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