Happy Halloween, everybody! (Do you like that Mutts newspaper comic??)
Well... I guess... I think that the freshness of their first semester at Fukuoka University has worn off the first year English major students half way through their second semester: in yesterday's first period Introduction to American Culture and Literature class, 13 students came late, and 19 student were absent (out of about 120 people). Sigh. I wish, of course, that they would all want to spend 90 minutes together learning what I'd like to teach them and generally enjoying our time together, but the reality is that about a quarter of the students don't care enough about what we do to come to class on time. On the plus side, nearly three quarters of the students are usually on time and ready to go and try to stay awake and listen and learn. ANYWAY, setting aside my complaints, I did enjoy introducing them to children's play and literature! And my other classes were mostly fine. I have a great time with the sports majors for English conversation class (even though most of them do no homework and don't try to speak English with each other). They are funny and healthy and cheerful, and we laugh a lot together. (I try not to think that I'm not teaching them anything...) My seminar was OK--I just wish more of the students in the class would post comments on our Facebook group. English conversation for second-year English majors was OK--I just wish they would speak more English to each other in their small groups when I'm not right next to them. My American culture class for third year English majors was OK--a few of them actually raised their hands to ask questions about Halloween, and the ones I chose by random chance to do that could do it. And my graduate school classes were fine. We're reading Charlotte's Web in one of them, and working on Gothic matters in another and gender in The Aeneid and Le Guin's Lavinia in another. So. We're getting close to the half-way point of the semester, and I'm starting to think I might survive another year. Fifteen more until I must retire at age 70! Hard to believe how fast the time has passed... See you next week!
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Well, it happened again this year. Each year in mid-October I teach the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class about Calvin and Hobbes, finishing with the moving story about the baby raccoon that Calvin finds and hopes to save, only to be shocked by its death, and each year when I do this class, the day our beloved cat died seven years ago comes back to me (because he died in mid-October, and I had to go to school the morning after the night he died and teach this same class about Calvin and Hobbes), so that when I explain the part of the story where Calvin says, "I'm crying because out there he's gone, but he's not gone inside me," and then explain the part where Calvin says to Hobbes, "But don't YOU go anywhere," and Hobbes hugs him and says, "Don't worry," I end up crying in class! How embarrassing... My voice breaks, I get choked, my nose starts running, and I cry before 100+ students, who must be wondering what the heck is wrong with me. Sigh...
Apart from that, it was a good week. One highlight was attending a seminar by a visiting professor from Leeds University in England, Dr. Lou Harvey, who told us about motivation in language learning and had us talk about our own motivations in small groups, and then gave us a PR pitch about her school (which does sound super). Thanks to my stellar colleague Catherine Matsuo for inviting Dr. Harvey! Another memorable activity was getting my annual health examination yesterday morning. And we had THREE back to back meetings from 4:30 till 8:30 last Wednesday. Yikes--we're almost half way done with the semester... See you next Saturday! I THINK last week's classes went OK.
(I'm listening to Grouper's amazingly beautiful and dark The Man Who Died in His Boat album on Youtube... so if now I think classes in the bright sun of October were OK, then maybe they really were!) I told the culture class I have an Election Addiction for the 2016 US presidential election that's been getting worse and worse the closer November 8 (election day) comes. I concluded the African American unit in the first year introduction to American Culture and Literature class (terrible history, wonderful strength, big influence, great literature) and started the American Newspaper Comics and Calvin and Hobbes unit (they gotta like that stuff!). I had another seminar (getting the kids talking about the Christmas and Sundays chapters of Little House in the Big Woods). I had my Sports majors finish their short speeches in front of the class, and they were funny and did pretty well, really, with eye contact and some gestures and warm smiles. I had my Conversation class discuss our Bone graphic novel for the first time, and I THINK it will be OK (though they sure use lots of Japanese whenever I'm not nearby...) AND my graduate school classes were fine, really. Sheryl (my Chinese PhD student) is preparing to give a paper at a conference a week from tomorrow, so we practiced that with my colleague Sonoda Sensei's great big help. So, maybe it was all OK! And just ten more weeks of classes to go-- see you next Saturday (I might go to a Fukuoka U football game against a rival Fukuoka university...) Last week was another short week because of the Wednesday typhoon, #18, that caused the university to cancel all classes (which I didn't learn till I'd gone to my office!).
I'm not understanding why so few (none so far) of the third-year American Culture class students post comments on our class blog... I'm not understanding why so many of the first-year Introduction to American Culture and Literature class students are not doing homework carefully enough... (I just gave them the first quiz of Fall Semester and was not pleasantly surprised by how most of them did.) I am enjoying all the classes a lot, nevertheless! Today I had to go in to campus (on Saturday!) to participate in an Entrance Examination Proofreading meeting. . . And the semester is already almost a third over! Well, it was a pretty good third week, really... though... As usual, I didn't use time well in the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class for (mostly) first-year English majors.
We are doing African American culture and literature now, a three-week unit. I was interested when I showed a picture on the screen of a white Barbie with a black Barbie, and asked the 100 or so students to raise their hands for the prettier Barbie, and the vast majority chose the white Barbie (only one or maybe two people chose the black Barbie!). So... I think unconscious racism is not uncommon in Japan, I suppose because Japanese people tend to have straight hair (like blond Barbie), and tend to grow up liking Disney characters and American movie and TV stars, most of whom are white. At the same time, they really think that racism and discrimination are terrible and wish they would go away. Anyway, after asking them about that, I told them about and showed them pictures of the studies of kids choosing a white or a black baby doll to play with, and white and black kids mostly choosing the white baby, and a picture of black Barbies being sold for half the price of white Barbies in a store, and showed them pictures of Beyonce as a little kid with natural kinky black hair and then as a superstar with straight blond hair... I wonder what they made of it all? Then I also introduced the Colin Kaepernick kneel down pose for the pre-game NFL national anthem events, as a form of protest to draw attention to the racism and discrimination in US society today, by which too many black men are killed by police relative by percentage to white men... And then there wasn't enough time to comfortably cover African American literature, slave spirituals, Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool" (including a great reading of the poem by Morgan Freeman), and no time at all for Jay-z's "99 Problems." And too fast at the end... Sigh... I'll try again next time! I do think I did OK with my other classes...... |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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