My second week back at school started with more technical troubles!
My graduate school class with six students was great at first, cause we'd all decided to keep our video cameras on through the Webex class, whereas the standard way for Fukuoka University online classes to work is with video cameras off. Anyway, it was fun to see each other in action and to see our smiles and reactions and so on... but then... about half way through, the video on my computer got messed up, so some of the students only saw my silhouette and I saw student A's face frozen in the thumbnails of students B and C for some reason, when student A's face wasn't turning bright green! Hmmm... So next week we're going to try Zoom. Then, the very next class was my Introduction to American Culture and Literature, and again about half-way into the class when I was sharing screens suddenly Webex froze so I had to ask all the students to leave the meeting and return after five minutes, during w hich I restarted my computer and so on and so forth. Then the same thing happened with about ten minutes left in class, so I couldn't show a nice picture of Naomi Osaka wearing face masks with the names of George Floyd and other victims of police written on them... Luckily it really was time to give them their quiz, which worked OK (except seven people entered their email addresses incorrectly, so I couldn't release their scores so they'd get them. ANYWAY, those classes were fine, really, the graduate school one talking about Features of Fiction (character, narrator, plot, etc.) and the American Culture and Literature one covering (in 70 minutes!) the history of slavery, segregation, civil rights movement, persisting racism (in health, education, economy, marriage, justice, and toys), ending with Black Lives Matter and George Floyd and Jacob Blake etc. ... Thursday classes went smoothly again, more or less... but for Conversation class I had the students leave our Webex meeting and join a Zoom one, so I could put them into breakout rooms. They seemed to work, maybe...... I could only visit three (because I had to try to help one boy who couldn't understand how to join a breakout room), and of the three I joined, two were functioning finely, with the students using English to communicate with each other etc., while one was a dead silence when I joined it... ANYWAY, I will try it again! I had a fun moment in the Interactive English class for Freshmen Pharmacy majors in my last class on Thursday when a girl asked another girl a cat question (because by chance they gave back to back self-introduction speeches mentioning that they each had young cats for pets), what is your favorite cat pose? And the girl answered "rolling on the floor" and asked the other one, "How about you?" so the other one could answer, "Round back after waking up and yawning." I loved it. On Friday, my seminar class introduced historical fiction, so I asked the students to give their examples of historical fiction in movies, tv shows, novels, or manga, etc., and they came up with some nice interesting examples, like Hotaru no Haka (Graveyard of the Fireflies), Honnoji Hotel (girl time slips back to 1582 warring period Japan), Life is Beautiful, Jin (doctor time slips back to Edo era), and the Genji drama (Genji Monogatari's hero time slips into our present). Anyway, it made me think of how many time slip or time travel historical fictions there are, so it must be a sub-genre (Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Outlander, etc.)... and how after all when we read a regular historical fiction, we in effect time travel (as the author has time traveled to write it). So all in all the week was good. But I sure am exhausted on Saturday!
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So, my right shoulder is aching and my right eye burning from too much computer work in the last week, preparing for classes and teaching them—online. But! I survived the first week of Fall Semester.
How did it go, back in the saddle, back on the bicycle, back in the online classroom? Well... if you want to know... My first class was Wednesday morning period 1 from 9:00, with my two second-year Master’s graduate school students. Honestly, I am worrying a little about whether they’ll be able to finish their MA theses (50+ pages in English) in time this year and about whether I’ll be able to help them properly when so busy with so many other things going on for school now… Anyway, for their class, apart from talking about their writing schedules and so on, I got them to experiment a little with Zoom. So we started our class in Webex, and then I gave them a link in the Webex chat window to a Zoom meeting and had them follow the link to join it. It worked, except for some preliminary problems where we left our mics on in Webex, so that when we joined the Zoom meeting with mics on, there was a horrible feedback sound. And I even practiced putting them in a “breakout room” with just the two of them, to see how that works. Finally, we left the Zoom meeting and returned to the original Webex meeting to finish the class. All that was useful (I hope) for my university Eikaiwa and Seminar classes, because I am hoping to do something similar with those ones to get students talking to each other (in English!) in smaller groups. My second class was Wednesday period 2 from 10:40, a graduate school seminar for five first-year Master’s students and one fourth-year university student who will be my MA student next year and who will take this grad school class so as to try out grad school and also to get some early credits. For this day we just introduced ourselves and I told them about the class and the books we’ll read and so on and so forth. My third class was Wednesday period 3 from 1:00, Introduction to American Culture and Literature, for all first-year English majors plus older ones who failed in previous years