Well, I just had a weird experience discovering one more difficult thing about doing online instead of in person classes: I fell asleep during a class!
Well, not really ASLEEP asleep, but I lost consciousness for a split second two or three different times in my Reading & Listening class for first-year Commerce majors. That has never happened to me in any university class, as far as I can remember now. The reason is that being in person in a room with students always keeps a certain amount of nervous adrenaline running around my body, making time pass super rapidly and making it impossible for me to sleep, even if I were sitting down to do classes, which I almost never do (except for my seminar classes, but then the adrenaline keeps me lively). But doing classes online, I always sit down at my computer, so. . . and there is less adrenaline firing me up because I can't see any of my students. I have no idea if the Commerce majors noticed my two or three brief blackouts. I think I almost didn't miss a beat in what I was doing, but... I was going through Chapter III and Chapter IV of Charlotte's Web, pointing out things about the story, about the English, about American culture, and so on. . . Anyway, after the second (or third) time falling briefly asleep, I realized I'd better do something to liven up the class and get some interaction going between the students and me, so I chose some "volunteers" to practice saying a little conversation between Wilbur and Templeton (A: Will you play with me? B: Play? Play? I hardly know the meaning of the word.) and then doing variations on it, having the students replace play with any other verb they want. And that did the trick, waking me up fine. But I'll have to try to get more sleep Wednesday nights from now on, cause Thursday is my tough day anyway, periods 2, 3, and 4, with the Reading and Listening class coming in the middle. ANYWAY, apart from that (and apart from ANOTHER Webex technical trouble, this time in my seminar Friday afternoon when I was trying to share some YouTube videos on Chrome of people playing some songs that Laura's Pa plays on his fiddle to entertain his family in Little House in the Big Woods, and Webex sharing froze, leaving the screen black, though, fortunately, the students could hear the videos, I think), last week went OK. And there was a really nice lucky moment in the afternoon on Wednesday, around 4:30, as I was hustling to a graduate school meeting across campus and ran into three girls who said hello to me as if they knew me, so I stopped and said hello back, and one of them said, "Thank you for today's class!" and then I knew that they must be first year English majors who took my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class on Wednesday afternoon. We could chat briefly, and I could put faces to the names I see every week when I join the meetings and see all the students' names in the participants' list in Webex. Right. So another week survived. The FIFTH, if you can believe that, the semester being a third of the way over already.
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Will I ever have a completely smooth week of classes this semester? Hmmm..
Last week started rocky when i went to campus to do my online classes from my office, only to discover that my network connection wasn't working. I knew it was because our university had started a new log in security procedure that I had to activate, but the only way I could access it was via the Internet, and the only way I could connect to the Internet was by logging in to the university network... a cute catch-22. So I needed about 90 mins of help in my office from a nice and patient Computer Center person, who finally got my room's wifi connection going. (In the afternoon another Computer Center person came to change the settings on my computer so as to enable my ethernet connection to work, just in case.) Anyway, apart from that, Wednesday went OK, I guess, with a lively and fun graduate school seminar in the morning and my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class for (mostly) first-year English majors in the afternoon (we covered Virginia Hamilton's "The People Could Fly," which, judging by the a little bit low scores on the quiz I gave at the end of class, was difficult for the kids to understand (or my presentation of it was). Thursday went OK (I continued trying Zoom for breakout rooms with my conversation class, which works with varying degrees of success, depending on the kids involved and their chutzpah levels and English abilities), except for the start of period 4 class for first-year Pharmacy majors, because something was up with the university server, so we couldn't join our Webex class meeting for about seven minutes, which results in much freaking out on my part and those of some of the students. Friday was OK! I had to scold (or shame) a couple seminar students who hadn't been reading their classmates' posts on our Facebook group, and then thought maybe that wasn't the best way to handle their lack of diligence. I hope I didn't crush their spirits! One boy in my seminar couldn't get his mic to work in Zoom, so in his breakout room he had to chat his ideas to his two group members, but they are both bright and friendly and good students, so I think it worked OK for him, and one group finished four topics that should take at least half an hour I reckoned in only ten minutes somehow! Hmmm... ANYWAY, I survived our fourth week, if you can believe that. Soon the semester will be a third over already. Good luck to all of us! Last teaching week got off to an interesting start.
