Ah, this year I had no classes on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, thank the gods!
I did have my last classes of 2016 on Friday the 23rd. It is fun to say "Merry Christmas" to 100 young people and hear them say it back... It is a pity that I lost my temper when too many students trailed in late and later. I decide not to restrain myself from giving my "Being Late Lecture." Ahhhhh.... What a Christmas mood killer! Sigh..... I point out that they aren't late to their part time jobs, to their dates with boy or girl friends, to movies, and so on, so they shouldn't be late to class. Being on time is part of showing respect to the people you do something with. As for me, I was never late to any university class, and was only late once before then, in elementary school grade three, when I forgot that we had a sports festival on Saturday and overslept. I would have been crushed by embarrassment to walk into a class late! I'd have thought (wrongly, probably) that everyone's eyes would be one me, walking in late... So it never happened. Jeeze, taking points off their grades isn't even enough to make them all come on time! I did feel sorry and apologize to the about two thirds of the class who are always on time. ANYWAY. Apart from that blow up, I think the last class was OK, maybe... A last day on the Philip K. Dick story, "Human Is." (maybe they got sick of it...). I showed them some posters of other movies that have situations where an alien or a demon or a ghost etc. possesses a human body, trying to point out that stories can show it positively or negatively, depending on what genre the story belongs to and what intentions the makers have. And finally I had my Teaching Assistant Shiori show a three and a half minute video highlight of the Roswell TV show with Dido's neat song playing, to show what was once a trendy romantic drama in which the aliens are looking like people and engaging in various kinds of romance with some human high school kids (it sounds kinda creepy to say it like that!). Right. ANd in the afternoon, I had my graduate school 1-1 class with Shiori, talking about her third thesis chapter and so on. She WILL finish her thesis by the January 10 deadline, I am convinced now. And it should be a nice thesis (she's comparing Virgil's The Aeneid with Le Guin's Lavinia in terms of gender). Right--so next time I talk with you will be 2017 or close to it, if you can believe that-- Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
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In the middle of my second-year English Conversation class for English majors last week, a male student asked if he could go to the restroom. I gave him permission. After about ten minutes I started thinking he'd been gone too long, so I had just opened the classroom door to look out into the hallway when I surprised him in his act of returning to class. As soon as he saw me, he made motions as if drying his hands as if he'd just rinsed them after using the toilet. He rejoined his discussion group. I moved around the room a bit, joining in a group discussion here or there, and in a short time joined his group, when I was struck by a strong smell of cigarettes. I asked him, "Did you just just smoke a cigarette?" And he nodded.
And I lost my temper. No swearing this time! But I told him that his action was slimy, dishonest, and low, and that he'll never go to the toilet in any of my classes ever again. Warming up, I asked the girl next to him if she liked the smell of cigarettes, and she said, "Hate." I gave a triumphant, "Hah!" and said, "See? you are making your group members smell your cigarettes!" I stretched out both my arms for dramatic effect, and then asked students in another group if I just used Japanese (something supposedly off-limits in our class), knowing that I had sprinkled Japanese in with my English diatribe. Interestingly, on that very day the students were to do class surveys that the university makes us do once per semester, and the smoking student had been the only student of 25 or so to volunteer to take the finished surveys to the administration office for me (teachers aren't supposed to handle them once students fill them out). He's not a bad lad, really. (I wonder what kind of evaluation he gave my class after that scolding!) Needless to say, I wish our university would become a smoke-free zone. Although you're not supposed to smoke inside buildings now, there are places on campus set aside (way too comfortably and conveniently and appealingly and shelteringly) for smokers to do their thing, and it's supposedly OK to smoke in the outside stairwells of Building A (where my conversation class is held, and where the boy was probably standing to smoke). I can't help but look back on my university days and recall that I never once got up in the middle of a class to go to the toilet and was never once late (I also was never even once absent). I'd have been terrified of standing out, fearing that had I entered class late or left class early the eyes of all the students would be on me. I can't help but recall that until about eight years ago students never left my in-progress classes to go to the toilet, whereas now it's a rather regular occurence, with students simply getting up in the middle of big lecture classes and walking out--until I put the hammer down and give them my Toilet Lecture (in which I get them to imagine they pay money to see a movie in the theater, in which case they'll probably either go to the toilet before the movie begins or hold their need till after the movie ends). Today's kids! Too many are addicted to their "smart" phones and try to check them in class; too many feel it's fine to get up in the middle of class and walk out; too many miss too many classes or come late too often. Hmmm. Is it a symptom of the "yutori sedai?" the loosening of the Japanese K-12 curriculum to reduce memorization etc. and increase self-actualization? Hmmm... ANYWAY. Plenty of nice things happened last week, like when a few bright first year English major students visited my office to chat and borrow picture books, etc. Or like last night when I went to the Humanities Year End Party (Bonenkai), and had lots of conversation with my super colleague-friend John and some of my other fine colleagues too, and ate a delicious French type fancy multiple course meal, and then went to a second party for coffee (with honey and milk in it!), etc. And I think I finally did an OK class for the first year Introduction to American Culture and Literature class (still about the Philip K. Dick story "Human Is")... So the end of the school year continues to approach... A funny thing happened in the first year Introduction to American Culture and Literature class Last Friday. It is period 1, starting at 9:00, and many of the poor kids are sleepy when having to listen to English for 90 minutes. So I do try to wake them up when I see them nodding off sometimes.
