It's Sunday morning. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining into my room, and the construction noise that has woken me for the past days finally fell silent. Yet all of this, as beautiful as it may seem, does not bring me as much joy as the first thought that comes up in my head: it's Sunday again - time to water my Amaryllis and Schlumbergera (or, as Albert Heijn calls it, 'autumn cactus') again.
These two plants are only 1/4th (by the time of writing this, that is) of my little new obsession. For days, I've been watching YouTube videos on how to regrow your veggies and gardeners commenting on videos on how to regrow your veggies. To make it feel less like procrastination, I'm watching these videos in Spanish - a language I am currently trying to master - desperately attempting to translate the videos filmed in tropical Ecuador to the Dutch November-climate (while, literally, translating the videos).
The result is unsurprisingly underwhelming: the habanero chilli seeds that I've been convincing to sprout for a week now look as uninterested as the average student over zoom (not saying that they are - it's just still a mystery how to look pretty and excited while staring at a screen). I haven't seen my tomato seedlings since I've planted them days ago, just like that one student whose connections is always too bad to turn on their video, leaving you to stare at their initials. My leeks were doing fine for a while, making me send daily update-pictures to my family and friends. But like any student after a day of Zoom classes, it now looks drab and unmotivated to grow further. It's just my spring onions that sprout and grow like they want to win a medal. To be fair, I do harvest them far more often than my leeks. And there you have the perfect metaphor for why hybrid teaching is so important - a breath of UCM every once in a while makes online classes brighter and fresher too.
My store-bought plants are doing brilliantly, but I wouldn't know how to translate that into a Zoom metaphor. A store-bought diploma is the best? That doesn't seem right.
Jesler van Houdt