Only Connect- E. M. Forster and the joys of online teaching

In a sealed room, somewhere within the bowels of the earth, a woman named Vashti, is lecturing to her unseen listeners.

She’s been lecturing from underground most of her life- “the clumsy system of public gatherings had been long since abandoned; neither Vashti nor her audience stirred from their rooms…”

Whilst lecturing, she turns on her isolation switch; when she finishes she turns it off again, and immediately “all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her….what was the new food like? Could she recommend it…?”

She speaks to her son, Kuno, via The Machine, temporarily emerging from isolation; to her dismay, he has a request: “I want to see you not through The Machine…I want to speak to you not through the wearisome Machine…” Vashti cannot contemplate a journey through the surface of the earth, which she describes as “only dust and mud”. She emphasises the dangers of such an expedition: “you would need a respirator...or the air will kill you…”

Although, I hasten to add, I haven’t been sealed in an underground chamber here at Fell Towers, there’s something uncannily resonant about this description of virtual teaching in lockdown. Vashti and Kuno, and their disturbing world, were magicked into being by the great E. M. Forster, as long ago as 1909. In that faraway Edwardian world, the novelist more famous for his precisely satirical portrayals of the hypocrisies and emotional paralysis of the English upper middle classes, somehow appeared to foretell not only lockdown, but also computers, Facebook and Instagram. If anything could increase my admiration for this wonderful writer, this can.

Since the college campus closed in the middle of March, my days have followed a different pattern. I wake up later than usual, head downstairs to my grandfather’s old desk, turn on the laptop, open up Microsoft teams, and prepare to spend a day talking to a blank screen. The lively, animated young people with whom I’m fortunate to spend my working life, have temporarily disappeared, sentenced to listen to me chuntering on at them from a screen. I have to admit that the very fact that I’m doing it at all is miraculous; my classes were clearly sceptical that I’d have the ability to operate Microsoft Teams, and grasp its mysteries…

And somehow I have. I have an additional advantage over Vashti, as despite the limitations of our Machine, the young minds of West Cornwall remain communicative, reflective, challenging; they are indomitable, and they will return. Although I cannot see them. I know they’re there- they’ll take the mic, and they’ll contribute their insights via chat, effortlessly adapting to a technology which I suppose has come of age as they have. And I’m so impressed by their engagement and understanding, perhaps even more so than usual. In a creative writing session this morning I was honoured with such original and thoughtful phrasing- in a description of a cold day, the sun is described as “pushing its way through…like tin trickling out of ore." More lyrically, “Birds sing the melody of winter”. Alert to changing moods, another wrote of a girl “Using her finger, she slowly traces the shape of a face into the condensation forming on the glass- two eyes and an exaggerated frown…As if the universe could hear her inner misery…”

Perhaps typing encourages a greater freedom and of self-expression than trying to articulate it orally in public? I can only begin to imagine the countless pedagogic research projects which, over the next few years, will dissect this strange period of our lives.

Back to Forster. Vashti completes her lecture, and sits back, awaiting audience reaction. There is none. There is only silence, and Vashti knows that it is it; the machine is stopping, and it is the end of the world. Unable to face the horrors of Direct Experience, she dies. As we emerge blinking into our own countryside, our towns and our cities, we can relish our own Direct Experience. Never again will we take for granted the mundane pleasures of expressing ourselves through the thousands of social interactions of which a day is composed. Except perhaps on a rainy Thursday morning in February… Forster’s famous phrase in Howards End is “Only Connect”, and thankfully, and thanks to the machine, we do.