2026-01-08 05:45:06
In the fall of 2021, after a remote year, I was teaching in person wearing a mask close to 100% of the time. A few weeks into one intro course, where the students didn’t already know me, I lowered my mask for a moment and there were audible gasps from the class. They’d never seen the lower half of my face!
“What did you •think• was going to be down there?!” I quipped. (Maybe they were picturing tentacles, like an Ood?)
But the gasp was genuine: after hours of looking at my masked face, they still had no idea what my •unmasked• face looks like.
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