So it's taking me less time now to practice the students' names and faces in the three non-English major classes: thirty-three engineering freshmen, twenty-eight pharmacy freshmen, and thirty-six commerce sophomores. Whereas it took me half an hour at least the first day and twenty minutes the second, last week on the third day for each of those classes, it took me about ten minutes. I am finally starting to remember them! It would be much easier if I were using photo cards, but I decided to stop doing that from this year, cause I started accumulating too many cards from past classes and years and don't know what to do with them and cause I thought it'd be too onerous for the kids this year and too dangerous for me (with coronavirus etc.).
So that's good. Also, I really am enjoying the classes, overall... but my favorite day is Friday when I start period 1 with mostly third-year English majors for American Culture (that's the picture atop this blog), then have period 2 with six lively, interesting, intelligent, and funny MA students, and then period 3 with my PhD student. It's a great way to end the work week. The students in the Culture class seem mostly to be enthusiastic and engaged; about twenty of them have been posting thoughtful comments on our class blog once a week, and last Friday all but one stayed awake through the 90-minute class. The MA class is really fun and funny--we just started talking about From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler last Friday, the part where Claudia and her little bro Jamie run away from home to stay in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, and we were laughing at how the siblings talk to each other and so on. I was impressed when one guy pointed out the frequency with which the kids talk about money and also Claudia's irony, as when Jamie is making so much racket walking with his pants pockets stuffed full of $24.43 in change, so she asks him if he's wearing chain mail. We also used an inflation website to calculate how much money that would be today (hundreds of bucks!), covered what "Oh, baloney" means (kids way to say bullshit), figured out what kind of woman Mrs. Frankweiler is based on her letter to her lawyer Saxonberg, and so on. The PhD class was stimulating, talking about a couple Emily Dickinson poems ("She died at play" and "Come slowly--Eden!") with my interesting and enthusiastic Chinese student. Though I was so exhausted after the week of classes I fell asleep while she was thinking of an answer to a question about a poem, after that cat nap I was alert and on point. And the Emily poems are amazing, their virtues becoming more apparent the more we read and talked about them. The non-graduate school, non-English classes earlier in the week were a bit challenging. The Pharmacy class is Interactive English (basically conversation), and it's hard to hear in the class cause the students are shy and wearing masks and the classroom doors are open for ventilation so the noise from multiple other classes comes in the room, especially after about an hour when other teachers start letting their classes go early. **I think I should let my classes go early, too, cause of the coronavirus catching danger when we're together in a room for 90 mins, but so far I've been doing them pretty much as usual........... then the two classes using The Wild Robot by Peter Brown are maybe mostly OK for most of the students, but I'm sure that there are several kids in each one who can't follow, keep up, read, etc., and it takes a lot of energy to project my voice and passion for what we're doing to them........ Anyway, three weeks are down, perhaps safely (I feel fine anyway, apart from being exhausted from the exertion of teaching and the deprivation of normal amounts of sleep). Eleven more weeks to go!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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