I guess you can tell from the masks on our faces in the photo above that the picture is from the new year! (It was taken by one of my two sister-TAs yesterday in my Friday period 1 American Culture class...)
So far this Saturday I haven't developed a sore throat from projecting my voice in classes Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so I think my vocal chords have gotten used to their sudden hard work, so that's nice. I think I haven't caught coronavirus yet, so that's great (a miracle?) There were plenty of occasions where I could catch it, though, as there will be throughout this school year: elevators with multiple people confined for a minute or two, classrooms with many people confined for 90 minutes or so, buses with some people confined for ten or so minutes, my office with two or three people confined for 90 minutes or so, and so on. Not to mention getting to and from classes in the stair wells etc. etc. If I haven't caught it yet, and if the university hasn't developed cluster infection break out sites yet, it must be because everyone (students, kids, staff, etc.) are all always wearing masks and often spraying their hands with alcohol. It will still be a miracle if clusters don't pop up though. Anyway, classes themselves were OK with one exception. My seminar and my graduate school classes all went fine, because the students are bright and funny, fun to spend time with, and they usually say interesting things about the literature we're reading. My culture class was fine, apart from technical troubles with the machine showing my iPad images on screen, such that the right half of each image was shoved to the right and off the screen, so i had to hold each one manually with my finger on my right hand and use the pointer with my left hand, which caused me much left shoulder pain, aggravating my poor shoulder so much, AND trying to get an admin type guy to fix the problem took time... AND because I'd taken too much time to take roll, it meant that I ran out of time for what I wanted to do and so had to hurry and didn't let students ask questions, so felt sorry after. But anyway, really it was probably OK. And even my Freshman Pharmacy Interactive English class was OK, even though I made the poor students start doing self-introduction speeches in front of the class (am I a sadist at heart???). And my Reading and Listening class for freshmen engineers was OK really (I found that one boy likes reading, had challenged a Harry Potter book in English in junior high school and was reading now Flowers for Algernon (in Japanese). The only problem I had was in the Reading and WRiting class for commerce sophomores... It wasn't their fault! The first part was OK, really, when I learned their names and faces (with masks) again and explained the homework handout etc. The problem was when I read with them the first chapter of The Wild Robot when there wasn't enough time to do the whole thing, and I (of course) explained uninteresting difficult things like the copyright page and dedication page and then had to hurry through the end........... I asked the kids what was in the box (crate) on top of some island rocks, and the first two or three students couldn't say or didn't know or didn't understand, but luckily the last guy I had time to ask got it and said, "robot." ANYWAY, I felt sorry because I had probably given them stress by mismanaging time, one of my usual faults as a teacher I've never been able to get rid of. OTHERWISE the work week was fine (well, there was a 2.5 hour meeting Wednesday afternoon that made my butt hurt cause we had to sit on hard chairs in a big classroom on the fifth floor of building 8 (five flights of stairs to walk up first....). Good luck to us all henceforth!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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