Going Remote
A Teacher's Journey
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic.
Going Remote is a joint production of The Censored Press and Seven Stories Press.
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
Includes back matter revealing the literary and theoretical touchpoints that inform Going Remote (works by Octavia Butler, Neil Postman, Jaron Lanier, and Diane Ravitch).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bessie's debut graphic memoir of teaching at a community college during the pandemic while undergoing treatment for cancer swells with a determined optimism even while being threaded with dystopian references. Bessie believes in the community college system as a hub of diversity crucial to class mobility. In January 2020, he steps onto his San Francisco Bay Area campus after an eight-month sabbatical; he's been working on a memoir about his decade-long game of cat and mouse with a brain tumor. He embraces the institution's smells of "strawberry vape," buzzy with student's collective energy. But by March, "We are subjects in ‘The Great Zoom-School Experiment.' " He plays amateur IT guy and social worker, and teaches to "little black boxes" with muted mics. His students, many of them already marginalized, drop out or face a litany of crises. Bessie's suspicious of techie solutions—"Free-market technocrats see this as an opportunity to accelerate their agenda to monetize public education"—and draws parallels to the science fiction literature on his syllabus. Glanting's drawings are thick with shadow and cyborgian representations of a world isolated by multiple diseases. But as a teacher, Bessie's idealism holds through, and he ends on an open-ended note—the pandemic still unfurling, his tumor held at bay by an experimental medication. As he writes: "Right now, we're here," and that is fragile and poignant enough.
