I had to teach my Introduction to Psychology class today to 300+ students from my cell phone while I was trapped in my apartment building elevator with my two young kids.

This has to go down as my most surreal and stressful teaching experience.

For context, I'm teaching a huge Intro Psych class this fall. It's totally remote and was massively overenrolled so I'm. trying to teach 360 students from around the world in the pandemic.

But others have it worse and the students are great so it's been fun thus far.

The first problem is that the local schools are closed and I have limited child care.

So I have to get my kids from day care at 3pm and race back to my apartment by 3:30pm. My son crashes my course and likes to share his thoughts, but the students find it funny so I don't mind.

Today, I set up my computer, raced to get my kids, and then we got back to my apartment at 3:20pm. Class starts at 3:30pm.

We hopped in the elevator and i breathed a sigh of relief that I was going to make it to my class on time.

As the elevator closes and starts moving up, it lurches to a halt and starts dropping. I got that feeling in my stomach that happens when you are in a roller coaster and it starts falling.

Then it stops moving completely.

Ok, no need to panic. The door won't open and the elevator won't move. But I use the call button to contact the staff from the elevator.

They promise to call a repair man from the elevator company to help us escape.

I'm now texting people to figure out what to do. My daughter (8 years old) starts getting scared. My son (10 years) starts teasing her about overreaching. She starts crying.

Things were melting down pretty good at that point. But we rallied and calmed down.

I figured my students would be worried if I didn't show up for class.

My internet reception was horrible (you know when it only has one bar of reception). I wasn't high enough to access my wifi either.

But I tried to login into my NYU Classes website to contact my students.

Thankfully, I managed to login and send out an email announcement to the class by 3:28pm.

The subject line: "Trapped in my elevator, will start class as soon as I’m rescued"

By this point, a certain level of camaraderie had developed in the elevator.

We had a dawning recognition that were all in this together and would pull through.

I reminisced about the time I was stuck in the elevator with Jack 5 years ago and we laughed about those old times!

But time passed. The kids got anxious. And I started to worry about my poor students and how I would manage to finish the lecture on time. The midterm is next week.

After half an hour, I made an executive decision to try and teach from the friendly confines of the elevator.

I desperately tried to get enough internet access to login into NYU Classes and access my zoom link.

But zoom made this incredibly hard on my phone. They needed me to download an app and then login. In many ways, this was the biggest challenge of the entire ordeal.

Eventually, I logged into my class. But the internet was so weak that I couldn't speak to the students.

So I logged out and logged in again using the phone link. I would just give the lecture over the phone without video or slides. It seemed like the only option.

I was finally able to phone into my class. I could see there were over 200 students already in the room and they were just chatting, speculating about my new life in the elevator.

They seemed strangely relaxed. Their lives seemed somehow fuller than our life in the elevator.

But I spoke. They kept talking. I yelled my name. They heard and recognized me. The class was afoot!

I could hear their collective surprise--especially once they realized I was still trapped in the elevator and the class was still going forward.

I could hear one student yelling to her roommate that her professor was trapped in an elevator. Others seemed excited to give this a try.

Apparently they'd never been taught from a professor stuck in an elevator before. It would give the class a fresh new twist.

Then it dawned on me that I had no way of showing them my carefully crafted slides on the conscious and unconscious mind. They were on my computer. In my apartment.

I suddenly felt very alone. Would I be able to remember the lecture? Had I made a mistake by jumping on the call?

Then I just started talking about consciousness and it went surprisingly well for stressed out guy giving a lecture over his phone with no notes while trapped in an elevator with his kids.

Sure, I lowered my standards. But I felt it was only fair under the circumstances.

As I'm talking, I realized my kids are just staring at me with perplexed looks on their faces.

They weren't horrified, but seemed almost confused by what was transpiring as I raised my voice to explain how we have many mental processes that operate outside our awareness.

After about 50-excruciatingly-long-minutes in the elevator, it jolted and then started to move.

The doors opened. We could see our beautiful nondescript lobby and the sun beaming in from the front doors.

We cautiously stepped out into freedom.

I was able to catch the other elevator upstairs, boot up my laptop, and give the rest of the lecture from the now-seemingly-normal confines of my kitchen table.

I'm not sure how this will play out my semester teaching evaluations, but at this point of 2020, who cares anyways.

Postscript: Why didn't I cancel my class? I don't know. It all seemed weirdly normal in the moment. Each step just seemed to logically follow the prior step.

As I type it all out, I am now deeply aware of how absurd this was. I will not be teaching in elevators in the future.

A few weeks ago, I co-wrote an article about how our current work expectations need to be changed to reflect the stress of teaching during the pandemic.

And that was *before* I was stuck teaching my class while trapped in an elevator with my kids. It just gets worse and worse. https://twitter.com/jayvanbavel/status/1299385550525419521