Arts & Culture

The Steamy Anticipation of the Break-Out Room -

or Video Conferencing for Beginners

Plus: Confessions of a Language Teacher

By Susan Isaacs Director of Languages2000

“There really is no greater anticipation than wondering who you will be put into a breakout group with on zoom...” tweeted my son a few weeks ago. I decided to pay close attention.

This video conferencing lark is going better than my wildest dreams. My classes are more packed than ever with brilliant bankers and musicians, lawyers and artists, doctors and journalists, all discussing the ups and downs of the lockdown animatedly in French, Italian, Spanish, German, or Portuguese. But I am well aware that perhaps a certain something is missing. My students can talk to me as I go round the class, asking them questions in French, Italian, Spanish German, or Portuguese. But I am sure there is something else they would like to do, and that is, talk to each other. Enter, centre stage, the “break-out room.” What, you may well ask, is a “breakout room.” Apparently, I am told, with the wonders of modern technology, you can magically separate people on a video conference call, into different rooms to talk to each other.

It sounds a little worrying. What happens if they don’t like each other, or what happens if they like each other so much, that they decide to stop studying French, or Spanish, or Italian, or German, or Portuguese, and start chatting about something completely different. Or what happens if they decide to have subversive conversations about the teacher? But the video conferencing people have thought of everything, it seems. As host you can switch people when you feel like it from one room to another. You can go and visit them, to check they are doing ok, and you can set a timer and then, hey presto, spirit them back into the main room again at will. And if you are worried about the responsibility of choosing who to put with who, the software will take that worry off your plate and select them automatically. And I must confess to all you fellow teachers in particular out there, that the possibility is enticing. While your students are all busy in their break-out rooms, you can take the opportunity to blow your nose, or maybe even make yourself a cup of tea, and no-one will be any the wiser. Whoever designed these video-conferencing software must have been a despot, or at the very least a teacher, at heart, because there is plenty of opportunity to indulge any dictatorial tendencies you may have. First of all you can keep all your students in a waiting room before they enter. It does make you wonder which magazines to leave lying around. You don’t even have to let them in at all. Then once they have entered, you can mute all their microphones, turn all their cameras off, mute some of them and allow others to speak, and if push comes to shove, boot any or all of them out of the room simultaneously. It rather reminds me of a James Bond toy car my brother had when we were little. His greatest joy was pushing the button to the ejector seat in the car, which would shoot the unfortunate passenger out of the window. I must say I have not yet run a class in this way, and have been experimenting anxiously with my nearest and dearest. The problem I hadn’t anticipated was that my kids decided to turn their own cameras off, walk out of the physical room they were in, make their own cups of tea, and mute their own microphones themselves. Perhaps my dictatorial tendencies will have to take a back seat.

But, as my son Alexander said “there is no greater anticipation than wondering who will be put into a breakout group with you on zoom.” And I do wonder in the future which couples, when asked how they first met, will say in all honesty, “well actually we met in a break- out room together.“

Susan is holding language classes on zoom in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Portuguese. See her website www.languages2000.co.uk or contact her for more information on susanelizabethisaacs@icloud.com

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