I guess you can tell from the masks on our faces in the photo above that the picture is from the new year! (It was taken by one of my two sister-TAs yesterday in my Friday period 1 American Culture class...)
So far this Saturday I haven't developed a sore throat from projecting my voice in classes Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so I think my vocal chords have gotten used to their sudden hard work, so that's nice. I think I haven't caught coronavirus yet, so that's great (a miracle?) There were plenty of occasions where I could catch it, though, as there will be throughout this school year: elevators with multiple people confined for a minute or two, classrooms with many people confined for 90 minutes or so, buses with some people confined for ten or so minutes, my office with two or three people confined for 90 minutes or so, and so on. Not to mention getting to and from classes in the stair wells etc. etc. If I haven't caught it yet, and if the university hasn't developed cluster infection break out sites yet, it must be because everyone (students, kids, staff, etc.) are all always wearing masks and often spraying their hands with alcohol. It will still be a miracle if clusters don't pop up though. Anyway, classes themselves were OK with one exception. My seminar and my graduate school classes all went fine, because the students are bright and funny, fun to spend time with, and they usually say interesting things about the literature we're reading. My culture class was fine, apart from technical troubles with the machine showing my iPad images on screen, such that the right half of each image was shoved to the right and off the screen, so i had to hold each one manually with my finger on my right hand and use the pointer with my left hand, which caused me much left shoulder pain, aggravating my poor shoulder so much, AND trying to get an admin type guy to fix the problem took time... AND because I'd taken too much time to take roll, it meant that I ran out of time for what I wanted to do and so had to hurry and didn't let students ask questions, so felt sorry after. But anyway, really it was probably OK. And even my Freshman Pharmacy Interactive English class was OK, even though I made the poor students start doing self-introduction speeches in front of the class (am I a sadist at heart???). And my Reading and Listening class for freshmen engineers was OK really (I found that one boy likes reading, had challenged a Harry Potter book in English in junior high school and was reading now Flowers for Algernon (in Japanese). The only problem I had was in the Reading and WRiting class for commerce sophomores... It wasn't their fault! The first part was OK, really, when I learned their names and faces (with masks) again and explained the homework handout etc. The problem was when I read with them the first chapter of The Wild Robot when there wasn't enough time to do the whole thing, and I (of course) explained uninteresting difficult things like the copyright page and dedication page and then had to hurry through the end........... I asked the kids what was in the box (crate) on top of some island rocks, and the first two or three students couldn't say or didn't know or didn't understand, but luckily the last guy I had time to ask got it and said, "robot." ANYWAY, I felt sorry because I had probably given them stress by mismanaging time, one of my usual faults as a teacher I've never been able to get rid of. OTHERWISE the work week was fine (well, there was a 2.5 hour meeting Wednesday afternoon that made my butt hurt cause we had to sit on hard chairs in a big classroom on the fifth floor of building 8 (five flights of stairs to walk up first....). Good luck to us all henceforth!
0 Comments
Well, the first week of class is over! I have three classes on Wednesday, two on Thursday, and three on Friday, and I am still exhausted on Saturday.
It was a stressful school week in many ways, including, of course, the big one :coronavirus threats and precautions and concerns. One of those involves having to wear at least one mask for 90 minute long classes. Another involves having to try to make sure that the students sit far enough apart from one another, their natural inclination being to sit in pairs of friends side by side. I try to make them sit diagonally one on the left and one behind on the right and one behind that on the left etc. going back, but it's not always possible when the classroom does not have enough desks to accommodate the number of students in the class, as is the case with my Thursday period 5 reading and writing class where there are 36 people in the class but only 56 desks, and the room is rather compact for that number. The class before that one, interactive English, is perfect, with 28 students and the 56 desks (it's the same room). The University has put spray bottles of alcohol outside each classroom so that on the way in and on the way out we can shu shu our hands and in theory protect ourselves and other people a little bit, but it also feels somehow like a band aid on an amputation, in that in between classes the students form into large masses trying to go in a building or out of a building or in a room or out of a room, and so although they're always wearing masks, this being Japan and not America, they are still often much too close to each other and to a lot of people for my comfort. And then there is simply the issue of having classes in person after one year of having classes online! No matter how difficult it was to change from in person to online last year, I did become used to it, and did come to appreciate not having to leave my home to go to school early in the morning and not having to worry about clothes so much and being able to eat lunch more easily and comfortably and tastily and generally not having to perform in front of a live audience. And even when I was familiar with teaching in person for over 25 years of my career, it was always a stressful struggle to get started in a new school year each April, involving many nightmares before the semester would begin in which I was late to class or I forgot my handouts or I was wearing my pajamas or I could not find the room etc., so now this time all of