Well... somehow we've finished about eleven weeks of the second semester and Christmas is starting to approach, it being December 2nd now.
I've been enjoying classes mostly. I'm trying to enjoy doing America Bunka Bungaku Gairon (Introduction to American Culture and Literature) for nearly a hundred first-year English majors, because it'll be the last time I do the class for a good while, because next year and the year after I'll have to do a third- and then fourth-year seminar instead, and after that we'll start a new curriculum (ugh) in which the class will be mutilated--cut in half--one semester for the American version and then one semester for the British version (ever since I came to Fukuoka University in 1997, the class has been a full-year class...) Also, we had some events recently, like a Theme and Method presentation day for Graduate School English followed by a fun party downtown. It was great to eat and drink with graduate students and teachers after listening to first-year MA students tell us about their second-year (next year) thesis projects. My most challenging class to teach has been Thursday period 4 Freshman English for Commerce majors, because there are about eight girls who constantly check their smartphones and talk to each other throughout the class, no matter how many times I ask them to focus and pay attention. They are cute and funny and good natured, and I really enjoy their company, but on the few occasions when I'm really trying to communicate something to them like homework or something about English or American culture and I see them not paying any attention but babbling and giggling and smartphoning away, I do feel a sense of frustration. Last Thursday was typical: at one point when I was telling them about American newspaper comics like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts, I realized that one of the girls was applying makeup in the back of the room, so I told her, "Akari! No more makeup! Makeup time is over! Stop please!" So she grudgingly stopped, but then five minutes later i saw her fixing her eyelashes with an eyelash curver device! Then ten minutes later I saw her reach for her convenience store lunch she'd been eating before class began and glared at her, so she smilingly put down her chopsticks! Then when I wanted the students to go to Gocomics.com's website on their smarthphones to show how they can read all these American newspaper comics for free whenever they want, they were so conditioned to stop checking their smartphones when i scold them about it that they all started putting their smarthphones away! So I had to repeatedly say, "turn ON your smartphones!" And they kept hearing "Turn OFF your smartphones" no matter how many times I said "ON," until I finally went to the light switches for the classroom and dramatically turned them all off (saying "OFF") and then on (saying "ON"), until they finally actually heard what I wanted them to do. Then they didn't understand many of them that I wanted them to go to the website I'd printed on their homework handout, Gocomics.com, so I had to go around individually and put my finger on that website for about ten of them so they got the idea... Yikes! And that was just a ten minute sequence in one day with those kids! But after the class ended, and I was walking back to my office, I ran into about eight first-year English majors I teach in Freshman English on Wednesdays, and it was such a pure relief and joy to see them (they are good kids and good students)... ANYWAY, sometimes Freshman English can be a chore or a torture or a pain and sometimes it can be a lot of fun. And even with that Thursday class of Commerce majors, there are some super students in it, like this serious boy who sits in the front and understands everything I say and prepares homework and volunteers to ask questions etc. etc. and I do enjoy those crazy girls despite myself. So the semester goes on. I'm enjoying all my graduate school classes, like the one with my first-year MA students Riku who's studying Emily Dickinson's poetry, and each Friday for 90 minutes we dive into Emily's poems, one or two or three of them, figuring out finally what they mean and appreciating her rhymes and near rhymes and rhythm changes and so on. And a seminar for three first-year MA students plus my two PhD TAs, and we're reading together the high school vampire novel by Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown, and enjoying talking about it a lot. Oh, and last Thursday afternoon (after the crazy girls class--one time I caught them taking selfies in class!) an interesting quiet super student first-year English major boy visited my office to talk for about an hour, and that was nice. He's living with his grandmother in Fukuoka because his family home is in the next prefecture, Saga, and takes 40 minutes to ride his bicycle to school and is thinking of choosing the literature and culture course when they have to choose that or language and communication course next week (though I'll believe that when I see it, because I pessimistically believe all the best students usually choose the language and communication course). And then I think that after all I will miss interacting with young people when I retire in eight years (if I'm healthy enough to work that long). I found out recently that in two whole classes, about 55 people, only two said their families get physical newspapers every day, and that in one class of English conversation, none of the students had ever written a letter on paper in their life, so I can see, I mean, how culture is changing from when I was a kid... Anyway, the semester goes on... Soon 2023 will be over!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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