Wow--yesterday I finally had my last class of Spring Semester. And ... it was a Friday class but it was held on a Monday because our university feels compelled to have fifteen meetings for each class by any means necessary. That means we sometimes have Monday and Thursday classes on Saturdays, Friday classes on Mondays, and so on. It's crazy. When I came to Fukuoka University in 1997, it was more relaxed, and depending on the calendar and the day of the week, some classes had 14 meetings, some had 12, some had 11, and so on, and we never had any weird class meetings on different days of the week. But now ... (I won't go into how our summer vacation has shrunk more and more each year till we go From April into August now for Spring Semester!)
ANYWAY. It was fun to meet the first year students in Introduction to American Culture and Literature again, and fun to meet them on a Monday instead of our usual Friday. Every Friday (usual class time) we begin and end with big "TGIF" greetings and partings (it's the first thing I teach them in the first class of the year), and they get a kick out of saying it with big voices. So yesterday I started off that way with them, then told them about OGIM and OHIM (Og God/Hell It's Monday), but then said that because we have a FRIDAY class, today (even though Monday) is in fact a TGIF occasion. Then we went into the last class, wherein I went through the handout I'd given them about the term examination and answered their questions for about an hour (I'd hoped to do it in half an hour, but a surprisingly large number of them were bold enough to ask questions, unusual for a Japanese class), and then had to pack into the last half hour a review of our semester (Native Americans, Puritans, Romantics, Modernists and their songs and poems and personalities and cultures etc.) plus a little extra on some benefits of studying American Culture and Literature in English (Learn American culture, exercise their empathy muscles, get topics for conversation and thought, and improve their English expression and understanding), and then said "TGIF" for goodbye. After the class, several somewhat earnest boys got an extra point or two by reciting some William Carlos Williams poems. (I made them do them over if they paused strangely or messed up the words, but actually they could do rather well.) Also yesterday in the evening I attended a graduate school beer garden party downtown, in the heat. It was fun but hot and smoky and involved too much meat barbecued and not enough veggies. ANYWAY, the classes of the first semester are over, and now I just have to invigilate exams and make a lot of grades and read a master's thesis and give an Open Campus lecture and survive this incredible heat and humidity, worse than ever... Fight!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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