Last Saturday we held the annual Theme and Method event for our first-year English Department Graduate School students. They make twenty-minute presentations about their plans for their Master's theses, which they'll write in their second years. One student will research primary, secondary, and tertiary stress in pronunciation of English words, and the other will write about solitude, society, and nature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There was also a lecture about graduate school, about why students decide to enter it, about how teachers should teach in it, and about the role of administration staff in it, and so on, given by another university's professor who once years ago attended our graduate school.
All in all it was a good event, reluctant though I am to leave home on a Saturday. After the Theme and Method event, we had a party with sushi and sashimi and motsu nabe and spicy tomato chicken etc. Our graduate school department is a good place to be, what with the family feeling among teachers and past and present students. I hope we'll get a few more students in future. This year we have but two new ones, plus two second-year ones, and my own PhD student. Meanwhile, the semester continues to chug along, the seventh week just having been completed. The university students were given their applications for choosing their courses (language or culture-literature), which they'll have to do in the first few days of December. Yes, it's that stressful time of year again, when the kids are confused (many of them) and the teachers stressed (some of them) and I always find myself wondering why the heck we have to make the students choose one course or the other after their first years, and why we can't just have one big English Department and let them take any classes they want to take, more or less... I'm about to receive ten first drafts of graduation theses from my seminar students--eeek! The deadline is November 4. I wonder if I'll be able to edit them all properly and if the kids will be able to revise their theses appropriately and if all deadlines will be kept and so on and so forth. I have just a couple days before that typhoon hits me. Right! Here's hoping I can keep my head above water through November--
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I haven't done it for a while, but in the last American Culture class I made the students participate in a little spelling bee, so they could see what they're like. I introduced the concept of the difficulty of spelling English (compared to other languages), and of the history of the spelling bee (introduced not so long after the USA became the USA), and of the typical spelling be in an English class compared to the National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC, and showed them the trailer of Spellbound (the documentary about one of the National Spelling Bees, focusing on the various finalists from various backgrounds etc.), and showed them a set three funny Peanuts comic strips where Charlie Brown forgets the "i before e except after c" rule and gets over confident and then misses the spelling of "maze."
And then I did the spelling bee. Because there are about 70 students in the class, I couldn't take time to have everybody participate, so I chose by random chance 11 students, and then had them spell words like phonology, lyrics, illustration, etc. I was impressed by the young lady who won, by virtue of being the only one of the 11 to get both her words correct, the second word being loneliness... I remembered (but didn't tell about) my only experience with spelling bees as a participant, back in 4th grade i think, where I missed the very first word I was given, almost intentionally, because I hated standing out so I wanted to be able to sit down as soon as possible and stay there... ANYWAY, it was an amusing diversion, I'm pretty sure, and did show how hard English spelling is, because only three students got their first words right, and then only that one student got the second one right... And one of the students is basically a native speaker of English, having been born (I think) in California and grown up there and come to university here just a year or so ago. She missed spaghetti, after getting the tricky h right, but then saying i instead of e... Oh, we're doing American English in that class right now, which is why I did a spelling bee, etc. Now for the weekend rest! Last week in my graduate school seminar I had the students prepare a page or so from the book we're reading (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler [1967] buy E. L. Kongisberg) to read out loud in class, and to be ready to explain why they had chosen that passage.
I was inspired to have them do that by two things: first, every time I have them read some paragraph or passage out loud in class on the spur of the moment, I am surprised by how hard it is for them to read aloud and for me to listen to them; second, my wife and I started watching a Japanese TV drama in which the main character is a mathematician whose wife has left him because he never empathized with her or their two small kids and who has recently begun changing as a result of participating in a reading out loud class. My wife told me that Japanese roudoku(朗読)cannot really be translated into English as "reading aloud" or "reciting" etc. The Japanese "word" is comprised of two kanji (Chinese characters), the second 読 meaning "read" and the first 朗 something like cheerful, pleasure, etc. . . . ANYWAY, I had the students do it, and they did great! It was really interesting to see which passages they chose and why they chose them and then of course to hear them read the passages. Whereas they are usually unsure and halting when made to read out lout impromptu, raising their voices questioningly after many words because they're not sure they read them with correct pronunciation, etc., when they read the passages they'd practiced, they were smooth, confident, engaged, and engaging. One student chose a letter written to the two kids who've run away to secretly live inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC by the museum's director, gently explaining to them why the "clue" they provided the museum (in an anonymous letter) is not so useful in proving whether or not Michelangelo actually sculpted a debatable statue of an angel in the museum; one student chose a passage where the kids Claudia and Jamie are crushed after reading the director's letter; one student chose a passage where the kids figure out how to type their anonymous letter to the museum; and so on. The other students also had ideas about each other's chosen passages. The activity helped us focus on key scenes in the reading. I hope it helped the students pay closer attention to the text and imagine its situations and characters more deeply! It's something I'll try again in future, with my under graduate and graduate students. It did give me pleasure and make me cheerful to listen to them! In the beginning of this new semester, I'm taking it easy on myself by using E.L. Konigsberg's From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967) in two different classes, my fourth-year university seminar and my first year graduate school seminar.
I love the book! It has a great concept: 12-year-old Claudia and her 8-year-old brother Jamie run away to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where they hide out by tagging along with school tour groups during open ours and sleep in a 16th century bed (that was the site of a murder) and bathe in a restaurant fountain after hours. The dialogue between the siblings is spicy and funny, the mystery they try to solve (did Michelangelo sculpt this statue of an angel?) is intriguing, and the Met is just a wonderful place for the kids (and the reader) to spend time. The relationship between Claudia and Jamie is perfect: they bicker a lot (Claudia has a bad habit of correcting Jamie's English), but take turns encouraging or inspiring each other, and generally complement each other nicely: "She was cautious (about everything but money); he was adventurous (about everything but money)." ANYWAY. I wanted to say that I'm dissatisfied with how the book is going in classes so far. I've had one university seminar class and two graduate school classes discussing the book so far, and I find myself taking over too much and explaining too much and reading too much because I find myself getting impatient at the students for not saying enough soon enough and interestingly and interestedly enough. Maybe I like the book too much and want the students to like it too much and so when they don't bring up really funny or neat touches in the book, I get disappointed? I'll have to find a way to get the students to talk about the book in such a way that (I hope) their enthusiasm for it comes out without my taking over the class so much. . . |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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