Well... somehow we've finished about eleven weeks of the second semester and Christmas is starting to approach, it being December 2nd now.
I've been enjoying classes mostly. I'm trying to enjoy doing America Bunka Bungaku Gairon (Introduction to American Culture and Literature) for nearly a hundred first-year English majors, because it'll be the last time I do the class for a good while, because next year and the year after I'll have to do a third- and then fourth-year seminar instead, and after that we'll start a new curriculum (ugh) in which the class will be mutilated--cut in half--one semester for the American version and then one semester for the British version (ever since I came to Fukuoka University in 1997, the class has been a full-year class...) Also, we had some events recently, like a Theme and Method presentation day for Graduate School English followed by a fun party downtown. It was great to eat and drink with graduate students and teachers after listening to first-year MA students tell us about their second-year (next year) thesis projects. My most challenging class to teach has been Thursday period 4 Freshman English for Commerce majors, because there are about eight girls who constantly check their smartphones and talk to each other throughout the class, no matter how many times I ask them to focus and pay attention. They are cute and funny and good natured, and I really enjoy their company, but on the few occasions when I'm really trying to communicate something to them like homework or something about English or American culture and I see them not paying any attention but babbling and giggling and smartphoning away, I do feel a sense of frustration. Last Thursday was typical: at one point when I was telling them about American newspaper comics like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, I realized that one of the girls was applying makeup in the back of the room, so I told her, "Akari! No more makeup! Makeup time is over! Stop please!" So she grudgingly stopped, but then five minutes later i saw her fixing her eyelashes with an eyelash curver device! Then ten minutes later I saw her reach for her convenience store lunch she'd been eating before class began and glared at her, so she smilingly put down her chopsticks! Then when I wanted the students to go to Gocomics.com's website on their smarthphones to show how they can read all these American newspaper comics for free whenever they want, they were so conditioned to stop checking their smartphones when i scold them about it that they all started putting their smarthphones away! So I had to repeatedly say, "turn ON your smartphones!" And they kept hearing "Turn OFF your smartphones" no matter how many times I said "ON," until I finally went to the light switches for the classroom and dramatically turned them all off (saying "OFF") and then on (saying "ON"), until they finally actually heard what I wanted them to do. Then they didn't understand many of them that I wanted them to go to the website I'd printed on their homework handout, Gocomics.com, so I had to go around individually and put my finger on that website for about ten of them so they got the idea... Yikes! And that was just a ten minute sequence in one day with those kids! But after the class ended, and I was walking back to my office, I ran into about eight first-year English majors I teach in Freshman English on Wednesdays, and it was such a pure relief and joy to see them (they are good kids and good students)... ANYWAY, sometimes Freshman English can be a chore or a torture or a pain and sometimes it can be a lot of fun. And even with that Thursday class of Commerce majors, there are some super students in it, like this serious boy who sits in the front and understands everything I say and prepares homework and volunteers to ask questions etc. etc. and I do enjoy those crazy girls despite myself. So the semester goes on. I'm enjoying all my graduate school classes, like the one with my first-year MA students Riku who's studying Emily Dickinson's poetry, and each Friday for 90 minutes we dive into Emily's poems, one or two or three of them, figuring out finally what they mean and appreciating her rhymes and near rhymes and rhythm changes and so on. And a seminar for three first-year MA students plus my two PhD TAs, and we're reading together the high school vampire novel by Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and enjoying talking about it a lot. Oh, and last Thursday afternoon (after the crazy girls class--one time I caught them taking selfies in class!) an interesting quiet super student first-year English major boy visited my office to talk for about an hour, and that was nice. He's living with his grandmother in Fukuoka because his family home is in the next prefecture, Saga, and takes 40 minutes to ride his bicycle to school and is thinking of choosing the literature and culture course when they have to choose that or language and communication course next week (though I'll believe that when I see it, because I pessimistically believe all the best students usually choose the language and communication course). And then I think that after all I will miss interacting with young people when I retire in eight years (if I'm healthy enough to work that long). I found out recently that in two whole classes, about 55 people, only two said their families get physical newspapers every day, and that in one class of English conversation, none of the students had ever written a letter on paper in their life, so I can see, I mean, how culture is changing from when I was a kid... Anyway, the semester goes on... Soon 2023 will be over!
0 Comments
Whew--back in the classroom! The over-too-soon summer vacation is long gone. (So is my birthday, last week...)
