Last week classes were fine! Pronunciation practice in the English Conversation classes, Outside Over There (a picture book by Sendak) in the Seminar, Memorial Day and Obama visiting Hiroshima in Culture class, Puritans and rhyme in Culture and Literature class, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making in graduate school seminar, and "Mountain Ways" by Ursula Le Guin in graduate school thesis study. Whew! Very tired today...
And today is no Saturday day of rest but a day of TRAVEL, because my wife and I are going to China today for a few nights. We'll visit Xian, where the terracotta soldier statues are... I hope I'll be OK for next weeks' classes: they start on Wednesday so I won't miss any, but I also won't have any days of rest and preparation at home... ANYWAY, see you next Saturday!
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Last week the main event was a welcome part for our two near English department teachers, Cho Kanako Sensei and Dodo Emiko Sensei. The party was held in the With the Style hotel downtown, and we all had fun, during our eating and drinking and chatting, I'm pretty sure. It is great to have two new cheerful and positive members in our department. Now we have about 30 teachers. And next year we'll get two or three more new ones...
And... I've been feeling sorry for the two graduate students taking my seminar in American Young Adult fantasy, cause they're having a lot of trouble reading The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland on a Ship of Her Own Making by Catherynne Valente, because there are so many words they don't know and because, I think, Valente uses plenty of irony. I love the novel, but I kind of regret choosing it for our class now. I hope they'll find the next book we'll read, The Coldest Girl in Cold Town by Molly Black, less difficult to read! The highlight of last week was our Friday night TGIF Welcome Party for our 100 first-year English Department students.
Hey! It was great fun. The many student volunteers and the two teacher leaders Stephen and Larry organized things very well, with tasty food in the Bunkei Center 16th floor Sky Lounge Restaurant (with a great view of Fukuoka City going out to the Dome and Tower and islands and sea and sunset), and three interesting games that we hadn't played before and that required English. We do a similar party each year, and this was the first time that there were TOO MANY CAKES! And after eating, chatting, and playing games for nearly two hours, we took some group photos (I hope to get one somehow and put it in this post at some point). A good time was had by all-- Last week was easy because I only had one day of classes, Friday, because of Golden Week holiday. A great thing happened when a first-year student who has practiced classical ballet for eleven years posted a comment on our Introduction to American Culture and Literature class blog in which she said that she was glad to have learned in our previous class about Maria Tallchief (1925-2013), a Native American who became the first great American prima ballerina, and that she had watched some Maria Tallchief videos on youtube, and was impressed. My student's comment inspired me to watch some Maria Tallchlief videos, and although so far I haven't found much of her dancing classics like Firebird, I have found some nice tribute videos, like the one below, and a great video of her pas de deux in Swanlake below:
I am happy that many more students are posting comments in my class blogs this year than last year.
And I wish I could watch a video of all of Maria Tallchief's Firebird performance that made her and the NY City ballet famous! Whew--we just made it through the third week of the new school year and into Golden Week, a little holiday I need more and more as I age. It means that next week I only have classes on Friday. Last Thursday (4/28) I did my three back to back standing up, high energy classes (Conversation-Culture-Conversation), had several seminar students in my office reading picture books so they can choose one each to give a report about, and then went to a lecture from 18:00-19:30 given by Professor Jacques Durand of the University of Toulouse, hosted by our own Yamada Sensei. Professor Durand talked about his and his team's efforts to record hundreds of speakers of French or English from different regions reading lists of words and short passages and engaging in informal conversation make a database revealing how French and English are changing, typically with dialect differences decreasing as the power of mass media coming out from Paris, London, and America increases. (In one funny conversation an Indian woman told someone that they were living in America not India because they watched so many American TV shows like Friends!) I'd been worried the lecture would be too technical for me, but Professor Durand's English was so clear and his lecture so understandable and his examples so interesting that I felt stimulated afterwards. Now for GOLDEN WEEK! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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