Last Monday around noon when I started preparing for the week’s classes (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) I discovered to my horror that our Internet had stopped working, which also meant that our telephone had stopped working (because they are part of the same system here), which meant that we were in big trouble. Tor one thing, neither my wife nor I has a smart phone or cell phone etc. So how would we (I mean my wife, because she takes care of everything in our life that requires Japanese, which is one reason why my Japanese ability doesn’t advance) contact NTT to have them send someone to repair or fix or solve etc. our problem? My wife used the common room phone on the first floor of our apartment (mansion) complex, which was not easy because to use it we need to talk to our kanrinrin (like a concierge), and he’s very protective of his domain and resentful of intrusion, despite the nature of his job here. She finally was able to talk to an NTT person, who told her that the earliest we could get help would be on October 7, ten days later! That meant that for me to prepare and teach my classes until then, I’d need to go to school and do the online classes in my office. Now, so far this semester I’d had two meetings with my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class, and both of them had been badly interrupted by Webex freezing up on me when I was sharing screens. The first Wednesday (9/16) required me to half-way through the class tell all 100+ students to leave the meeting so I could end it and then return to the meeting after I’d restarted it. This lost at least five precious minutes and cost at least five months of my life span. Then on 9/23 the same thing happened, twice in the same class! Luckily, the second time was close enough to the end of class so I could just give them their daily quiz and say goodbye. I was hoping that by doing the class on campus in my office, things would go more smoothly because in my office I could use Webex’ desktop app, which is more stable and easier to use for sharing things etc., whereas at home I must use Webex online, which is very unstable and tricky to use for sharing things etc. (I won’t bother you with an explanation of THAT situation…) But, as I am the King of Technological Incompetence and Technical Troubles, things suddenly went haywire. When I tried to play a youtube clip (embedded in PowerPoint) from 12 Years a Slave, where the protagonist starts singing a spiritual with his fellow slaves for a funeral of one of their number, suddenly a super helpful student turned on her mic to say, “I can’t hear the video.” So I tried to play the clip from within my browser on YouTube itself, but the same thing happened. The students could hear my lecture but couldn’t hear any video I played! So I thought… Hmmm… I used a USB headphone and mic set for the class before this one, and then for this one I decided to go back to using the mic and speaker inside the computer, and though I changed the settings in Webex, I didn’t change the settings for the computer itself, so (I THINK), the video sound would not come out. After the class, I experimented a bit and finally hit on that possibility… and so I reset the computer’s audio settings and started a one-person Webex meeting to see how it’d work, and it seemed OK… so I THINK that was what was happening, so I will try again next week and hope for the best. I feel so sorry cause every week so far has had problems that wasted our time in class, and I really wanted to play a Beyonce song (“Brown Skin Girl”) and to play Gwendolyn Brooks and Morgan Freeman reading “We Real Cool,” and so on and so forth. Instead, I had to weakly recommend the kids visit our class website to play the things, cause I had uploaded links to them there… Miraculously, later that day I got a call from my wife (a telephone call from my wife!), saying that NTT had come and fixed the problem! Hallelujah! So I could do Thursday and Friday classes at home. Which is much easier than schlepping to school. And my butt starts hurting when I sit in my office all day at school, cause the chair is a normal chair, whereas the super nice (and expensive) chair I use at home won’t hurt my butt no matter how long I sit in it. Not to mention coronavirus being Out There. I guess my other classes went OK last week. Grad School Seminar (the students are bright and not too shy and the number is nice, six, and we keep our videos on the whole time, so we can see each other’s reactions and so on, unlike with all my other classes), Conversation, Reading and Listening, Conversation, and then my university seminar on Friday (I like those kids a lot, too, cause they are interesting and intelligent and fun to spend time with). Thursday is the draining day: periods 2, 3, and 4, right in the middle of the day, and all three requiring much talking and focus etc. Period 2 is the conversation class where I’ve been experimenting with the kids in using Zoom for Breakout Rooms (small groups inside the big class of 27 people ). It’s seeming to work, but it does depend on how motivated they are to use English only. In the last class I had them in groups of two and told them to find out everything they could about their partner etc., and when I visited the pairs, the first seven or so were actually communicating in English, but the last ones were using Japanese, perhaps having become tired of using English or shy to use it or something, so… so… maybe three or four people is better than two… Now it’s Saturday, and I’m still exhausted from classes last week, and have to start preparing for next week seriously NOW. Good luck in next Wednesday’s class! |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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