It is good to meet students again, as well as my colleagues, and to go walk on our campus and go to my office and so on. I even managed to get all my first day handouts printed and copied and organized all right... And I memorized the names and faces of two classes of thirty kids, reconfirmed the names and faces of about 120 other students, too. So things are starting well enough... **Some names are hard to distinguish, like Rensho, Reishi, Ryosei, Ryuhei, Yusei, Yushin, or Izuha, Hozuka, Ikuho... There've a few memorable moments so far, especially as the students in the English conversation type classes start doing their self-introduction speeches and talking about what they did in summer vacation etc. One guy said he's an uncle with three little nephews; one girl has three rescue cats while another girl wants a cat; one guy won a thousand dollars gambling in an another Asian country somehow and is wondering when to turn it into yen (because the yen is so weak against the dollar now, but may get weaker still...); one girl went from being a volleyball player in high school to a lacrosse manager at our university; one guy has a part time job in a theater where he gets to see movies for a discount; one guy likes scary suspense movies and music like Silence of the Lambs and Marilyn Manson; one guy hates worms because of an experience he had age seven; one guy said that a customer in the clothes store he works part time in requested a shirt made of 60% cotton, and when he (the student) found one with 61%, the guy said it wouldn't do... I really like finding stuff out like that... and I realize that when I retire I'll really miss it. Well, here it is Saturday July 29, 2023, and classes are finally (almost) over. I did my last university undergraduate classes last Friday the 21st, and (almost) my last graduate school classes last week. I also started invigilating exams yesterday. We have to do four exams each exam period, even if our own classes don't have exams. Yesterday, for instance, was some exam for 110 engineering students (mostly electric engineering, I think), of whom 109 were male! Unluckily, we were in AB01, which is a basement lecture hall in Building A, designed like a mountain, with the rows of seats ascending a steep slope, so we invigilators did a fair amount of mountain climbing during the exam (well, it is good exercise, really, so maybe it was lucky...). In addition to being surprised to see only one girl in a set of 110 engineering students, I was surprised to discover that barely a fifth of the 110 were wearing masks. For that matter, the teacher whose exam it was, the guy in charge of the exam, wasn't wearing a mask, either. The three supporter invigilators, including me, were... And of course the students sans masks did a fair amount of coughing and sneezing and such...
ANYWAY. Were we in an American university, we'd have been out on summer vacation by the middle of May, probably, or maybe at the latest by the start of June, but here we are at the end of July just getting into our exam period! My last exam will be August 1, Tuesday, when my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class has its exam (110 students on the list, about 90 first-year English majors, a handful of older English majors who've failed the class in the past, and a handful of Law, French, German, and East Asian students). And Monday I have to invigilate back to back exams for other teachers' classes. And, needless to say, it's HOT now! Today will get to about 36 degrees, which is nothing compared to Arizona's temperatures, not to mention Southern Europe's, etc., but when you factor in our excessive humidity, 36 is really uncomfortable. And the cicadas are, as every year, deafening in their desperation to mate before dying. (I actually do like their "song," but it does seem to heat the air even more...) Right, so complaining about the heat and all wasn't my intention here. Instead, I'd like to summarize my experience with classes this semester as it's ending, as well as to hit a few highlight moments. MY MOST DISAPPOINTING CLASS (let's get this out of the way first). English Conversation II (for second-year English majors). This class had the WORST attendance of any class I can remember ever teaching here. My usual policy is if you miss five classes, you don't get credit, but if I stuck to that, I'd fail two-thirds of the class probably. The best student missed two classes... Usually the best students don't miss any. Many students were only on time and in class a few times. Every week at least half the class wasn't there when we started. Their study habits were lousy, too, with most of them doing no homework on the relatively few occasions when I assigned some, and too many of them forgetting the homework handouts when we needed to cover them in class. The nadir was probably about the 11th day when they were absent or late and I saw a girl doing her email on her smartphone as I was trying to start our topic that day... I snapped! For the first time since I've been teaching, in my live, going back to U of Michigan writing classes, Kagoshima U classes, and Fukuoka U classes, I just ended the class after twenty-five minutes, telling them to have a good lunch and walking out of the room. After that, things were slightly better, but only the half or so of the class who were in class when I snapped and left knew what had happened, so the other half who were absent continued being absent or late even after... ANYWAY, I don't want to trash this class completely for some reasons.. First, most of the kids are really charming and sweet and funny. Second, they are "C" class, which, under our department's terrible new policy of dividing a year of English majors according to their TOEIC scores, SIE (Study in English) being the top quarter, A class the next, B class the next, and C class the last, my class were the "underachievers" in their year, supposedly. I always like the underdog, so I sympathized and rooted for them and wanted them to do well, really. I told them at one point that being in C class has nothing to do with their brains, that they are just as smart as any of the other students in their year, that their problem is only motivation/attendance, etc. etc. And I had a great moment with them when one day when a girl jumped up from her chair and recoiled in horror against