So yesterday in the middle of my first class on Philip K. Dick's great early science fiction short story, "Human Is" (1953), I was digressing about American divorce as a way of explaining why Jill Herrick (the upset woman in the lefthand picture above) would want to leave her horribly cold husband Lester, (the cold scientist in the left hand picture above), and I'd just said that 40% of American marriages end in divorce, and I saw a girl nodding off to sleep in the back, so I barked her name out and asked her, "What percent of American marriages end in divorce?" And with sleepily challenging eyes (and without any hesitation), she said in a clear, sleepy voice, "Forty." And all her girlfriends surrounding her and some other students said, "Ohhhhh" in amazement because they'd assumed she'd been sleeping, so they were mightily impressed that she could answer so quickly and correctly. (Also I suspect they were impressed because they couldn't have answered my question if I'd asked them!) So I laughed and shouted, "Good ears!" And then I showed the class some marriage advice slides from the Internet (like "Talk to your spouse more sweetly and with more respect than you talk to anyone else"), and then I showed them my wedding photo (cause this year is our 30th wedding anniversary!)... And told them the trick to making a marriage last I was told by my best friend from high school's mother before I got married: "Never go to sleep angry." The point I was trying to make was that reading science fiction (and all literature) can lead us into interesting discussions about life and relationships and help us become more empathic people. (For the record, my wife and I have had plenty of moments like the one in the story illustration above! But usually we're a pretty good team, and talk about many things.) Ah, looking at the early December crescent moon and Venus paired in the sky recently gave a refreshing perspective on small events in our department.
Recently, our first year English department had to choose between the Language Course OR the Culture and LIterature Course, the most unpleasant time of each year when it comes. It's been that way ever since I came to Fukudai in 1997, nearly twenty years ago. I can never understand why we need to make the poor students make that decision, a month before their first year ends. I always wish we could just let them take any class they want to take (apart from some required ones that should stay required, like the four first year introductory lecture classes that introduce them to Speech Communication and Linguistics (in the Language Course) and to English and American Culture and Literature (in the Culture and Literature Course). The reasons my colleagues give when saying that we cannot get rid of the course division system are administrative rather than pedagogical. They say things like, "If we get rid of the course division system, we will not be able to manage class sizes, and some classes will have too few students and some classes have too many." Well, that is a problem now anyway, and how do we know it will become worse unless we try things without a course division system? Getting rid of the course division system would remove much worse problems--from the students' point of view. Many of them have real difficulty, mental and emotional, trying to decide which course to choose, without having taken enough classes to know what each course is really like. They choose, they change their minds, they choose again... And usually there is an imbalance. It is a broken system. In recent years, like this year, too many students choose Culture and Literature, so that we have to find a way to move some of them into Language, which is another painful process. . . ANYWAY, in the midst of all this, I want to try to clean my spirit, and one way to do so is to look at the stars in the sky; even though Fukukoa is a big city with many lights so that most stars are invisible to us, in this season Venus and the moon (and often Mars) are so bright, we can see them easily and beautifully, and they remind me that my worries for our students are very small in the scheme of the universe. |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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