In this article, the author writes that in online education, students and professors can lose important connections to each other. Obviously distance learning has merits. People who might not other-wise have access to education can take online courses. That is particularly true for women, who must often balance mothering with paid work and find it impossible to be a student in the parameters of traditional education. But online courses are just a substitute for traditional education because a classroom full of bodies is quite literally full of real, living matter. In other words, it's the real thing. At the most basic level, to be a student has always meant actually dragging one's exhausted body into class with readings in hand, being (more or less) awake, alert, listening, and ready to open one's mouth. And to be a teacher, for the author, means seeing the faces of the students and how their bodies reflect their thoughts and emotions, hearing the timbre of their voices or the lilts in their dialects, experiencing them before me in the rich mix of ideas.