Searching for Squirrels and Craving Connection, an Ocean Apart

By Jess Wilber ‘21, Taigu Fellow 2021-2023

As with many college students across the US that were sent home in March of 2020, I left knowing the chances of my return would be slim. My entire senior year was going to be spent abroad, beginning with a cross-continental environmental justice program during the fall and ending with a language immersion program in China during the spring. It felt like my entire college experience had been building towards this year abroad. Of course, by the time August rolled around, the pandemic was only getting worse.

I spent my fall semester in remote work and remote classes. All that time spent staring at a screen left me feeling unfulfilled and unfocused. Instead of absorbing the things I was being taught, it felt like I was only getting disconnected fragments of information. As many fellows before me have noted, it felt like I was drowning in a monotonous limbo, unsure of how to move forward with my life or cope with the tragedies happening all around me. My Chinese language class was by far the most challenging to stay engaged with. By the end of the semester, it sounded as though my language skills had regressed. Knowing it wouldn’t be safe to travel anytime soon, I opted to graduate a semester early and enter full-time work.

When I learned I had been accepted to the Shansi Fellowship, I couldn’t contain my excitement. Would I finally get the opportunity to participate in the language immersion and cultural exchange I had been hoping for? I knew it wouldn’t be a guarantee. But as August rolled with no news about visa paperwork, it quickly became clear that I would be teaching remotely. I thought back to my own experience with remote learning a year prior: the disconnect from my professor and classmates, the lack of motivation to complete assignments, and the difficulty staying focused through lectures. With 285 students to teach, how could I possibly provide a different experience?

The first four weeks of classes were very difficult to manage. I had many technical challenges, like not getting added to my class’ WeChat groups, power outages, and slow internet speed. I also struggled to get feedback from most of my students about whether the content of the lectures was meaningful, interesting, and easy enough for them to understand. I felt like I was already failing to provide a constructive learning environment for my students. As I graded the first few weeks of assignments, I had a renewed sense of gratitude for how hard my own professors tried to connect with me and my classmates, even when they must have felt like they were drowning in this monotonous limbo as well. Like me, I’m sure all they wanted was to know they were providing something worthwhile to their students.

After sending out the first round of feedback on assignments, I was overjoyed to see the following message from one of my class monitors:

“Dear Jess, I am moved by your earnest teaching attitude. I read the homework that you corrected for me and my peers. The notes on the homework were very detailed, so that everyone could understand the meaning. Before we went to graduate school, we rarely had the opportunity to communicate directly with foreign teachers. For most students, you are our first foreign teacher. Everybody's English level is not neat, since we are accustomed to exam-oriented education through paper tests. I can say my English ability is not very good, but through two weeks of practicing spoken English, I feel it is already useful. You gave us the assignments that were very interesting and not too hard. It has really made an improvement on the dumb English we learned before!”

Another student messaged me to reassure me that the technical issues thus far had not affected anyone’s interest in my class:

“Through our dialogue in the past month, my friends and I all think you are a very gentle and patient teacher, more like a good friend. At the beginning, it is inevitable that there are problems, but just like now, we have overcome the difficulties!”

Despite the encouragement, I was nervous about my first office hours. I had no idea what to expect, or if students would even want to attend. I logged in to TencentVoov- a video conferencing platform like Zoom or Microsoft Teams- and waited for students to arrive. It was 6:00 AM for me, and I was far from a morning person. Suddenly, the waiting room began to fill up. I watched the number of attendees jump from 5 to 15 to 35 in a matter of seconds.

I could tell my students and I were feeling the same way: wary, shy, and a little confused. No one had their camera on except for me, so we were all staring at a screen of mostly black boxes with names. I had prepared some ice breaker questions for the group, which people were reluctant to answer. Sending in voice recordings as part of their weekly homework was one thing, but answering questions off the cuff was an entirely different ask. After 10 minutes of my questions and example responses being met with awkward silence, I decided to try a different approach. Clearly, my students wanted to be here, and they wanted to practice. But they needed a moment of genuine connection with me to take that next step.

I told students they could ask me anything they wanted about my life, but to do so, they had to turn their cameras on and try to ask the question aloud. As I answered questions about my age, previous work, what I studied in school, and what Chicago was like, my students started to warm up and feel more comfortable talking to me. When my dogs wandered in front of the screen, my students got even more excited, turning on their cameras just to wave to them. But the thing that got all my students animated and eager for more office hours was far from what I expected: a squirrel.

Growing up in the Midwest, I saw squirrels so often that I stopped noticing them. Even at Oberlin, where the fabled albino squirrel would immediately halt all campus activities when it appeared, I didn’t understand the hype. But when a squirrel jumped up on the ledge of the window behind me, my students erupted with enthusiasm. It never occurred to me that many of my students were from larger cities in China, where smaller wildlife like squirrels were rarely seen. We spent the rest of the office hours exchanging stories about amusing past encounters with squirrels.

Now that I had found a solid point of connection with my students, I began taking pictures of every squirrel I saw. I’d send a weekly “squirrel alert” to my students’ WeChat groups, sharing the top squirrel sightings around my neighborhood. I would find ways to weave squirrels into my lessons, through funny gifs, images, and example sentences for vocabulary words. One of my students even sent a video of squirrels in Taigu so that we could compare the physical characteristics.

While I won’t have the opportunity to travel to Shanxi Agricultural University to teach in person or chase down squirrels with my students, I’m grateful to have made meaningful connections with them despite the distance and unending limbo of quarantines. Their excitement for the things I wrote off as part of the monotony of my work from home routine have reignited my curiosity and drive to learn more about the world around me.