Well... we're in the rainy season (yesterday my American Culture class was startled by some booming thunder and torrential rain), the hard, hot, humid time of the school year in Japan. I can never stop thinking that American schools start summer vacation by the end of May or start of June, whereas we here go sweatingly on until the beginning of August.
ANYWAY. Classes have been mostly going OK. Of course, I never improve time management, especially in the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class, where I always try to cover too much and run out of time and make a largely incomprehensible mash of material in the last fifteen minutes. I figure that about a quarter of the students understand most of what I'm saying and trying to teach them, a quarter understand nothing, and half are somewhere in between those poles, depending on what's going on. I do enjoy spending time with the first year students, for sure! Last Wednesday I got a kick out of showing them that great Calvin and Hobbes daily comic strip. I was using it to introduce Modernism (1914-1945), cause Modernist writers and artists etc. wanted to create new things and preferred art etc. about cities or nature with human touch in it (like Ezra Pound's brilliant haiku "In a Station of the Metro"). And so for fun I asked a question... "Takahiro! What color is the kite?" "Black?" "Wrong! Haruki?" "Red?" "Right! Clever Haruki! But Takahiro you're right, too, because this is a black and white comic. OK, Hiroko, what color is the sky?" "White? Blue?" "Which one is it?!" "Blue?" "Right! Well, it's also white... ANYWAY, think about which YOU prefer: a blue sky OR a blue sky with a red kite in it. Do you prefer pure nature or nature with human touch? You can write about that on our blog--" And one girl the next day posted comments saying that she prefers the blue sky with a red kite, nature with human touch, because she can't live in 100% pure nature. I also showed them a clip from the Charlie Chaplin classic Modern Times, where he's working on an assembly line and goes crazy from the repetitive action and gets caught up in the clockwork gears of the big machinery and then throws all the levers out of whack and burns out the whole thing. These young people! 18 years old! Many knew who Charlie Chaplin was vaguely but had never seen any of his movies or footage... But I think they enjoyed it (it was easy to understand...). Now if I could just resist trying to force them to understand rhythm in poetry each year I teach the class! They have a hard enough time with rhyme, consonance, and assonance... Another bright spot from last week is that I managed to avoid losing my temper with this group of six girls who always sit together in my third-year Culture class, some talking, some sleeping, some checking their smart phones, etc., and almost none paying attention. Even when two of them got up in the middle of class to supposedly go use the restroom (even though they'd gotten to the classroom ten minutes at least before the class started, plenty of time to use the restroom then) I didn't scold them. (Well, I did poke my head out of the classroom door to ask them where they were going...) Most of the students in that class do want to learn about American culture and do pay attention to my lecture and to the images I show them on the screen, but I have developed a kind of allergy about those six girls and lose my temper with them so as to distract my focus on and appreciation of the class as a whole, so I was glad yesterday to not have let that happen (much) again. So there are just (just?) about four more weeks of classes in this semester. I hope I can survive them!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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