the wall because there was, inexplicably (we were on the 7th floor of a tall building) a praying mantis on her desk! It was smallish and green and cute, so I put it on my fan, whence it ran up my hand and got on my arm, etc., which entertained the kids as if I'd been handling a Black Widow Spider or something, and I went out of the room, went down the elevators to the ground floor, exited the building and found some nice bushes to put the creature in... The kids got a kick out of it, as did I. "I held nature!" MY OTHER ENGLISH MAJOR CLASS Introduction to American Culture and Literature I'm still not sure what to think about this group, because we haven't had our exam yet (worth 50 points), but... but... Well, on the plus side, there are some motivated and intelligent and capable students for sure, and I really enjoyed each class with this group, because as a whole they were responsive in class and generally (the first-year students) had good attendance etc. However, the quality of the comments they posted on our class blog each week was pretty mediocre in general... Many short, superficial comments without any examples or details or explanations, like, "I liked learning about rhyme," or "I like Edgar Allan Poe." Probably fewer substantial and thoughtful and interesting comments than when I've taught the class in the past. I got a perverse pleasure from one guy who'd been absent from class saying in his comment, "Thanks for the interesting class." And from another guy who'd been dead sleeping through class saying in his comment, "Thanks for the fun class." On the plus side, three students wrote really neat William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" poems that I could put into a handout and distribute to the class, but on the minus side, only three students did that. Only one student tried to do a bonus point activity, a girl who memorized the first stanza of "Annabel Lee" (when they're supposed to memorize an entire poem!). Every time I gave a quiz at the end of class (nine times), about thirty people got five out of five, thirty four, fifteen three, and the rest 0, 1, or 2. They often missed questions that I told them the answers to, basically, during class, both with my voice saying something and the screen showing something. I was a little appalled that more couldn't get a perfect five. If they read the handouts and listen in class, five should be rather easy to get. This tells me 1) their English ability, some of them, is really low or 2) their powers of concentration or preparation are pretty low. Another weird thing I noticed for the first time since I've been teaching the class is that many of them are very quick to take pics of the powerpoint slides on the screen with their smart phones. I suspect that many of these people are taking the pic and not trying to read the screen or listen to my explanation of it. So i'm thinking that in fall semester I might ban taking pics OR give them designated times (15 seconds now and then) to take pics or something... it's disconcerting and I suspect they're relying on their devices instead of on their ears, eyes, and brains. OTHER CLASSES I taught basically three conversation classes for the General English education at our university. One class I was lucky to get was 23 first-year English majors (who were also taking my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class). They were great, fun, funny, diligent, capable, active, etc. I think we had a good time together, too. I've given them mostly 90 or higher (A grades). No big problem other than the universal one where they tend to speak too much Japanese when I'm not hovering over their group. One class was first-year Business majors. They were mostly fun and nice... though there was a guy with low English ability, desire, confidence, etc., who refused to use English even when I was talking to him. He had a rather unpleasant attitude as well. Lucky for him he had good attendance! Anyway, they were largely fine and good to spend time with. The third class was second-year law students. They were lively but had terrible attendance (though not as bad as my English majors English conversation class!). My GRADUATE school classes were mostly fine. My class for my first-year seminar student was always great because we spent the first few weeks reading and talking about The Iliad and then the next nine or ten weeks reading and talking about Emily Dickinson poems! I loved those talks a lot and learned to appreciate Emily's poems even more than before, cause we always discovered something new by reading and talking about the poems. My classes for my two PhD students (sisters from China) were fine, really, though they've started wanting to make presentations and write papers rather suddenly, and so it's become rather demanding in terms of time and thought to help them. And my seminar for any of our grad students is always fun--we're reading and discussing adventure stories like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Tuesdays at the Castle, and in Fall Semester The Book of Three and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. My only regret is that I didn't do any Le Guin with them. Oh, one thing of note happened when one of the seminar students used ChatGPT to post writing on our Facebook Group, and I quickly realized something was off because suddenly her English was too good, and yet there was something weirdly superficial about the writing... It turned out that she had written in English a version of what she wanted to post, and then asked ChatGPT to turn her English into a native speaker's English or something. I was impressed, because it was pretty good English without discernible mistakes, but it also was too slick somehow. Had she been a native speaker of English, I might not have caught the infraction! Anyway, she apologized and I let it go at that, wondering a bit about where AI will take us and about what the difference is if I correct student English to make it sound natural or if Chat GPT does it... Right, so I have ONE more class, an online graduate school class, the Emily Dickinson one-to-one tutorial kind of thing coming up on Monday, and then I can make final grades etc. etc. I can do it! Today I heard the first cicadas (semi) of the season. It's been around 30 lately, and plenty humid. The semester staggers on...
