Let's put it this way: I am surviving!
This has been one of my most difficult semesters, because I'm teaching nine classes on three days (Wed-Thr-Fri), so that I often get sore throats from overusing my voice by the end of classes on Friday afternoon, usually starting early Saturday morning, so I'm often fearing I've caught a cold (or worse) and then gradually as I rest, usually by Saturday night or Sunday morning, I return to normal and feel relieved. Then there is the energy point, as I need to sleep a lot over the weekend to recover my energy enough to do the next week's classes, even while I need to prepare for those classes, etc. I am enjoying most of the classes a lot! The four graduate school classes are always enjoyable, stimulating, and rewarding. I teach two PhD students and one Master's student in three separate classes, each with different topics and needs and interests and abilities. One PhD student is working on a presentation on E. B. White's three children's novels, one is working on presentations on Louise Erdrich's children's books, and one is working on a thesis on Emily Dickinson's poetry. So far I've been enjoying the Emily Dickinson parts the most because I've always loved her poetry a great deal, but have not read so many of her poems for the last thirty years (since grad school), so I've been experiencing the exhilaration of reading "new" poems, being flummoxed by Emily's idiosyncratic and mysterious and complicated approach to life and poetry, and then gradually coming to understand the poems (mostly) and to enjoy them more deeply. Then I teach a seminar for three first-year MA students, for which we're reading American children's adventure stories, like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and Tuesdays at the Castle, and that's great fun. Anyway, the graduate school classes are fine, really! Then I have five university classes, which are mostly fun and fine. The most challenging one to teach, in terms of preparation and energy, is the big lecture class Introduction to American Culture and Literature with almost 110 students in it, 91 first-year English majors and then a handful of law, French, German, East Asian, or upper-class English majors... And I have FOUR grad student TAs for the class, too! Anyway, I did finally manage to learn (most of) their names and faces, and I like the class a lot. The other classes are basically conversation, two for English majors and the rest for other majors like commerce and law, and I like them a lot, too, really. Just one class has been very disappointing in terms of attendance, the conversation class for second year English majors, because almost half of the class of 22 will be absent or late every time......... Each week more students are going unmasked. Last Thursday one girl in a conversation type class was coughing really badly, regularly, deeply, the bad kind of cough that sounds bad to hear, and she had no mask, so at one point I silently handed her a new mask and she thanked me and put it on... But jeeze, students are still catching colds, catching coronavirus, getting fevers, and so on, so I wish at least that the sick ones would still wear masks in class! One thing I like about classes is finding out about the students, most of whom, to be honest, are not SO interesting (always saying their hobbies are music or sports), but once in a while there'll be an unusual person, like a girl who likes American movies with social themes like the Harriet Tubman movie or a movie about the Chicago Seven, or a boy who took a year and a half to learn to play a difficult piece by Liszt... Right, so here's hoping I can survive the second half of this first semester, now that we've entered the abominable rainy season, with 85%+ humidity and increasingly high temperatures!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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