"Several guests arrived in our virtual conference room hours before our session was scheduled to begin. When I beamed in from my own classroom, “Petty,” an English teacher from Taiwan, and Mansoor, a principal from Karachi, were struggling to converse. Accents were thick and the audio murky. Petty was telling Mansoor to move a lamp so that his face would be lit, as it was strongly silhouetted against a bright wall. Mansoor, repeatedly mistaking her pleas for questions about his computer lab, delved deeper into descriptions of his facilities. Meanwhile, Shukufa flitted in and out from Azerbaijan, posting missives to an empty chat room. With nearly an hour’s wait before our online professional development workshop was to begin, it was already approaching midnight in Pakistan and nearly 3:00 a.m. in Taiwan. Petty and Mansoor were clearly fatigued, but they were also unmistakably excited."

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