I had some fun moments in classes last week, when the students were put into groups of four or five or so and made to draw cards with topics they had to talk about for five minutes etc. etc. One boy ended up telling how he likes playing poker and wants to participate in the WSOP (World Series of Poker?). He doesn't play for money (it's illegal in Japan, he righteously said), but enjoys the game. He has a good poker face, he said, and I believe him. Another goofy funny cheerful boy who easily turns red and laughs a lot in the same group, I opined would have a terrible poker face, and he agreed, laughing red faced... A girl said that she's sharing an apartment with two girl friends, which is quite unusual in Japan, where the norm is to have a single apartment for one person. I asked how they manage groceries and provisions and the refridgerator etc., and she said that when they go shopping, they buy some basic things like rice and milk in common and use freely, etc., and some personal things no one else should touch, etc. When I asked if they cook meals by rotation or something, she said no, they just cook for themselves whatever they feel like eating, individually. They never get lonely! One boy said that his favorite place is this beach in the city, at night, for the lights, etc., though not for swimming. One girl said her favorite place is the top roof of Hakata Station, where she can see the whole city and all the lights (she has a part time job there, in a ramen shop on the first floor...) Anyway, it was fun learning about them! I had another reality check from the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class when, after doing the Emily Dickinson lecture, in which I showed them a picture book with Emily's yellow house on the cover, then showed my photographs of when I visited there in 2012, including one selfie of me right in front of her house, and I also told them I did a tour of the house and went into Emily's BEDROOM, etc. etc., when, after all that (in addition of course to telling about her life, her poems, and analyzing Franklin 359 "a Bird came down the Walk") I gave them a google quiz, twenty of the hundred kids got the following true/false question wrong: "JP is sad because he's never visited Emily's house." Sigh... Still more--yesterday (Monday) I did a zoom meeting with one of the first-year English majors in the class, a bright and well-behaved girl, so we could practice her English Speech Society speech, and I had made the background to my video Emily's house, the same picture I showed them in class last Friday, and when we'd finished our business, I asked her if she knew what house was in my background, and she asked if it was MY house!?!? (I think she did...) So I had to say it's EMILY'S house! ANYWAY, maybe I need to work on my delivery of information to the students... Let's put it this way: I am surviving!
This has been one of my most difficult semesters, because I'm teaching nine classes on three days (Wed-Thr-Fri), so that I often get sore throats from overusing my voice by the end of classes on Friday afternoon, usually starting early Saturday morning, so I'm often fearing I've caught a cold (or worse) and then gradually as I rest, usually by Saturday night or Sunday morning, I return to normal and feel relieved. Then there is the energy point, as I need to sleep a lot over the weekend to recover my energy enough to do the next week's classes, even while I need to prepare for those classes, etc. I am enjoying most of the classes a lot! The four graduate school classes are always enjoyable, stimulating, and rewarding. I teach two PhD students and one Master's student in three separate classes, each with different topics and needs and interests and abilities. One PhD student is working on a presentation on E. B. White's three children's novels, one is working on presentations on Louise Erdrich's children's books, and one is working on a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry. So far I've been enjoying the Emily Dickinson parts the most because I've always loved her poetry a great deal, but have not read so many of her poems for the last thirty years (since grad school), so I've been experiencing the exhilaration of reading "new" poems, being flummoxed by Emily's idiosyncratic and mysterious and complicated approach to life and poetry, and then gradually coming to understand the poems (mostly) and to enjoy them more deeply. Then I teach a seminar for three first-year MA students, for which we're reading American children's adventure stories, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Tuesdays at the Castle, and that's great fun. Anyway, the graduate school classes are fine, really! Then I have five university classes, which are mostly fun and fine. The most challenging one to teach, in terms of preparation and energy, is the big lecture class Introduction to American Culture and Literature with almost 110 students in it, 91 first-year English majors and then a handful of law, French, German, East Asian, or upper-class English majors... And I have FOUR grad student TAs for the class, too! Anyway, I did finally manage to learn (most of) their names and faces, and I like the class a lot. The other classes are basically conversation, two for English majors and the rest for other majors like commerce and law, and I like them a lot, too, really. Just one class has been very disappointing in terms of attendance, the conversation class for second year English majors, because almost half of the class of 22 will be absent or late every time......... Each week more students are going unmasked. Last Thursday one girl in a conversation type class was coughing really badly, regularly, deeply, the bad kind of cough that sounds bad to hear, and she had no mask, so at one point I silently handed her a new mask and she thanked me and put it on... But jeeze, students are still catching colds, catching coronavirus, getting fevers, and so on, so I wish at least that the sick ones would still wear masks in class! One thing I like about classes is finding out about the students, most of whom, to be honest, are not SO interesting (always saying their hobbies are music or sports), but once in a while there'll be an unusual person, like a girl who likes American movies with social themes like the Harriet Tubman movie or a movie about the Chicago Seven, or a boy who took a year and a half to learn to play a difficult piece by Liszt... Right, so here's hoping I can survive the second half of this first semester, now that we've entered the abominable rainy season, with 85%+ humidity and increasingly high temperatures! I’ve been enjoying classes so far!
