I was never much of a dater. I’ve always had lots of friends and easily found boyfriends within my music scene. I’m 40 and met my husband when I was 26, narrowly missing the whole internet-dating thing. Admittedly, I am one of those people who made fun of people who sought human contact in this way. So it’s a little funny to me that I have been teaching online for two years now. Of course teaching is not the same as looking for a soul mate, but it is still communicating over the transom of the Internet. Though I do love looking at human faces, making dramatic gestures and using humor and innuendo in “on-ground” classes (as they’re known in some circles), I enjoy teaching online a lot more than I expected to. Real human connections are made–especially in creative nonfiction classes, where students are sharing so much of their lives and themselves on the page.
The online classroom may be advantageous to memoirists and shy writers, allowing them anonymity that’d be unimaginable in a traditional class. It has also opened me up to students worldwide, offering a more diverse classroom than usual. (One of my childhood dreams was to “know someone in every country.”) But what a joy it was to recently learn that one of our Life’s a Bitch Books students actually lives nearby in Arlington! I met her for lunch, where we joked that we felt like it was a match.com date but were both happy that we “actually looked like our pictures.” Whew. She was lovely and brainy and full of ambition–all that I could ever want in a student and fellow writer-in-the-trenches! I hope to meet more of my online cohorts, some day, some way. It seems totally possible as this big world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
How lucky am I that my online teachers are local to me? Pretty. Freakin. Cool.