First, I can't believe 2020 and our Fall Semester are almost over. It has been the most difficult and the most speedy year I can remember.
Classes have been rolling along. The biggest and the smallest are the easiest and most fun to do. That would be my graduate school seminar for six interesting, intelligent, and entertaining students. We enjoyed E. B. White's Stuart Little first, and now are soldiering our way through Le Guin's The Farthest Shore, so our laughs are less frequent now, but I hope we're still learning something and thinking about important ideas. And I like reading and replying to their writing on our Facebook Group. The other class in this category is Introduction to American Literature and Culture for (mostly) first year English majors (a hundred students). It is the most time and energy intensive to prepare, because I have to make a new powerpoint presentation once a week, but it is also somewhat . . . comfortable to do because I don't need to monkey with putting students in small groups and so on. The classes requiring small group arranging (breakout rooms in zoom) are challenging, because it always seems as if one or two students have technical troubles and can't participate fully or at all, and because I can never quite trust them to be using English and not chattering in Japanese when I visit their rooms, and so visiting the different rooms requires a great deal of courage and moral energy on my part, because I never know what I will find... Also, I tend to spend too much time visiting the early groups and then have to rush to visit the later ones, and usually indeed run out of time and so on. And my seminar has I hope been going OK... We spend the first 30-40 mins answering student questions, and then I put them in two groups of about five people each to talk about homework topics etc., and so far they are really using English when I barge in on their rooms. And I'm enjoying reading what they write on our Facebook Group, too. (though I worry that some aren't writing enough...) An interesting and moving thing happened last week during an Interactive English class for first year Pharmacy majors. As there were an odd number of people in our meeting, and I was putting the class into pair groups in breakout rooms, I was randomly assigned to join a breakout room with one student, and after we did what we were supposed to do, we started talking, and it came out that her father had passed away when she was ten and that her mother had been raising her! I was filled with a desire to somehow recognize her mother's awesome achievement in getting her daughter to this point and to wish the girl the best success in getting her dream (to become a pharmacist in a big hospital).
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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