Students and Teachers Deal With Zoom Moments

Audrey Tobin ('21), Orbit Contributor

The video conferencing platform Zoom has quickly become the center of school life. It’s the brand new form of a classroom and has changed the way school operates. With new innovations, always comes errors and learning experiences, resulting in a fair share of embarrassing moments.  Zoom is no exception to that.

For the most part, Zoom still requires some getting used to. The most common mistake made by students on Zoom is accidentally keeping their mics on. When participating, turning your mic on and off, it’s quite easy to leave yourself unmuted without even realizing. This can result in all types of personal horror stories. 

Cosmopolitan published a zoom confessions article by Carina Hsieh, titled “11 Zoom Confessions That’ll Have You Double-Checking Your Mute Button”. With the very first sentence being, “Do not pee on a call. I repeat, do NOT pee on a call.” The article later goes on to tell the embarrassing confession of a woman named Maggie, who used the restroom during a meeting. Her video was off and she believed her audio was off too, however that wasn’t the case.

As much as embarrassment stings in the moment, it makes looking back at these crazy COVID times a little more humorous.

 

Attending school at home comes with the obstacle of dealing with other family members. It’s very likely a family member can interrupt you during class, but the embarrassing moment starts when a student realizes they are unmuted. RMHS senior, Carissa Carr had that exact experience in her math class. “I was taking a math test where I had to have my camera on and mic unmuted and my sister, Kayla came into my room, just busted in screaming about how I was wearing her new sweatshirt. I wasn’t allowed to mute because of “cheating” so I just sat there and went ‘I’m taking a test and I’m unmuted, you need to get out.’ It was the most embarrassing thing ever.” 

From the teachers’ perspective, these moments have brought quite a bit of humor to what was expected to be a somewhat depressing teaching experience. “I once had a student think his mic was off and he did a crazy loud yawn and it was a hilarious start to class. (We all needed a laugh like that),” RMHS math teacher, Ms. Griffin-Roland wrote in an email regarding embarrassing Zoom moments experienced in her classes.

As much as embarrassment stings in the moment, it makes looking back at these crazy COVID times a little more humorous. It’s brought a level of interest to a type of schooling that lacks the bold personalities and charisma students display in their classrooms.