Well, I just finished my first week of classes back online after our two week hiatus. It was . . . hard, especially Thursday, where I have to wait to do my two classes till 2:40 and go till 5:50, but then it was hard doing that before with in person classes at the start of our semester. The difficult thing now, of course, is staring at the computer screen for so long while trying to keep the faith that the students are all awake and focused and there and not playing games or eating lunch or napping etc. And to keep faith that they are understanding when I can't see any reactions (our university wants us to do classes with videos off, for the most part, though in small classes like my nine-person seminar I'm trying to keep videos on).
A difference between this year and last year online is that this time I'm using Zoom for all my classes from the start, because it's easier to get students in smaller groups with Zoom than with Webex, and is generally easier to use it than it is to use Webex. So far it seems to be working. It feels like a miracle when all the students (almost) in a class of thirty-six or thirty-three actually show up on time. I did like doing my seminar with videos on very much more than with them off (as we did last year). I think some of the kids may not be comfortable with videos on, but they did mostly seem to smile a lot and it was great to see their faces and expressions while we were talking about The Giver. My graduate school classes are fine with videos on, I think! The students are lively and funny and sharp. Maybe the most difficult class was the Interactive English class (English Conversation basically), because I'm having the students give short self-introduction speeches and it's so artificial to do that kind of thing online in a Zoom meeting with videos off... And it does require a lot of concentration to follow the speakers and to try to get a variety of students to ask them questions, etc. Another bonus (what can I say? I'm lazy) of online classes is that I don't need to go to school but can do them from home! That means I can sleep a little later in the mornings and worry a little less about what to wear and so on. I hope Fukuoka and Japan can get the coronavirus situation under control again so we can go back to SAFE in person classes, but until then, we'll do our best online, eh?
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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! So it's taking me less time now to practice the students' names and faces in the three non-English major classes: thirty-three engineering freshmen, twenty-eight pharmacy freshmen, and thirty-six commerce sophomores. Whereas it took me half an hour at least the first day and twenty minutes the second, last week on the third day for each of those classes, it took me about ten minutes. I am finally starting to remember them! It would be much easier if I were using photo cards, but I decided to stop doing that from this year, cause I started accumulating too many cards from past classes and years and don't know what to do with them and cause I thought it'd be too onerous for the kids this year and too dangerous for me (with coronavirus etc.).
So that's good. Also, I really am enjoying the classes, overall... but my favorite day is Friday when I start period 1 with mostly third-year English majors for American Culture (that's the picture atop this blog), then have period 2 with six lively, interesting, intelligent, and funny MA students, and then period 3 with my PhD student. It's a great way to end the work week. The students in the Culture class seem mostly to be enthusiastic and engaged; about twenty of them have been posting thoughtful comments on our class blog once a week, and last Friday all but one stayed awake through the 90-minute class. The MA class is really fun and funny--we just started talking about From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler last Friday, the part where Claudia and her little bro Jamie run away from home to stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and we were laughing at how the siblings talk to each other and so on. I was impressed when one guy pointed out the frequency with which the kids talk about money and also Claudia's irony, as when Jamie is making so much racket walking with his pants pockets stuffed full of $24.43 in change, so she asks him if he's wearing chain mail. We also used an inflation website to calculate how much money that would be today (hundreds of bucks!), covered what "Oh, baloney" means (kids way to say bullshit), figured out what kind of woman Mrs. Frankweiler is based on her letter to her lawyer Saxonberg, and so on. The PhD class was stimulating, talking about a couple Emily Dickinson poems ("She died at play" and "Come slowly--Eden!") with my interesting and enthusiastic Chinese student. Though I was so exhausted after the week of classes I fell asleep while she was thinking of an answer to a question about a poem, after that cat nap I was alert and on point. And the Emily poems are amazing, their virtues becoming more apparent the more we read and talked about them. The non-graduate school, non-English classes earlier in the week were a bit challenging. The Pharmacy class is Interactive English (basically conversation), and it's hard to hear in the class cause the students are shy and wearing masks and the classroom doors are open for ventilation so the noise from multiple other classes comes in the room, especially after about an hour when other teachers start letting their classes go early. **I think I should let my classes go early, too, cause of the coronavirus catching danger when we're together in a room for 90 mins, but so far I've been doing them pretty much as usual........... then the two classes using The Wild Robot by Peter Brown are maybe mostly OK for most of the students, but I'm sure that there are several kids in each one who can't follow, keep up, read, etc., and it takes a lot of energy to project my voice and passion for what we're doing to them........ Anyway, three weeks are down, perhaps safely (I feel fine anyway, apart from being exhausted from the exertion of teaching and the deprivation of normal amounts of sleep). Eleven more weeks to go! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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