What a day! Friday was the coldest and windiest and snowiest day I can remember in Fukuoka. Usually it snows about once or twice a year, but nothing stays on the ground or trees or buildings very long. But this morning I walked to school in a snow globe of furious flurries, and it was so fun! So much so that although I could have hustled to catch a bus and save myself twenty minutes or so, I let the bus go and kept on walking ... taking about 40 minutes because it was harder going over the powdery snow. And getting close to campus I squatted down and made a big snowball to carry with me the rest of the way. I settled it in the crook of a tree near the Bunkei Center (where my office is).
And on the way to period 2 class today, the snow was falling in tiny powder balls. Exhilarating! Anyway, today the last week of classes for 2022 finished! And there were some highs (in addition to the walk to and from school) and lows. High points were doing the sentence modeling using Calvin and Hobbes comics, with the students making their own variations on the comics by replacing key adjectives, nouns, and verbs. For example, one comic goes like this: "Whenever I take my bath, I always put my ducky in first" (Calvin) "For companionship?" (Hobbes) "To test for sharks" (Calvin). So here are some of their variations: Whenever I wake up, I always go in the living room first. For preparing for school? To sleep in the kotatsu. Whenever I go outside, I always wash my hands first. For eating some food? To hold clean hands with my girlfriend. Whenever I go home, I always turn on the lights first. For field of view? To scare away ghosts. Hey, those are pretty good! Another comic was about wishing, with Calvin asking Hobbes, "If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?" and Hobbes answering, "A sandwich," so Calvin freaks out and says, "I'd ask for a trillion billion dollars," so Hobbes calmly says (while eating a sandwich), "I got my wish." So students had easy and impossible wishes like, a chocolate and going to the moon, a pencil and catching stars, and so on. Although some of the students were clueless as to parts of speech (so they'd try to replace adjectives with nouns and nouns with verbs and so on), and quite a few were sick (they've been dropping with corona and other illnesses lately), and several were late (one boy comes about fifteen to twenty minutes late to every class), and very few of them had done any homework preparation (they were supposed to show up with their versions written on the handout with the comics), there were enough who were able to come up with interesting variations that it made me quite happy after the commerce major class and the chemistry major class. My good mood was dampened by the performance of my first-year English majors in English Conversation class. One guy turned out to have not read any of Charlotte's Web through the semester; two different groups of boys and two groups of girls had copied the homework from one of their number, with poor answers revealing they hadn't read the last chapter of the book; and apart from a handful of on the ball girls, it was as if they hadn't read the book at all or if so half-assedly. So that was a downer. So I didn't sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town with them or Winter Wonderland, even though for part of the class (up on the 7th floor of the building) we could see some great, rare snow falling and flying and floating outside, because I didn't have the heart to do something fun with them after they'd done such half-hearted homework (too many of them). Sighhhhhhhhhh. Another low point in Friday's Reading and Writing class, where I snapped, "NO!" at a student when he got up in the middle of class and started walking out the door. I had just let two other guys go to the toilet and told the second one and the whole class to say "please" when asking to go to the toilet or anything else, etc., and so this third guy got up and just said, "Toilet," so I snapped. It is true that he also had not done his homework (again), and he was the guy who lost the textbook I'd lent him and then forgotten I'd lent it to him, but I wouldn't have yelled at him if he had said "please," really... Anyway, I felt regret and guilt after for losing my temper like that. BUT the week ended on an up note with my American Culture class for third and fourth year English majors, when we covered Christmas, and, apart from a couple sleeping girls, a couple smartphone checking boys, and a couple other class homework doing girls (!), the kids were alert and listening and responding, and we finished by singing "Winter Wonderland" (well... maybe I sang it more than they did!). And then I could walk home in the cold windy snowy late afternoon, listening to a good audiobook and feeling alive and looking forward to getting home to life partner and dinner.... Thank you! Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and Healthy Holidays!
0 Comments
I was teaching my American Culture Kakuron class yesterday, covering American universities in general and my experiences at UCSD and UM in particular, when a student asked me what was my best memory from university. I immediately told him that the TGIF festivals put on by UCSD after classes on Friday in my first year, with free beer and pizza and live music on the grassy knolls in front of the gymnasium, cause I could run around in the golden late afternoon southern California sunlight, laughing with friends, looking at girls, and generally feeling full of youth and life, etc. (I didn't go into all that detail in class!)... and then I asked the student what was his best memory at our university. And he looked down and thought, and then said he doesn't really have any because for most of his first two years here, classes were online, and his words punched me and made me really see the students, sitting there mostly attentively in their anti-virus masks, and I felt so sorry for them for not being able to enjoy their university lives fully freely as before, laughing and talking with friends, partying, playing, studying together openly etc....
Too often I think of things from my point of view, how difficult it is to teach online (when we were doing that), how uncomfortable it is wearing masks while teaching (I often have to go out into the hallway to blow my nose in the middle of classes), how nervous it makes me to be around so many vigorous young people during a pandemic, and how strange it seems when I rarely see their faces when they take a drink or something... But for the poor students, this must really be an awful time, their youths being straightened if not blighted by all this... Ah, I made my poor American Culture class kids (third-years) do a spelling bee last week, botching it of course by not taking into account how long it'd take to do a spelling bee properly with fifty students, cause I was aiming at how I did it last year with twenty-one... So we ran out of time, of course, so we'll have to finish next class.
I was impressed by how well the kids did, spelling words like rhythm, vegetable, revolution, curriculum, cucumber, and elevator. They did miss ones like raspberry and mix up s and z or r and l, etc. But those are reasonable misspellings. I chose their numbers randomly by using a deck of playing cards, according to alphabetical order of suits (clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades), which almost worked, but took too long for my slow brain to calculate which number of the class list to translate a given card into. Anyway, I think they liked it, but of course it's no fun for the ones who miss a word early to sit there for forty-five minutes watching others participating......... |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |