Well... Yesterday I taught (if that's the right word) my last classes of spring semester 2020: Reading and Writing for thirty sophomore Pharmacy students and my Seminar for nine third-year English majors. I think they went as well as can be expected under the circumstances: Webex online classes without the students having their mics or video on and without my having my video on. I am able to ask students here and there to turn on their mics to say things, especially in my seminar, where that's what I hope they'll do, and which they are beginning to be able to do almost on their own. Two weeks ago there was a nice moment as we were talking about Mordicai Gerstein's great picture book The Man Who Walked Between the Towers when one student said she thinks the story is telling the reader that you can get your dream if you plan carefully and think a lot and negotiate between different problems etc., only to have another student say she thinks the story is telling the reader that you have to act immediately to get your dream, because if you don't, you might miss the chance. So I could ask the first student what she thinks about the second one's idea, and she said that she agrees with the second idea, and then explained in a way that synthesized both ideas to say you should be thoughtful and act immediately... Anyway, it was a really neat moment. The Reading and Writing class had to sit through a stupid and confusing explanation by me of English articles (the/a) that I'd never gotten around to covering in any earlier class we had, and then took their final test (using google forms). And most of them did very well, and I won't have to fail anyone or bend my system to pass anyone. As i told them, I think they are probably the first class I've had since coming to Fukudai in 1997 where not a single student missed a single class, and only one or two came late one or two times. After all, Pharmacy students are indeed the most diligent ones in our university. I made a stupid careless confusing mistake for my last EE (Economics) IA (interactive English) class last week. The week before I did a short version of my Calvin and Hobbes and newspaper comics presentation and had them ask me questions about it and vaguely told them that we might use a few of the comics I'd put in the handout to do some sentence/conversation modeling based on the comics, but I forgot all about that because my last classes a week earlier for Eikaiwa and other IA one (for pharmacy students) consisted of having the students ask each other questions and answer them, using follow questions and return questions etc., so doing that with them on their last day made me think that I'd be doing the same thing with the Economics students on their last day... when, because the Economics class would have an extra day (fourteen instead of thirteen) than the other two, it would have to end differently. ANYWAY, the point is that I caught the poor Economics kids totally off guard when I started explaining what we were going to do on the last day, about main questions, follow questions, and return questions, in a structure of A saying this and B saying that, etc. etc. So when I tried asking for volunteers (something this class had been pretty good at doing in earlier classes), nobody would volunteer! that was a shock... So I just chose two boys at random and made them do it, and it was a little painful, and they required much prodding and helping from me to do what I thought should have been an easy task: greet each other and then have one person ask the other a question and so on from there. It seemed a bit better after the initial awkward pair, and the next pair, two people did volunteer, but the boy's mic was weird, so he couldn't hear what his partner was saying and had to keep asking her "one more time please," so I had to help too much again. Another pair also volunteered and did fine, really. But finally only one last boy volunteered, and no one would volunteer to be his partner, so I finally tried choosing another boy at random, but the one I chose couldn't answer because something was off with his mic, so I tried one more, and he did OK... but the whole activity was like pulling a stubborn team of mules through cold, waist deep mud, and left me frazzled ... I did finally realize what had happened: while one pair were struggling to function, I went back and reviewed the last email I'd sent the class and saw that I hadn't asked them to bring questions to ask each other... so after that pair finished I apologized to the class for what had happened. I still don't think it should have been as hard as it was for them, being rather basic stuff that we'd practiced the first five or so classes of the semester, but I do feel sorry for having surprised them.... Anyway, I had a good last class with Reading and Writing and with my Seminar and with the my Introduction to American Culture and Literature (Gairon) class, which makes me remember another interesting thing about this semester. For the last Gairon class, I totaled up all the words that the students and I have posted on our class blog, and found about 89,000 words through thirteen days of classes, and then I thought to find out how many words I got with last year's in person on campus in classroom version of the class, and it was only about 41,000 words through fifteen days of classes. So I think there must be something about having had our classes online instead of in person that encouraged or drove more students to write more on our blog so as to communicate more in English than previous years' students have wanted or needed to do. Surely, about fifteen students never posted once on our blog, and many of them only did a few times, but then more of them posted more often than I can remember happening since I've been using a blog with the class, from about seven years ago... It has been weird to not see any student faces when teaching classes. I had to get used early on to not getting any reaction from things I normally would have expected to evoke some laughter or groans etc., and just carry on talking as it were to myself, while trying to remember that I was talking to 100 people at once (in the case of Gairon). For my three English conversation type classes and my seminar I did often get a kind of response from or interaction with students when I had them say things in class and listen to them ask each other questions and answer them etc... But even that was weird cause I could never see their faces. Looking at the top of this page at the photo I took of last year's first year English majors, and remembering the people that go with the faces in many cases, makes me realize what I've been missing this year, even though I did of course get to know the names of good students who volunteered in classes or who submitted extra writing or who always did well on quizzes, and so on.... So. What will Fall Semester be like? It's due to begin in mid September, and I can't believe the university will let us have all or even some classes on campus, so I figure we'll just continue soldiering on with online classes. It does appeal to the lazy side of myself that wants to stay at home. But it is not good for the students, for sure, and there were many times in the conversation type classes when they'd say something like, "If I could go to campus I'd join a club" or "I'd make new friends" or "I'd go with my friends to eat in MacDonalds," and many of the first year English majors said they'd like to meet in person... It is not natural having classes only online. Add to that the problem that many of our students only have smartphones so we can't let them turn their videos on for fear of them running through their data plans, and it seems very difficult to give them anywhere near the kind of education they are paying for and deserving. Well, anyway, so far (without having done most of my grading), we have survived the first coronavirus semester.
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OK, so for the first two and a half months of our new ONLINE school year, I'd been dutifully dressing as though I'd be teaching in a normal on campus in person classroom setting, figuring it would help me do a better job with classes online if I dressed as if they'd be held in person. So I was also shaving in the morning of each teaching day and so on.
But last week (or was it the week before? my sense of time is so discombobulated during this weird coronavirus school year) it got so hot that I thought to myself, "Hey, the kids won't know if I'm wearing shorts or jeans, so..." and I just wore my around the apartment shorts with my teaching collared shirts! Is that the beginning of the end of decorum? Will I start skipping shaving here and there? start wearing around the home t-shirts? Hmm... another temptation is that we're supposed to conduct our classes with our video off, to avoid running through the students' data plans too rapidly (for those who only have smartphones with which to participate in classes). I have made it my practice to leave my video on for the first two minutes of each class, so as to say hello to the students as they join our meetings and to give them a face to go with my voice to (I hope) help them focus or pay attention a little more... but if I stopped doing that, I could then wear whatever I wear when I'm at home rather than at school! But if I started doing that... ANYWAY, classes I guess have been going as well as can be expected, under the circumstances. The classes most negatively affected by these circumstances are my three conversation type classes for Freshmen. As our university bought a cheapo plan from Webex that does not include break out rooms, we are unable to divide our conversation classes up into small groups, so every class has to be a big group of 24 to 29 people, which means that I cannot get all the students to say very much in English in any given class. I really feel sorry for them... I had been doing pronunciation practice with them, focusing on the difficult sounds to distinguish between for Japanese people th/s/z, r/l, and b/v, which usually in a normal classroom situation I can do in one day. But something about the online class setting meant that I ended up taking one whole day for th/s/z, and then a second whole day for r/l, and then I suddenly realized it must be horribly boring and unhelpful for the poor kids to sit there while I practice r/l with one of their number and then the next and then the next and so on. therefore, i decided to take a break from that and play Twenty-One Questions with them! Usually I do that by dividing the class up into groups of five or six people, so everyone can be "It" two or three times and everyone can ask the yes/no questions many times. That was impossible in our online class setting, but at least I could get every student to ask one question and some to ask a few and several students to be "It" after I did the initial example one to give them the idea how to play the game. It was pretty fun, I think, in two of the three classes. For some reason, it was a slog in the third... In the first two classes, the kids were rather lively and on the ball and active, whereas in the third one... It was odd. For some reason in the third class, I started a bad example, I think, by being a Character, and they guessed that I was Winnie-the-Pooh way too fast: are you an animal? yes. do you like honey? yes. are you Winnie the Pooh? yes! THree questions! Then the students did ones that were also too easy and or for some reason guessed too quickly: Tokyo Tower, tomato, and lemon. And then the next two were too hard! Ruffy from One Piece and then pudding. The other two classes, luckily, seemed to work better, with students being Steve Jobs, rabbit, elephant, the genie from Aladdin, and so on... ANYWAY, I hope they could learn how to play Twenty-One Questions and enjoy somewhat the break from practicing pronunciation. And we are getting close to the end of the semester: just about three more weeks of classes...... It's gone really fast, one of the fastest semesters I can remember. |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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