Well, I just had a weird experience discovering one more difficult thing about doing online instead of in person classes: I fell asleep during a class!
Well, not really ASLEEP asleep, but I lost consciousness for a split second two or three different times in my Reading & Listening class for first-year Commerce majors. That has never happened to me in any university class, as far as I can remember now. The reason is that being in person in a room with students always keeps a certain amount of nervous adrenaline running around my body, making time pass super rapidly and making it impossible for me to sleep, even if I were sitting down to do classes, which I almost never do (except for my seminar classes, but then the adrenaline keeps me lively). But doing classes online, I always sit down at my computer, so. . . and there is less adrenaline firing me up because I can't see any of my students. I have no idea if the Commerce majors noticed my two or three brief blackouts. I think I almost didn't miss a beat in what I was doing, but... I was going through Chapter III and Chapter IV of Charlotte's Web, pointing out things about the story, about the English, about American culture, and so on. . . Anyway, after the second (or third) time falling briefly asleep, I realized I'd better do something to liven up the class and get some interaction going between the students and me, so I chose some "volunteers" to practice saying a little conversation between Wilbur and Templeton (A: Will you play with me? B: Play? Play? I hardly know the meaning of the word.) and then doing variations on it, having the students replace play with any other verb they want. And that did the trick, waking me up fine. But I'll have to try to get more sleep Wednesday nights from now on, cause Thursday is my tough day anyway, periods 2, 3, and 4, with the Reading and Listening class coming in the middle. ANYWAY, apart from that (and apart from ANOTHER Webex technical trouble, this time in my seminar Friday afternoon when I was trying to share some YouTube videos on Chrome of people playing some songs that Laura's Pa plays on his fiddle to entertain his family in Little House in the Big Woods, and Webex sharing froze, leaving the screen black, though, fortunately, the students could hear the videos, I think), last week went OK. And there was a really nice lucky moment in the afternoon on Wednesday, around 4:30, as I was hustling to a graduate school meeting across campus and ran into three girls who said hello to me as if they knew me, so I stopped and said hello back, and one of them said, "Thank you for today's class!" and then I knew that they must be first year English majors who took my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class on Wednesday afternoon. We could chat briefly, and I could put faces to the names I see every week when I join the meetings and see all the students' names in the participants' list in Webex. Right. So another week survived. The FIFTH, if you can believe that, the semester being a third of the way over already.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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