We’re in the early days, like the first day, where I get students to ask me any questions about anything, and the second day, where I get the students in Conversation type classes to give 3-4 minute self-introduction speeches, and I’ve been learning a lot of interesting things about the kids and they about me I suppose, and I think we’ve mostly been having a good time (despite the classrooms being VERY hot the second week). So, I’ve been learning or hearing things like this: One girl has a big brother ten years her senior and really likes him in a special way. When she was in junior high and struggling with math, he coached her, though he was no math whizz and had to read her textbook to learn enough to help her. One girl has a little sister ten years her junior and really likes her in a special way. One girl has an identical twin sister and said that sometimes their parents confuse them and call her by her sister’s name, so I teased her by asking if she and her sister ever switch places/roles, she going to her sister’s college and her sister going to Fukudai and posing as each other (she chuckled and said no). One girl said she has a little brother in Junior High School and likes playing basketball with him, so I asked who wins, and she said with a nice smile that he always does. One girl said she likes movies like Harriet (about Harriet Tubman) and The Chicago Seven (about the unjust trial of the organizers of a demonstration back in the sixties), and a boy asked her in Q&A time what is a boring movie that she’s seen, and she said after a pause to think, “Star Wars,” because it’s too long and is just fight and chase scenes. A boy asked me how I met my wife (so I could tell my driving school story), and another boy asked me what I’m good at (so I could say I’m good at forgetting bad things and remembering their names and faces), and another boy asked me what is my best memory with my wife (so I could tell about the time when we were dating and romantic and my wife taught me how to say the Japanese words for body parts (nose, ears, chin, mouth, arm, etc.) by touching those parts so I could then touch those parts and say the words (the kids got a kick out of that, and so did I as I remembered that time thirty-seven years ago to tell them about it!). So all that kind of thing was neat. There were some painful speeches, to be sure, where a guy said maybe fifteen words in three minutes, spending the rest of the time looking down trying to think of what to say (and this was a HOMEWORK assignment I’d told them about the week before). There was a girl who was SO quiet-voiced and spoke so fast and had such weird intonation that neither I nor the kids could understand much of what she said. But overall, in all the classes (first-year English majors, first-year law majors, second-year commerce majors), most of the kids were on the ball and did fine, really. Oh, and my usual practice of learning their names and faces worked OK for the most part. In classes of up to 30 kids (four of my five being like that), I memorized their names and faces as I called roll, then took a few photos of each class, then practiced their names and faces with the photos after class, and generally got them memorized, so the next class I could greet them one by one by name, with just a handful of tricky ones (who got new hairdos or changed to glasses or no glasses or sat in different places, etc. etc.). I like learning interesting names, like one guy’s name that means Galaxy, one girl’s that means Beautiful Sea, one boy’s that means Horse Crossing, and so on, plus the names that sound similar in one class, like one class with Miyu, Miyu, and Miyuu, one with Kouta, Souta, Koki, Shoki, one with Ami and Mimi (sitting right next to each other), one with Honoka and Honoka (sitting right next to each other), one with Rio and Rio (sitting right next to each other), one with a lot of R starting names (Rintaro, Ryohei, Rento, Ryota, Ryoma, Ryo, Rikuto), and so on. And of course my graduate school classes are stimulating and pleasant, though… though… this year will be very challenging because I have three graduate students, one first-year Master’s student, one first-year PhD student, and one third-year PhD student (those last two are little sister and big sister), which means that I have four graduate school classes overall (three for those three plus one for any of our graduate students), which means that when combined with my university classes, I have nine classes overall, three Wednesday, three Thursday, and three Friday. Yikes! And all those classes are back to back (2-3-4 Wednesday, 1-2-3 Thursday, and 2-3-4 Friday). All that talking means that after my last class today (Friday) of our second week, my throat was rather sore, and I was worrying a bit as to whether I’d caught a cold or, gasp, corona! **By the way, our school has followed Japan as a whole in relaxing the mask requirements, so now a handful of students in each class are maskless, so that although I am still wearing mine, I worry that someone’s going to get me sick… Anyway, the only class I’m worried about is the big introduction