plus a handful of law students (I don’t know why…). I love this class, teaching it, spending time with the kids, reading and replying to their comments on our class website blog, and so on (and I will miss it next year when for the first time since I came to Fukuoka University in 1997 except for my sabbatical year in 2012 I will not teach the class). It’s exciting to have a chance to introduce 100 or so young people to great literature and interesting culture. I’ve never gotten tired of teaching this class, even after 20+ years, because the students and their reactions are always different. The first day is rather boring, usually, just going over what we’ll do and how grades work and so on and so forth, but today we had some stressful technical troubles… What happened was when I was sharing the screen in the Webex meeting so the students would see my PowerPoint slides for the class, I interrupted that business to give them a Google Forms quiz, and when I copy pasted the quiz link into the Webex chat window for them to use to do the quiz, I didn’t “stop sharing” the PowerPoint application, so (I think) I froze up Webex’ online application, so I could not share anything any more. This happened in Spring Semester a few times, but always in smaller classes with only about thirty students. The American Culture and Literature class has 100+ kids! So first I tried (panicking indeed) to join the meeting from another web browser (Chrome), but it still didn’t enable me to share my screen, and produced some feedback howl too, so I quickly closed Chrome and went back to my Webex meeting in Firefox and then had to ask the students to leave the meeting and return to it in a few minutes… Eeek! They actually did it, the good kids! So when they’d left the meeting I closed the application and reopened it and they rejoined the meeting and it worked kind of… except I could not now share PowerPoint as an application! That has never happened before. I realized that I should have restarted my computer when the kids had left the first meeting, to kind of clean it out of problems, but I was afraid to take too much time then before restarting the meeting, so I didn’t do that… ANYWAY, because PowerPoint application could not be shared, I had to share my entire screen. As I have a large iMac, I then had to make PowerPoint take up almost all my screen to avoid distracting the students with other screens… but then I covered up the Webex screen… ANYWAY, at that point I was afraid to ask, but I did ask, “Can you see the PowerPoint screen?” and one girl (my super transfer student from Kagoshima) said, “I can see!” so I just decided that if she could see they all could, and went ahead to finish class… Whew. Thursday went smoothly without any technical troubles! I had periods 2, 3, and 4 then, from 10:40 till 4:10: English Conversation for first-year English majors (it was good to meet them again), Reading and Listening for first-year Commerce majors, and finally InterActive English (like conversation) for first-year Pharmacy majors(I always feel lucky to have Pharmacy students, cause they’re usually the most diligent and capable students in our university). I guess the classes went OK! I enjoyed having the Pharmacy majors say hello one by one to test their mics, and regretted not having done that with my conversation class, too. It was scary at first, because by chance the first person I called on to turn on his/her mic to say hi had a defective mic, so I feared at first that no one was hearing me or being able to speak to me, with a dread Webex problem that afflicts my desktop application of Webex (which is why I have to use the online Webex version). But luckily the next person was fine, and everyone after that. Whew! Then Friday, my last day of the week, my easiest day of the week, with only one class, period 3, from 1:00, my seminar for (mostly) third-year English majors. That was mostly fine. We were missing two of the eleven people in the class, but I had the others introduce themselves by saying what they’d done during summer vacation. Needless to say, there wasn’t a lot of traveling. Mostly they were doing part time jobs and watching Netflix. One person watched Queer Eye, one person Stranger Things, one person a popular Korean TV drama, one person movies like The Truman Show and Men in Black. ANYWAY, I survived. I think the hardest day will be Thursday, because it is three back-to-back classes requiring lots of talking and each one having a different preparation. But Friday turned out to be strangely hard because the only class is so late in the day (from 1:00), so I have it on my mind all morning and through lunch etc… And from next week the real classes begin when we really start doing what we’re supposed to be doing in the classes… This semester will be extra hard for me, because I also have to read a lot of papers from two colleagues who are going up for promotion (deadline for their paper assessments being October 24). I could have made my small classes (five of my seven classes, including the two graduate school ones, would qualify in having fewer than thirty students) done in person on class, but I decided not to because 1) some students would have trouble coming to campus for just one or two classes, 2) some students would have trouble doing one class in person on campus and the next or previous one online, 3) my smaller classes have a lot of talking, so being together in a classroom with talking students for 90 minutes at a time seemed a little risky, 4) I just thought it’d be easier to do everything the same way (online). But if conditions change and Fukuoka becomes really almost free from the virus, I might change my mind… So for now anyway, if I can just manage to avoid technical problems like in my big lecture class, I’ll be happy! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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