Today I heard the first cicadas (semi) of the season. It's been around 30 lately, and plenty humid. The semester staggers on...
I had some fun moments in classes last week, when the students were put into groups of four or five or so and made to draw cards with topics they had to talk about for five minutes etc. etc. One boy ended up telling how he likes playing poker and wants to participate in the WSOP (World Series of Poker?). He doesn't play for money (it's illegal in Japan, he righteously said), but enjoys the game. He has a good poker face, he said, and I believe him. Another goofy funny cheerful boy who easily turns red and laughs a lot in the same group, I opined would have a terrible poker face, and he agreed, laughing red faced... A girl said that she's sharing an apartment with two girl friends, which is quite unusual in Japan, where the norm is to have a single apartment for one person. I asked how they manage groceries and provisions and the refridgerator etc., and she said that when they go shopping, they buy some basic things like rice and milk in common and use freely, etc., and some personal things no one else should touch, etc. When I asked if they cook meals by rotation or something, she said no, they just cook for themselves whatever they feel like eating, individually. They never get lonely! One boy said that his favorite place is this beach in the city, at night, for the lights, etc., though not for swimming. One girl said her favorite place is the top roof of Hakata Station, where she can see the whole city and all the lights (she has a part time job there, in a ramen shop on the first floor...) Anyway, it was fun learning about them! I had another reality check from the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class when, after doing the Emily Dickinson lecture, in which I showed them a picture book with Emily's yellow house on the cover, then showed my photographs of when I visited there in 2012, including one selfie of me right in front of her house, and I also told them I did a tour of the house and went into Emily's BEDROOM, etc. etc., when, after all that (in addition of course to telling about her life, her poems, and analyzing Franklin 359 "a Bird came down the Walk") I gave them a google quiz, twenty of the hundred kids got the following true/false question wrong: "JP is sad because he's never visited Emily's house." Sigh... Still more--yesterday (Monday) I did a zoom meeting with one of the first-year English majors in the class, a bright and well-behaved girl, so we could practice her English Speech Society speech, and I had made the background to my video Emily's house, the same picture I showed them in class last Friday, and when we'd finished our business, I asked her if she knew what house was in my background, and she asked if it was MY house!?!? (I think she did...) So I had to say it's EMILY'S house! ANYWAY, maybe I need to work on my delivery of information to the students...
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Let's put it this way: I am surviving!
This has been one of my most difficult semesters, because I'm teaching nine classes on three days (Wed-Thr-Fri), so that I often get sore throats from overusing my voice by the end of classes on Friday afternoon, usually starting early Saturday morning, so I'm often fearing I've caught a cold (or worse) and then gradually as I rest, usually by Saturday night or Sunday morning, I return to normal and feel relieved. Then there is the energy point, as I need to sleep a lot over the weekend to recover my energy enough to do the next week's classes, even while I need to prepare for those classes, etc. I am enjoying most of the classes a lot! The four graduate school classes are always enjoyable, stimulating, and rewarding. I teach two PhD students and one Master's student in three separate classes, each with different topics and needs and interests and abilities. One PhD student is working on a presentation on E. B. White's three children's novels, one is working on presentations on Louise Erdrich's children's books, and one is working on a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry. So far I've been enjoying the Emily Dickinson parts the most because I've always loved her poetry a great deal, but have not read so many of her poems for the last thirty years (since grad school), so I've been experiencing the exhilaration of reading "new" poems, being flummoxed by Emily's idiosyncratic and mysterious and complicated approach to life and poetry, and then gradually coming to understand the poems (mostly) and to enjoy them more deeply. Then I teach a seminar for three first-year MA students, for which we're reading American children's adventure stories, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Tuesdays at the Castle, and that's great fun. Anyway, the graduate school classes are fine, really! Then I have five university classes, which are mostly fun and fine. The most challenging one to teach, in terms of preparation and energy, is the big lecture class Introduction to American Culture and Literature with almost 110 students in it, 91 first-year English majors and then a handful of law, French, German, East Asian, or upper-class English majors... And I have FOUR grad student TAs for the class, too! Anyway, I did finally manage to learn (most of) their names and faces, and I like the class a lot. The other classes are basically conversation, two for English majors and the rest for other majors like commerce and law, and I like them a lot, too, really. Just one class has been very disappointing in terms of attendance, the conversation class for second year English majors, because almost half of the class of 22 will be absent or late every time......... Each week more students are going unmasked. Last Thursday one girl in a conversation type class was coughing really badly, regularly, deeply, the bad kind of cough that sounds bad to hear, and she had no mask, so at one point I silently handed her a new mask and she thanked me and put it on... But jeeze, students are still catching colds, catching coronavirus, getting fevers, and so on, so I wish at least that the sick ones would still wear masks in class! One thing I like about classes is finding out about the students, most of whom, to be honest, are not SO interesting (always saying their hobbies are music or sports), but once in a while there'll be an unusual person, like a girl who likes American movies with social themes like the Harriet Tubman movie or a movie about the Chicago Seven, or a boy who took a year and a half to learn to play a difficult piece by Liszt... Right, so here's hoping I can survive the second half of this first semester, now that we've entered the abominable rainy season, with 85%+ humidity and increasingly high temperatures! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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