to American Literature and Culture class for all of our first-year English majors plus repeating students who’ve failed it in the past, plus a about a dozen law majors and a handful of French or German or Japanese majors, a total of 113 students in one class. One problem is that the room is very snug for 113 people (plus my three TAs), so it gets warm… Another problem is that a not insignificant number of the students are taking a class taught mostly in English for the first time and have trouble understanding things I tell them. I have faith that most will start getting used to the class, but I also fear that a handful will remain clueless and zoned out, and I must find a way to not just lecture at them for 90 mins, the way I basically did today, well, 80 mins, cause I gave em a google forms quiz the last ten mins… I also want to learn their names and faces, but it’s tough cause there are so many, and I can’t take time to go around the room taking roll and learning each name and face. Well… I suppose I could do something like the first quarter one week, the second quarter another week, and so on. Anyway, what I did today was have them hold up pieces of paper with their names and numbers written on them and take photos of them, nearly thirty photos in all, which I now have on my computer, so my homework this weekend will be learning their names and faces that way! ANYWAY, all this is to say that after two weeks of classes, I’m basically exhausted but feeling happy enough and looking forward to next week and the next, actually (though I sure love my four-day weekends!). 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! 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......... A little bit interesting thing happened in my last classes on Tuesday period 5 and on Wednesday period 4, both Interactive English classes, the former one for commerce majors the latter one for chemistry majors. In each class the last six or seven students who had to give three-minute self-introduction speeches did their things (almost all of them being too short and skimpy on details) and including the three or four questions that we asked each speaker after their speech, the whole thing took about 65 or 70 minutes of the 90 minute classes. Therefore, at the end of each class I got up in front of the room and said I was going to give them one last three-minute speech about any topic they suggested to me. As the commerce majors are not into volunteering, I drew a playing card using my system whereby the diamond suit is the first 13 students on the class list, the heart suit is the next 13 students on the class list, and the ace and two of clubs are the 27th and 28th students on the class list. And the girl whose card I chose gave me a speech topic: fashion!
I know nothing about fashion and care nothing about it and sympathize with Henry David Thoreau’s quotation that goes, “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” I did actually tell them a loose version of that quotation! (I’m sure none of them had any idea what I was trying to say by it.) But I tried not to be too critical about fashion, because I know that many of them are totally into it, like the girl who suggested that topic for me. But really I couldn't say anything about it other than to say that I don't know anything about it, that I don’t know any brand names apart from, say, Nike, that my wife buys my clothes for me, and that I'm only vaguely aware of different fashions among our university’s students, like for different colored hair and different categories like gothic or punk people and sports people and business people and so on. For the chemistry majors when I asked them to come up with a topic, the boy who partly volunteered and whom I partly chose said after pausing to think, “human.” By that I took him to mean human beings or human nature or humanity. And so that's how I made my three-minute speech, beginning by saying there are too many people in the world, then pointing out that the best things people do is create things like a manga that one other student said he likes in his speech, Korean pop group that some other students said she likes in her speech, and so on, though I also did point out the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Finally, I told them about empathy, writing the word on the board, getting them to repeat it with me, and explaining it by some examples, after which I told them (parroting Philip K. Dick) that if we do not have empathy we are not human, and if we do have empathy we are human, because human beings are the only creatures with empathy. The point is that it's interesting how the same subject can be very different in feeling and outcome and content, depending on the students in different classes and depending on chance. Of course, I think that the speech about humanity was much more interesting than the one about fashion! But I'm glad that I had both topics to deal with because they show the variety of my students and my classes, even when we're doing basically the same activities. |
Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
Categories |