that usual stress for new year is multiplied by the strangeness of having to be careful about coronavirus and having to get used to teaching in person again. Another challenging part of this experience is that during the vacation between the last fall semester and this new spring semester, I fell into the bad habit of staying up until at least 1:00 AM and waking up at around 9:00 AM in the morning, so that now even though I must wake up much earlier, at 6:30 AM on Wednesday and Thursday and about 5:30 AM in the morning on Friday, I still was staying up until midnight or 1:00 AM and generally not sleeping well. A final challenging part of this experience concerns my sore shoulders, both of them being weak and tender and liable to sharp pains if I move them at certain angles or raise them to a certain height, etc. As a result of my shoulders, it is a challenging adventure in pain avoidance to do any number of daily things I usually take for granted like sleeping, getting out of bed, taking a shower shampooing my hair brushing my teeth washing my face putting on or taking off clothes specially shirts that do not have buttons and so on. My fear going into the new school year was that teaching classes in person would exacerbate my painful shoulder situation, because I tend to use many gestures when I am teaching to try to help my communication and to keep the students from falling asleep etc. Luckily, so far, although my shoulders are both sore when I come home, I wake up and start the next day OK. All this is to say that it was an exhausting start to the new school year, but I did survive it, and I think it's going to be OK, or as OK as it can be to participate in a University with 20,000 students and 3000 or so staff during an epidemic I have a new and terrible virus! As for the classes themselves, I had good impressions from all of them and I already like many of the students in many of the classes. I tried to memorize the names and faces of the three classes I'm teaching that are not for English majors: reading and listening for freshmen engineering students, interactive English for freshmen pharmacy students, and reading and writing for sophomore Commerce students. this was not easy as there are 33 students in the first class, 28 in the second, and 36 in the third. And they're all wearing masks! But I managed to do it for each class, although of course without being able to practice I'm going to forget almost every student in each of those classes during the week intervening until we have our next class. But next time it'll take me less time to memorize them and the next time after that it'll take me less time and so on. In the past, I would have gotten photo name cards from each student and would have been able to practice at home and then really got their names and faces in my head, but I decided that because of the coronavirus I did not want to distribute index cards to a whole class and then make the students paste their photos onto their cards and then return them to me the next time etc. Furthermore, since I've been doing that every year since I've been teaching in Japan, I've accumulated hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of such cards from my over two decades of teaching, and they are taking up a lot of space in a cupboard in my office, and I don't know what to do with them. So I finally thought I'm not going to do that anymore. The first day of each class in each new school year or new semester is always the easiest day, because I just have to introduce the class introduce myself and that's about it. Next week in short will be a bigger challenge than last week in a way because I'll actually have to do some teaching. In contrast with those big classes, I also have some small ones. I have my seminar for 4th year English majors with nine students, and our classroom seems big enough and it has could window ventilation, so I feel relatively safe in there and I like all of the students, and it is nice to meet them in person. I also have a Graduate School seminar kind of class where 6 students plus my teaching assistant, and that is in a big enough room to accommodate probably 40 people, so I feel relatively safe in there also, although it is true that there are no windows to open so we have to keep the doors open. But I really like the students in that class, because they are intelligent and interesting and diligent and funny. And then I have my Graduate School classes for the particular students I am supervising, on Wednesday morning I meet two first year Masters students one Japanese guy and one Chinese young lady, and it should be fine, the only tricky thing will be finding what they want to write their second year Masters theses about. And then there is my time spent with my first year PhD student, who happens to be the big sister of one of the first year Masters students, and it's nice to talk with her also, so that should be OK, although maybe also will need to work a bit to find what she wants to do, although we are going to start by reading and talking about Emily Dickinson poems. As for meetings, my least favorite part of working in the University, we only had one last week, a half hour Graduate School meeting online during lunch on Wednesday, so that wasn't so bad. Next week we have an in person humanities meeting with about 130 faculty members in some big room, and they usually last over 2 hours and are very tiring. So next week promises to be at least as challenging as this week. Right so that is the first week of classes that I survived. Here's hoping the future weeks go just as well. Our university is starting the new school year with classes in person on campus in classrooms. After last year online. My first classes start tomorrow.
I'm in a state of denial and of panic. Tomorrow I'll be in the classroom again! About 20,000 young people cruising around campus. Ninety-minute classes. Crowded stairwells and elevators. Twenty-thousand young people! Not a few old people like me. Yikes. I guess I am kind of looking forward to it a little--it is my job--but I always feel stressed out before a normal school year begins, let alone this coronavirus year. Good luck to everyone! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |