Today I heard the first cicadas (semi) of the season. It's been around 30 lately, and plenty humid. The semester staggers on...
I had some fun moments in classes last week, when the students were put into groups of four or five or so and made to draw cards with topics they had to talk about for five minutes etc. etc. One boy ended up telling how he likes playing poker and wants to participate in the WSOP (World Series of Poker?). He doesn't play for money (it's illegal in Japan, he righteously said), but enjoys the game. He has a good poker face, he said, and I believe him. Another goofy funny cheerful boy who easily turns red and laughs a lot in the same group, I opined would have a terrible poker face, and he agreed, laughing red faced... A girl said that she's sharing an apartment with two girl friends, which is quite unusual in Japan, where the norm is to have a single apartment for one person. I asked how they manage groceries and provisions and the refridgerator etc., and she said that when they go shopping, they buy some basic things like rice and milk in common and use freely, etc., and some personal things no one else should touch, etc. When I asked if they cook meals by rotation or something, she said no, they just cook for themselves whatever they feel like eating, individually. They never get lonely! One boy said that his favorite place is this beach in the city, at night, for the lights, etc., though not for swimming. One girl said her favorite place is the top roof of Hakata Station, where she can see the whole city and all the lights (she has a part time job there, in a ramen shop on the first floor...) Anyway, it was fun learning about them! I had another reality check from the Introduction to American Culture and Literature class when, after doing the Emily Dickinson lecture, in which I showed them a picture book with Emily's yellow house on the cover, then showed my photographs of when I visited there in 2012, including one selfie of me right in front of her house, and I also told them I did a tour of the house and went into Emily's BEDROOM, etc. etc., when, after all that (in addition of course to telling about her life, her poems, and analyzing Franklin 359 "a Bird came down the Walk") I gave them a google quiz, twenty of the hundred kids got the following true/false question wrong: "JP is sad because he's never visited Emily's house." Sigh... Still more--yesterday (Monday) I did a zoom meeting with one of the first-year English majors in the class, a bright and well-behaved girl, so we could practice her English Speech Society speech, and I had made the background to my video Emily's house, the same picture I showed them in class last Friday, and when we'd finished our business, I asked her if she knew what house was in my background, and she asked if it was MY house!?!? (I think she did...) So I had to say it's EMILY'S house! ANYWAY, maybe I need to work on my delivery of information to the students...
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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