The start of any semester leaves me in a bundle of nerves. Who will my students be? How will they gel as a group? Will I still find the material interesting?

But preparing to teach my Contagion class this semester seemed especially daunting. I hadn’t been teaching last spring, when NYU Abu Dhabi, like most other schools around the world, had to make the big shift to remote learning. I had peeked over several colleagues’ shoulders and worked closely with the Core curriculum faculty in particular, but I hadn’t felt the full trepidation of testing my own skills in a new teaching arena.

I gave myself pep talks, reminded myself that Zoom teaching must have its own affordances. Shouldn’t the tech allow some things to happen that just can’t happen in a live classroom? Surely I’ll find those windows, I told myself, if I adopt appropriate course design principles.

I planned to give new life to the comments section of my course site, giving reticent students more room to participate. I tried to imagine prompts for breakout sessions, collaborative work in Google Docs and virtual field trips. I looked for audiobooks, podcasts or recorded lectures that might give students a break from their screens. I worried about how disparate their time zones or internet access might be.

Fortunately, my students are all clustered within a few hours of each other and can manage two synchronous sessions each week. I know colleagues who have spent the summer creating videos, recording lectures and assembling slide decks, all in anticipation of asynchronous delivery. But even with everyone in the same Zoom call, I faced my own challenges. When I’m teaching, I find myself scrutinizing each window, trying to see who’s there, awake, confused or eager to speak. And I was left worrying: Can the chemistry of a live room translate to the screen? What was lost when physical bodies and minds were no longer in immediate proximity?

After our first session, I made a list of things I already missed: the way a pre-class conversation ends abruptly when I walk into the room a few minutes late; the knowing glances, eye rolls and occasional laughter that can crisscross a classroom and organize my students into smaller units of friendships; and the phones under the table in lame attempts to disguise texting. The energy that rippled through the room, rising and falling with blood sugar levels, sent cues that informed me whether I needed to circle back, say something again or send the conversation in a new direction. The segmented Zoom grid seemed to build barriers against this kind of energy.

From the minute they populated my screen, I could tell that I would like this group of students as much as any class I’d taught before. But how would we make up for lost connections?

I decided to hold mandatory, one-on-one office hour appointments with my students. In recent semesters, I’ve required a similar check-in at midterm. But moving this exercise to the first week has helped me feel connected to them right away, individually and as a group. What had their last six to eight months been like? They’d been scattered around the globe, with or without friends; stranded at study abroad sites or here on campus; quarantining for five weeks in a cheap hotel without seeing another human being outside a hazmat suit; stuck at home all summer, but with the rest of the family stuck somewhere else; losing or almost losing loved ones; or just losing time.

The sheer diversity of experience among my 16 students was staggering. Yes, these stories were relevant to my course, which is, after all, about the ways in which contagion and fears of contagion can reorganize social structures, experience and even identity, often unevenly. But more importantly, they helped me recognize my students’ humanity, the ways in which their lives had been upended and made more vulnerable. It was an emotional temperature taking, more important, probably, than the literal temperature checks that seem to regulate every threshold of our Covid-19 existence.

This diversity of experience is especially important to bear in mind when it comes to the Class of 2024, still rooted for the most part in their home countries but having entered our community virtually. Earlier this week, I met with the First Year Dialogue group I will co-facilitate this year. Compared to my Contagion students, the majority of whom have made their way back to Abu Dhabi, this representative sample of the incoming class is stretched across almost a dozen time zones. Some connections were shakier than others, some faces sleepier too.

And yet there they were, making jokes in the chat box on a Tuesday night, collaborating on Jamboard sketches, reflecting on what they’d learned about netiquette and the volatility of social media by monitoring the anonymous NYUAD forums for most of the last year. What would their NYUAD experience look like? When would they begin to feel normal? Would the way their university experience started actually serve to strengthen their bonds as a class?

If my Contagion class has taught me anything over the last eight years, it’s that attempts to barricade ourselves against one another — desperate, shoring up attempts at self isolation — are bound to backfire. Like it or not, contagion reminds us that we’re connected, even if a pandemic’s more dire consequences are unevenly spread. Those connections demand organization and imagination as we start again.

Returning to university, physically or in our varied virtual networks, I hope we can imagine our way into more empathetic relations as a community, across whatever lines divide us, including the line between professors and students. In meetings with Core faculty, I make the case that we don’t have to be stuck in crisis mode in order to practice compassion in the way we teach.

And when students ask me for free advice, I tell them to be brave. Tell your professors where you’ve been this year, what ups and downs you’ve had on a spectrum from excitement to exhaustion. You just might find we’ve been there, only human, too.