The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
statement
ILLUSTRATION BY ????
Zoom fatigue: A new
way to be exhausted
in college
BY LEAH LESZCZYNSKI, STATEMENT COLUMNIST
Wednesday, September 9, 2020 — 16
W
alking
briskly
to
my
French class to escape the
Michigan chill, I savor the
blinding morning sun and let the autumn
breeze tangle my hair as I weave through
the bottlenecks of people in Angell Hall
to arrive at my first class just a little bit
early. My classmates line the narrow
Tisch hallway, most of them scrolling
mindlessly on their phones, some chat-
ting about today’s homework — what
they did not understand or failed to com-
plete, fighting sleeplessness under a dim,
dorm-room light. When 9 a.m. hits, I ex-
change smiles with the cute boy leaving
the previous section, make a joke about
being unable to speak French and head
in for 50 minutes of the bittersweet pain
that is LSA’s language requirement. A
year later, these are little moments that I,
that we, do not have this fall. Now, with
approximately 78 percent of University
of Michigan undergraduate credits tak-
ing place entirely online this fall, most of
our education is entirely remote. Bright
lecture halls and poorly painted discus-
sion rooms with more bodies than desks
have been replaced with our own homes,
apartments and hours upon hours of
Zoom meetings.
At the beginning of the pandemic, the
rapid replacement of in-person gather-
ings with video calls sparked extensive
discussion of “Zoom fatigue,” a widely-
used label for the impacts of excessive
virtual meetings on one’s well-being.
Though some of us forgot the annoyance
of sitting through an unfulfilling virtual
discussion once winter classes ended,
Zoom fatigue is making an un-
welcome return in our stu-
dent lives with the be-
ginning of the fall
term. Engineering
junior
Braden
C r i m m i n s
c o m m e n t -
ed on this
phenomenon in an email to The Daily.
“I’m a computer science major, so I
spend a lot of my time on the computer
just to get my work done,” Crimmins
said. “Having all of my classes over Zoom
only adds to the time I spend looking at
a screen.”
Even if you find joy in not having to
rush from Angell to your organization
meetings, seize the opportunity to get
ready only from the waist up or revel in
the ability to leave the camera off, Zoom
fatigue is one of the many new obstacles
of our current, unfamiliar learning envi-
ronment.
The situations in which we attend our
virtual classes are stressful in new, pro-
found ways for many of us. Student is-
sues of housing, food security and inter-
net access have been exacerbated by the
pandemic, with many students experi-
encing the financial and emotional strain
COVID-19 has created. On top of these
stressors, there are also aspects of the
virtual classes themselves that inspire
the term Zoom fatigue.
Grainy screens and unstable con-
nections fail to provide us with a large
amount of the nonverbal cues that help
us learn and engage with our professors
and peers. Priti Shah, professor of Cogni-
tion & Cognitive Neuroscience and Edu-
cational Psychology at the University,
explained in an email interview with The
Daily the difficulties a lack of nonverbals
can create.
“Face-to-face interactions rely a lot on
visual cues. It is easy to tell if people are
paying
atten-
t i o n ,
whether someone wants to speak, wheth-
er they are agreeing or disagreeing and so
forth. In a Zoom meeting, it is much more
challenging to read people,” Shah said.
“There is no eye contact, or shared eye
gaze to provide these cues.”
The nonverbal cues we are fortunate
enough to observe are analyzed with
more effort, energy and assumption, as
much as can be gleaned from reading a
person solely from the shoulders or head
up.
“Even if people are explicitly nodding
or raising hands, it takes extra effort to
scan through all the people. … There is
often a temporal delay,” Shah said. “All
of these factors make it necessary to con-
sciously think about things that normal-
ly would be fairly automatic.” The con-
scious attention to these little things is
part of what makes hours of online class-
es and student organization meetings so
exhausting.
The ability to multitask during virtual
meetings also opens the gates to a flood
of distractions that are less acceptable
(and oftentimes banned) during in-per-
son classes, allowing us the opportunity
to lose focus during class.
“As an educational psychologist, I
know that under the best of conditions,
students’ minds wander while listening
to lectures,” Shah said. “At least some
studies have found that mind-wandering
is more pervasive for online lectures than
in-class lectures.”
In our Zoom lectures, we are tempted
to text, wander into the alluring abyss
of social media and respond to emails
while trying to learn — actions many of
us avoided during in-person classes to
maintain our focus and avoid disap-
proving looks from our professors.
Relatedly, Shah commented on
how the ability of professors to
be engaging may be affected
by virtual classes, explain-
ing that, “Students also
tend to be motivated
and attentive when
they feel that the in-
structor genuinely
cares about their
learning … the
caring may be
communicat-
ed with eye
contact,
or
smiles or a
brief inter-
action.”
For many
of us, these
s e e m i n g l y
trivial
in-
t e r a c t i o n s
help us feel
more
in-
volved in a
class,
which
would explain
why their ab-
sence can create
a
less
engaging
setting, where the
constant
allure
of
seemingly higher pro-
ductivity poses a threat
to our focus and learning.
With all these stressors and changes
to our education in mind, it makes sense
why so many of us are experiencing the
tiring toll of Zoom fatigue. Even more
daunting is the fact that virtual meet-
ings are not only replacing our classes,
but numerous other social interactions
as well, making the onslaught of constant
video calls overwhelming at times. Our
student organization meetings are now
via Zoom — even Festifall used Zoom to
interact with potential new members in-
stead of seducing open-mouthed, starry-
eyed freshmen with its endless tables and
scarily enthusiastic canvassers that are
guaranteed by the usual, in-person for-
mat.
On the personal side, FaceTime din-
ners, birthday parties and hangouts are
now a larger part of our social lives than
ever. But constant video calls are ex-
hausting and a reminder of the fact that
we are unable to experience the once-
normal ebb and flow of last-minute plans
and spontaneous, in-person connections
that create some of the best memories. I
miss watching my friend from across the
hall eat eight cookies from the Mosher-
Jordan dining hall after a night of sur-
prisingly competitive pick-up basketball
at the Central Campus Recreation Build-
ing more than anything (except Mo-Jo
cookies themselves), but I try to be grate-
ful that I can still see her over FaceTime.
There are greater issues of this time
than Zoom fatigue, and while exploring
the additional stressors virtual classes
create for many of us, we ought to ac-
knowledge the monumental benefits
video technology provides. We are still
able to receive a Michigan education (al-
beit, at an increased price), connect with
our family and friends and continue our
lives in many ways because of platforms
like Zoom and FaceTime. LSA freshman
Megan Mattichak explained some of the
benefits of her virtual classes in an email
to The Daily.
“Asynchronous lectures help me learn
at my own pace, and move ahead of
schedule earlier in the week, so that I can
be free on days for extracurricular activi-
ties that I may have not previously been
free during,” she said.
It is obvious this pandemic — pro-
longed by an ignorant presidential ad-
ministration and many people unwilling
to follow public health measures — will
continue to change our world in pro-
found ways, and the pandemic’s impli-
cations for the future of education are
no different. I hope that in the future,
we will once again have the luxuries of
dreading a walk to class in an unpredict-
ed Michigan snow, politely turning down
canvassers at the front of Mason Hall and
cramming onto a Blue Bus to get to our
next class.
But for now, I’ll continue in this new
reality: starting each morning after savor-
ing an extra half hour of sleep, watching
the sun dance off the calleryana leaves
shining through my childhood bedroom
windows and wandering to my desk
donning third day hair and sweatpants,
grateful for another day and another 50
minutes of the bittersweet pain that is
LSA’s language requirement.
ILLUSTRATION BY EILEEN KELLY