First, I can't believe it's the last day of May today, and we've gotten through five or six weeks of classes (depending on the day of the week) already.
I've been SO busy getting ready for classes (Introduction to American Culture and Literature takes the longest because I've been making PowerPoint presentations and Google Forms quizzes for every class so far) that I haven't had time to write any blog entries here for a while. So here are some stand out great moments in a couple classes. First, I've been having the students in my three conversation type classes give 2-3 minute self-introduction speeches one at a time, after each of which I ask about two students some comprehension questions and then have them ask the speech makers a question about the speech contents, and then sometimes have the speech maker return the question to them and so on and so forth. And every once in a while there is some kind of neat serendipity thing that happens where my random choices of students to do those things yields some surprising connections. For example, in one class last week (I can't even remember now which it was but maybe it was an Economics major Freshman English class on Wednesday), consecutive speech makers one after the other told us the following. The first speech maker said she likes drawing pictures of animals, specifically cats. The second speech maker said she likes coloring in pictures in coloring books, especially pictures of cats. The third speaker said she has a pet cat five-years old with a long tail. The boy whom I asked randomly to ask her a question asked her, "Do you take your cat on walks?" And she said, "no," so I made her return the question: "How about you? Do you take your cat on walks?" And the boy said, "Yes," so I asked him, "On a leash?" and he said "Yes." And I was so excited by the whole thing, the chance that four students would have cats like that (when most who have pets have dogs), and that one of them would take his cat out on a leash on walks, etc. was delicious. Made my day. Then in the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class, I was doing a special Wednesday class on Saturday (our university wants us to have fourteen class meetings no matter what, so they stick in extra Saturday classes here and there), and we were covering rhyme and so on, and I was introducing rhyme by showing them some educational games for American kids like puzzle blocks that only fit together with rhyming words (and that have neat pictures illustrating the words too), and then I showed them this TV game about rhyme for 5-9 year olds called Rhyme Robber, and I asked them to chat me the pictures whose words rhyme, and immediately there was this torrent of "cat hat," "bear chair," "snake cake," and so on scrolling down the Webex screen, and it was so funny and exciting I was laughing and clapping like a 5-9 year old, and I saw one guy suggested "neck snake," so I could say not really, and later refer back to it as another example of near rhyme when I was covering near rhyme later in the class. Anyway, it was great fun, really. Of course, I spent too much time playing around like that and so had to rush past assonance and consonance and never even mentioned rhythm, so the quiz was too hard again, but it was fun. I am really enjoying this weird class situation. Of course, the three conversation classes, two on one day, become grueling, and kind of all blur into each other, so I might be combining cat people from two different classes in my above account, but so far it has been somehow manageable and even fun (if very very exhausting). Good luck to us for the rest of the semester, which we're just over a third of the way through now.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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