Ah, this year I had no classes on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, thank the gods!
I did have my last classes of 2016 on Friday the 23rd. It is fun to say "Merry Christmas" to 100 young people and hear them say it back... It is a pity that I lost my temper when too many students trailed in late and later. I decide not to restrain myself from giving my "Being Late Lecture." Ahhhhh.... What a Christmas mood killer! Sigh..... I point out that they aren't late to their part time jobs, to their dates with boy or girl friends, to movies, and so on, so they shouldn't be late to class. Being on time is part of showing respect to the people you do something with. As for me, I was never late to any university class, and was only late once before then, in elementary school grade three, when I forgot that we had a sports festival on Saturday and overslept. I would have been crushed by embarrassment to walk into a class late! I'd have thought (wrongly, probably) that everyone's eyes would be one me, walking in late... So it never happened. Jeeze, taking points off their grades isn't even enough to make them all come on time! I did feel sorry and apologize to the about two thirds of the class who are always on time. ANYWAY. Apart from that blow up, I think the last class was OK, maybe... A last day on the Philip K. Dick story, "Human Is." (maybe they got sick of it...). I showed them some posters of other movies that have situations where an alien or a demon or a ghost etc. possesses a human body, trying to point out that stories can show it positively or negatively, depending on what genre the story belongs to and what intentions the makers have. And finally I had my Teaching Assistant Shiori show a three and a half minute video highlight of the Roswell TV show with Dido's neat song playing, to show what was once a trendy romantic drama in which the aliens are looking like people and engaging in various kinds of romance with some human high school kids (it sounds kinda creepy to say it like that!). Right. ANd in the afternoon, I had my graduate school 1-1 class with Shiori, talking about her third thesis chapter and so on. She WILL finish her thesis by the January 10 deadline, I am convinced now. And it should be a nice thesis (she's comparing Virgil's The Aeneid with Le Guin's Lavinia in terms of gender). Right--so next time I talk with you will be 2017 or close to it, if you can believe that-- Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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