Here is the moment that used to wreck my labs. I am mid-demonstration, six steps into a configuration, and a hand goes up: “Mine says access denied.” I walk over. It is a typo. By the time I return to the front I have lost my place, the room has lost the thread, and two more hands are up. The demo has become a troubleshooting session with an audience.
For an instructor whose attention does not switch cheaply, and that describes a lot of us, this is not a small cost. Every context switch has a re-entry fee, and it is paid in the quality of whatever comes next. So I separated the two jobs.
Demonstrating and troubleshooting now happen at different times. During a demonstration, I demonstrate. Individual problems wait for the doing phase, when I am walking the room anyway. I say this on day one and I repeat it on the slide: “If your machine misbehaves during the demo, write it down. I will be at your desk in five minutes.” Students accept it, because it comes with a promise that gets kept.
Questions go into one channel. In class that might be a shared doc, a stack of index cards, or the chat in a virtual section. Outside class it is the LMS inbox, and only the inbox, not a mix of email, texts, and hallway conversations that I then have to reconstruct from memory. One channel means one place to look and nothing that slips through because it arrived at the wrong door.
I review the channel at planned pauses. In class, that is the break between demonstrating and doing, when I scan the cards or the doc and answer the three questions that matter to everyone at once. Outside class, it is a fixed time each weekday. Batching questions lets me give considered answers instead of reflexive ones, and it stops the day from dissolving into forty interruptions of two minutes each.
Then I publish the expectation. My syllabus states when students can expect replies: inbox messages answered within one business day, grades within a week. This sounds like a policy for students, and it is, but it is also a policy for me. Once the window is public, I stop feeling that every unanswered message is a small failure, and students stop refreshing for a reply that was never going to come at midnight.
Community colleges rarely give us teaching assistants, so the structure has to do the work an assistant would. A single channel and a planned pause are that structure. They are also, not incidentally, better for students. The person who was afraid to interrupt gets the same access as the person who never hesitated, and everyone learns that a considered answer tomorrow beats a distracted one now.
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