My second week back at school started with more technical troubles!
My graduate school class with six students was great at first, cause we'd all decided to keep our video cameras on through the Webex class, whereas the standard way for Fukuoka University online classes to work is with video cameras off. Anyway, it was fun to see each other in action and to see our smiles and reactions and so on... but then... about half way through, the video on my computer got messed up, so some of the students only saw my silhouette and I saw student A's face frozen in the thumbnails of students B and C for some reason, when student A's face wasn't turning bright green! Hmmm... So next week we're going to try Zoom. Then, the very next class was my Introduction to American Culture and Literature, and again about half-way into the class when I was sharing screens suddenly Webex froze so I had to ask all the students to leave the meeting and return after five minutes, during w hich I restarted my computer and so on and so forth. Then the same thing happened with about ten minutes left in class, so I couldn't show a nice picture of Naomi Osaka wearing face masks with the names of George Floyd and other victims of police written on them... Luckily it really was time to give them their quiz, which worked OK (except seven people entered their email addresses incorrectly, so I couldn't release their scores so they'd get them. ANYWAY, those classes were fine, really, the graduate school one talking about Features of Fiction (character, narrator, plot, etc.) and the American Culture and Literature one covering (in 70 minutes!) the history of slavery, segregation, civil rights movement, persisting racism (in health, education, economy, marriage, justice, and toys), ending with Black Lives Matter and George Floyd and Jacob Blake etc. ... Thursday classes went smoothly again, more or less... but for Conversation class I had the students leave our Webex meeting and join a Zoom one, so I could put them into breakout rooms. They seemed to work, maybe...... I could only visit three (because I had to try to help one boy who couldn't understand how to join a breakout room), and of the three I joined, two were functioning finely, with the students using English to communicate with each other etc., while one was a dead silence when I joined it... ANYWAY, I will try it again! I had a fun moment in the Interactive English class for Freshmen Pharmacy majors in my last class on Thursday when a girl asked another girl a cat question (because by chance they gave back to back self-introduction speeches mentioning that they each had young cats for pets), what is your favorite cat pose? And the girl answered "rolling on the floor" and asked the other one, "How about you?" so the other one could answer, "Round back after waking up and yawning." I loved it. On Friday, my seminar class introduced historical fiction, so I asked the students to give their examples of historical fiction in movies, tv shows, novels, or manga, etc., and they came up with some nice interesting examples, like Hotaru no Haka (Graveyard of the Fireflies), Honnoji Hotel (girl time slips back to 1582 warring period Japan), Life is Beautiful, Jin (doctor time slips back to Edo era), and the Genji drama (Genji Monogatari's hero time slips into our present). Anyway, it made me think of how many time slip or time travel historical fictions there are, so it must be a sub-genre (Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Outlander, etc.)... and how after all when we read a regular historical fiction, we in effect time travel (as the author has time traveled to write it). So all in all the week was good. But I sure am exhausted on Saturday!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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