Man, I would fuck with my teachers for this one. Here are some ideas:
-
Turn it off and on randomly, pretend you don't know what's wrong. If the teacher keeps pointing it out, say sorry but it's an older cam.
-
Eventually just leave it off partway through a lesson. Say it broke and you can't do anything about it now.
-
Get some colored glass. Say you fixed it, but the whole picture is now red. Or just get strong sunglasses and it's very dark in your room.
-
Mix yourself a drink in full view of the camera. Say it's for after the lesson.
-
Record a loop of yourself sitting attentively and typing and play it back instead of having a live feed.
The last one is probably the one you want to do long-term. The rest is just some fun for yourself.
-
Can you load a video loop of yourself? Would that help?
i keep forgetting i set that as my username and always get shocked when someone calls me that
Just tell yourself absolutely no one likes being recorded live, they probably have some anxiety due to this as well, I often have to deal with anxiety when I'm with others, or hell, even while on the phone; and relativizing helps a lot. Like, they're just some regular folks, and in your case, you won't see them again once you're done with uni anyway, so there's always that.
and the multitude of insecure bullshit corporate platforms that are deeply not-okay for me to put on any device I value!
The big blind spot in my education was mathematics. Great with humanities, decent with sciences, but I got to algebra and it stopped being a tangible thing with use-value. I can calculate an artillery shell's trajectory with the quadratic formula but the only mental understanding of that or why it's important is specifically the one example of it where I'm analysing something real. To get into the higher level algebra courses for my degree, the school required an algebraic literacy course. It's taught by a grad student whose research is on anxiety in mathematics testing. Twice a week for two hours you're doing algebra in the ideal environment for it which sounds great.
I don't know what that looks like in a classroom. On zoom it's a quick lecture where everything written is immediately out of frame followed by random groups working through a list of 10-20 problems. I see a bunch of numeric gibberish like I'm a CSI Miami investigator and then one or two classmates are staring me directly in the face and depending on me for time-sensitive problem solving. I'm doing work I don't understand, that I have to cram youtube videos for just to make sure the patterns look right, with two strangers I fuck over if I'm not as fast as them. Who are looking directly at my face for two hours.
That class made me actively unlearn algebra. I felt more anxiety before those sessions than I did in an ambulance riding to cardiac arrests.
Math is hilarious in that there are like, 15 different ways you can be taught a certain subject, and different people respond to different methods in radically different ways. But the way it works now, you get pretty much a random professor out of the three or so in a department, and they usually teach it the way they understood it, and if you don't get it then it's your fault. Definitely go to youtube for stuff your professor is unable or unwilling to help you with. I highly recommend Professor Leonard's youtube channel, he has a ton of college algebra and beyond stuff and a lot of people seem to react to him positively.
Try to look at it from the teacher's perspective, it must suck to have to talk for hours in front of a faceless chatroom where everyone has their cameras turned off and you don't know if they're even paying attention.
As a teacher. Thats fine. With the side I'm using you have to "activate" the students to even being able to hear them. Generally I unmute only so they can answer to my questions or ask questions on their own. For students who don't like to pay attention this is bad, but at least now they can't disrupt the lesson and harras the interested students. For me it is much more relaxed. There is a problem with shy students not wanting to speak up, but generally the rest being muted / not being able to make grimaces helps with this as well. Now I wish for a mute option when we go back to school. Also my subjects are math and chemistry it's harder for stuff like languages and music.
Oh I was thinking about college classes. Usually the students are past the age where they'll disrupt the lesson if they're bored.
Yeah having to have the camera on is a fuck. Are you talking uni or school or what?
Can you say your connection is poor and you don’t have the bandwidth to keep the video on?
Maybe you can ask them if you can turn it off. In all my classes policies around cameras and whatever aren't that strict or really enforced at all that I know of (except maaaybe during exams). Only benefit is I might be able to answer a question because I don't have to raise my voice. But it feels like a gun is being pointed at your head for the entire class.
