Yearly Note 2020: Pandemic
2020 was the year I had planned to leave, and couldn't.
I'd come in wanting to push hard against the traditional classroom. Years of small experiments and a growing shelf of learning theories had convinced me that student-centered, informal teaching was the right direction. The clearest expression of that was the Deconstructing Algorithms thesis project, which sat at the intersection of philosophy and algorithmic design and questioned processes most people take for granted. I was genuinely excited about it.
Then COVID-19 stopped everything. The hardest part wasn't my own disrupted plans but watching students lose the chance to explore what they were capable of. The halt forced me to look harder at how the design school ran its projects, at how rigid the structure was and how little it asked of collaboration. It made me more determined, not less, to find another way.
In the second half of the year I took on the new online upskill courses, which finally let me teach in the informal register I'd been reaching for. I had meant to leave Srishti by the middle of 2020. The pandemic, and some other things, didn't let me. So I stayed, adapted, and rethought what I was actually trying to do.