in order to justify the regulation of market forces?
- Why do we not have universal healthcare in the U.S.?
- Is there any justifiable reason to suspend the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution? Can we suspend voting? Or elections? Or checks and balances between the three branches of government?