Last week the first three days were national holidays for Golden Week, while Thursday and Friday were canceled by the university because of the worsening coronavirus situation. Nevertheless, I held the two graduate school classes I teach on Fridays--on Zoom. They were mostly OK that way, reminding me of how we did everything last year. One member of the class with six students joined us from a Starbucks, so sometimes we could hear people talking in his background, but otherwise it was OK.
In that class we covered chapters 3 and 4 of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Claudia and Jamie walking forty blocks from Grand Central Terminal to the Met, where they set up camp, joining kids' tour groups by day and sleeping in a fancy and musty Renaissance bed at night and generally becoming a team), while in the PhD class my student and I read and talked about three more Emily Dickinson poems (we seem to be able to work in three per ninety-minute session). But what about next week? Well... Our university has canceled all university classes for next week, because we are supposed to get ready to do what were in person classes online, but our graduate school is carrying on as usual, though we are being given the option (which I will probably take) of moving our classes online. So it looks like for the foreseeable future we'll generally be online... but! we are being given the option with graduate school classes and with the university classes in the major of our departments of doing online OR in person classes, the university letting teachers decide such things. What will I do? I am leaning towards doing all the classes I have to decide about, even the PhD class with a single student, online... It seems safer than staying in a room with one person or six people or nine people or thirty-two people for ninety minutes. My main concern is that if I do my classes online, what will other teachers do? That is, I might help cause situations where students have my class online one period and another teacher's class in person the next period, which might be difficult for them to manage. Keep in mind that Japan has of yet only vaccinated about 1% of the very oldest citizens! Hmmm. So next week might be another short week for me (though I will have a few graduate school classes). Good luck to us all!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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