Yikes, it's been HOT--June ended with days about as hot and humid as mid- or late-August, around 35 degrees etc. Kids and teachers have been suffering, melting, wilting...
The air conditioners are usually working in the classrooms, but as we have windows and doors open in the classrooms to promote air circulation during coronavirus times, things still get plenty uncomfortable. Anyway, here are some highlights from the last few weeks of classes. I found out some interesting things about some students in English conversation class for first-year majors. For example, one girl's parents are both nurses, who met in nursing college and work in different hospitals in the same city, the father getting higher pay than the mother. And one girl's parents own a patisserie, so she's always smelling good things baking and eating tasty cakes and such. I started having to ask a boy in one class to pull up his mask, because he was constantly pulling it down (or letting it drop down) around his chin. As the class he's in is "Interactive English" (basically English conversation), so the students talk a fair amount, and as one of his classmates had recently returned from being out with Covid (and telling us that he'd been coughing blood while sick), and as they sit side by side in the classroom, etc., it's rather appalling that a kid would want to have a class like that without wearing his mask properly. I continue to get weird flashes as if seeing people buck naked when students pull down their masks to get a drink during class. It is a sign of how weird our current life is that I feel uncomfortable when seeing people's faces... I have pretty much mastered all my students' names and faces by now, without the aid of the photo cards I used to have all classes give me. But there are still a few here and there whose names I regularly botch, like the girl whose family name I keep mangling, Megashira, Shimameguribashi, etc., when it's Murashige. And the class with three Rinas, three Mizukis, and a Motoki and a Tomoki, an Ayami, Ayari, and Ayuri, a Riku and a Rukuo, and a Jumpei and a Junsuke, not to mention a Karen and a Karin is still challenging (in a fun way, as it's fun to say their names when greeting them before class). My Reading and Writing class for Commerce majors continues to be challenging, because, although most of the students are capable enough to do what has to be done to participate in the class and pass it etc., and a few are super, there are several who are clueless, hopeless, dire, and almost doomed. They sleep in class; they get one point out of five on our daily quizzes, even though I basically give the answers to the class during each lecture so that if the students do homework and pay attention in class the quizzes should be easy to get perfect scores on; they copy their friends' homework; and so on. They also tend to miss too many classes... I may have to fail them, but I don't want to. Failing them will doom them to taking huge repeater classes next year, and we are in the coronavirus times, so teachers are supposed to be more lenient about absences.... Apart from this class, most students in most classes are doing well enough to get (and deserve) credit. Anyway, this has been an increasingly difficult semester, because throughout June and into July I've been having to go to all-day Saturday meetings for our entrance exams and to take several hours preparing for them during the week, so my usual Saturday of resting and recovering energy expended during the work week has been gone. So I'm really getting tired and my lower back is really sore... sob sob sob! Just two more weeks now, though, of usual classes!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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