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.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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