Last week was so easy that I've already forgotten about it almost completely!
Because of the nature of my schedule (class on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday) and a national holiday (last Wednesday) and a school holiday (last Friday), I only had one day of classes last week. It was my hard day, actually, in that it features two back to back general English classes periods 4 and 5, and I tend to have much more energy in the morning than in the afternoon, and I don't like getting through the day thinking that I have to teach a couple classes later, etc. etc. However, since we began doing classes in person, Thursdays have been going better for me. Last Thursday was OK! We finished the students' short self-introduction speeches for the first-year Pharmacy students period 4. One girl's English had that American English quality, and indeed it turned out that she lived in Ohio for three years during elementary school. The last speeches were in general not SO great, because most of them were too short, but that's to be expected for the last students to volunteer to do the activity, and really they were OK, and the class is fun to spend time with. In the second-year Commerce Reading & Writing class period 5 we did the next section of The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, which is a neat book. I do fear that probably about a quarter or a fifth of the kids are having trouble, because the book, being a normal American book for elementary schoolers, has a big vocabulary, and I think that Japanese students are not comfortable using the easy words they already know to read for general comprehension while ignoring the words they don't know, so I think some of the students are having trouble. Most may be doing OK. They do mostly all score 5 or 4 points out of a possible 5 on the quizzes I give at the end of class. The challenge is to try to find more ways (in addition to making them read passages out lout here and there) to do things more actively for in person classes and move way from my online mode... ANYWAY, the one-day work week was very nice. (Though now it's over and from tomorrow begins another full one!)
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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