Well, the first week of class is over! I have three classes on Wednesday, two on Thursday, and three on Friday, and I am still exhausted on Saturday.
It was a stressful school week in many ways, including, of course, the big one :coronavirus threats and precautions and concerns. One of those involves having to wear at least one mask for 90 minute long classes. Another involves having to try to make sure that the students sit far enough apart from one another, their natural inclination being to sit in pairs of friends side by side. I try to make them sit diagonally one on the left and one behind on the right and one behind that on the left etc. going back, but it's not always possible when the classroom does not have enough desks to accommodate the number of students in the class, as is the case with my Thursday period 5 reading and writing class where there are 36 people in the class but only 56 desks, and the room is rather compact for that number. The class before that one, interactive English, is perfect, with 28 students and the 56 desks (it's the same room). The University has put spray bottles of alcohol outside each classroom so that on the way in and on the way out we can shu shu our hands and in theory protect ourselves and other people a little bit, but it also feels somehow like a band aid on an amputation, in that in between classes the students form into large masses trying to go in a building or out of a building or in a room or out of a room, and so although they're always wearing masks, this being Japan and not America, they are still often much too close to each other and to a lot of people for my comfort. And then there is simply the issue of having classes in person after one year of having classes online! No matter how difficult it was to change from in person to online last year, I did become used to it, and did come to appreciate not having to leave my home to go to school early in the morning and not having to worry about clothes so much and being able to eat lunch more easily and comfortably and tastily and generally not having to perform in front of a live audience. And even when I was familiar with teaching in person for over 25 years of my career, it was always a stressful struggle to get started in a new school year each April, involving many nightmares before the semester would begin in which I was late to class or I forgot my handouts or I was wearing my pajamas or I could not find the room etc., so now this time all of that usual stress for new year is multiplied by the strangeness of having to be careful about coronavirus and having to get used to teaching in person again. Another challenging part of this experience is that during the vacation between the last fall semester and this new spring semester, I fell into the bad habit of staying up until at least 1:00 AM and waking up at around 9:00 AM in the morning, so that now even though I must wake up much earlier, at 6:30 AM on Wednesday and Thursday and about 5:30 AM in the morning on Friday, I still was staying up until midnight or 1:00 AM and generally not sleeping well. A final challenging part of this experience concerns my sore shoulders, both of them being weak and tender and liable to sharp pains if I move them at certain angles or raise them to a certain height, etc. As a result of my shoulders, it is a challenging adventure in pain avoidance to do any number of daily things I usually take for granted like sleeping, getting out of bed, taking a shower shampooing my hair brushing my teeth washing my face putting on or taking off clothes specially shirts that do not have buttons and so on. My fear going into the new school year was that teaching classes in person would exacerbate my painful shoulder situation, because I tend to use many gestures when I am teaching to try to help my communication and to keep the students from falling asleep etc. Luckily, so far, although my shoulders are both sore when I come home, I wake up and start the next day OK. All this is to say that it was an exhausting start to the new school year, but I did survive it, and I think it's going to be OK, or as OK as it can be to participate in a University with 20,000 students and 3000 or so staff during an epidemic I have a new and terrible virus! As for the classes themselves, I had good impressions from all of them and I already like many of the students in many of the classes. I tried to memorize the names and faces of the three classes I'm teaching that are not for English majors: reading and listening for freshmen engineering students, interactive English for freshmen pharmacy students, and reading and writing for sophomore Commerce students. this was not easy as there are 33 students in the first class, 28 in the second, and 36 in the third. And they're all wearing masks! But I managed to do it for each class, although of course without being able to practice I'm going to forget almost every student in each of those classes during the week intervening until we have our next class. But next time it'll take me less time to memorize them and the next time after that it'll take me less time and so on. In the past, I would have gotten photo name cards from each student and would have been able to practice at home and then really got their names and faces in my head, but I decided that because of the coronavirus I did not want to distribute index cards to a whole class and then make the students paste their photos onto their cards and then return them to me the next time etc. Furthermore, since I've been doing that every year since I've been teaching in Japan, I've accumulated hundreds and hundreds and probably thousands of such cards from my over two decades of teaching, and they are taking up a lot of space in a cupboard in my office, and I don't know what to do with them. So I finally thought I'm not going to do that anymore. The first day of each class in each new school year or new semester is always the easiest day, because I just have to introduce the class introduce myself and that's about it. Next week in short will be a bigger challenge than last week in a way because I'll actually have to do some teaching. In contrast with those big classes, I also have some small ones. I have my seminar for 4th year English majors with nine students, and our classroom seems big enough and it has could window ventilation, so I feel relatively safe in there and I like all of the students, and it is nice to meet them in person. I also have a Graduate School seminar kind of class where 6 students plus my teaching assistant, and that is in a big enough room to accommodate probably 40 people, so I feel relatively safe in there also, although it is true that there are no windows to open so we have to keep the doors open. But I really like the students in that class, because they are intelligent and interesting and diligent and funny. And then I have my Graduate School classes for the particular students I am supervising, on Wednesday morning I meet two first year Masters students one Japanese guy and one Chinese young lady, and it should be fine, the only tricky thing will be finding what they want to write their second year Masters theses about. And then there is my time spent with my first year PhD student, who happens to be the big sister of one of the first year Masters students, and it's nice to talk with her also, so that should be OK, although maybe also will need to work a bit to find what she wants to do, although we are going to start by reading and talking about Emily Dickinson poems. As for meetings, my least favorite part of working in the University, we only had one last week, a half hour Graduate School meeting online during lunch on Wednesday, so that wasn't so bad. Next week we have an in person humanities meeting with about 130 faculty members in some big room, and they usually last over 2 hours and are very tiring. So next week promises to be at least as challenging as this week. Right so that is the first week of classes that I survived. Here's hoping the future weeks go just as well.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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