Well, here it is Saturday July 29, 2023, and classes are finally (almost) over. I did my last university undergraduate classes last Friday the 21st, and (almost) my last graduate school classes last week. I also started invigilating exams yesterday. We have to do four exams each exam period, even if our own classes don't have exams. Yesterday, for instance, was some exam for 110 engineering students (mostly electric engineering, I think), of whom 109 were male! Unluckily, we were in AB01, which is a basement lecture hall in Building A, designed like a mountain, with the rows of seats ascending a steep slope, so we invigilators did a fair amount of mountain climbing during the exam (well, it is good exercise, really, so maybe it was lucky...). In addition to being surprised to see only one girl in a set of 110 engineering students, I was surprised to discover that barely a fifth of the 110 were wearing masks. For that matter, the teacher whose exam it was, the guy in charge of the exam, wasn't wearing a mask, either. The three supporter invigilators, including me, were... And of course the students sans masks did a fair amount of coughing and sneezing and such...
ANYWAY. Were we in an American university, we'd have been out on summer vacation by the middle of May, probably, or maybe at the latest by the start of June, but here we are at the end of July just getting into our exam period! My last exam will be August 1, Tuesday, when my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class has its exam (110 students on the list, about 90 first-year English majors, a handful of older English majors who've failed the class in the past, and a handful of Law, French, German, and East Asian students). And Monday I have to invigilate back to back exams for other teachers' classes. And, needless to say, it's HOT now! Today will get to about 36 degrees, which is nothing compared to Arizona's temperatures, not to mention Southern Europe's, etc., but when you factor in our excessive humidity, 36 is really uncomfortable. And the cicadas are, as every year, deafening in their desperation to mate before dying. (I actually do like their "song," but it does seem to heat the air even more...) Right, so complaining about the heat and all wasn't my intention here. Instead, I'd like to summarize my experience with classes this semester as it's ending, as well as to hit a few highlight moments. MY MOST DISAPPOINTING CLASS (let's get this out of the way first). English Conversation II (for second-year English majors). This class had the WORST attendance of any class I can remember ever teaching here. My usual policy is if you miss five classes, you don't get credit, but if I stuck to that, I'd fail two-thirds of the class probably. The best student missed two classes... Usually the best students don't miss any. Many students were only on time and in class a few times. Every week at least half the class wasn't there when we started. Their study habits were lousy, too, with most of them doing no homework on the relatively few occasions when I assigned some, and too many of them forgetting the homework handouts when we needed to cover them in class. The nadir was probably about the 11th day when they were absent or late and I saw a girl doing her email on her smartphone as I was trying to start our topic that day... I snapped! For the first time since I've been teaching, in my live, going back to U of Michigan writing classes, Kagoshima U classes, and Fukuoka U classes, I just ended the class after twenty-five minutes, telling them to have a good lunch and walking out of the room. After that, things were slightly better, but only the half or so of the class who were in class when I snapped and left knew what had happened, so the other half who were absent continued being absent or late even after... ANYWAY, I don't want to trash this class completely for some reasons.. First, most of the kids are really charming and sweet and funny. Second, they are "C" class, which, under our department's terrible new policy of dividing a year of English majors according to their TOEIC scores, SIE (Study in English) being the top quarter, A class the next, B class the next, and C class the last, my class were the "underachievers" in their year, supposedly. I always like the underdog, so I sympathized and rooted for them and wanted them to do well, really. I told them at one point that being in C class has nothing to do with their brains, that they are just as smart as any of the other students in their year, that their problem is only motivation/attendance, etc. etc. And I had a great moment with them when one day when a girl jumped up from her chair and recoiled in horror against the wall because there was, inexplicably (we were on the 7th floor of a tall building) a praying mantis on her desk! It was smallish and green and cute, so I put it on my fan, whence it ran up my hand and got on my arm, etc., which entertained the kids as if I'd been handling a Black Widow Spider or something, and I went out of the room, went down the elevators to the ground floor, exited the building and found some nice bushes to put the creature in... The kids got a kick out of it, as did I. "I held nature!" MY OTHER ENGLISH MAJOR CLASS Introduction to American Culture and Literature I'm still not sure what to think about this group, because we haven't had our exam yet (worth 50 points), but... but... Well, on the plus side, there are some motivated and intelligent and capable students for sure, and I really enjoyed each class with this group, because as a whole they were responsive in class and generally (the first-year students) had good attendance etc. However, the quality of the comments they posted on our class blog each week was pretty mediocre in general... Many short, superficial comments without any examples or details or explanations, like, "I liked learning about rhyme," or "I like Edgar Allan Poe." Probably fewer substantial and thoughtful and interesting comments than when I've taught the class in the past. I got a perverse pleasure from one guy who'd been absent from class saying in his comment, "Thanks for the interesting class." And from another guy who'd been dead sleeping through class saying in his comment, "Thanks for the fun class." On the plus side, three students wrote really neat William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" poems that I could put into a handout and distribute to the class, but on the minus side, only three students did that. Only one student tried to do a bonus point activity, a girl who memorized the first stanza of "Annabel Lee" (when they're supposed to memorize an entire poem!). Every time I gave a quiz at the end of class (nine times), about thirty people got five out of five, thirty four, fifteen three, and the rest 0, 1, or 2. They often missed questions that I told them the answers to, basically, during class, both with my voice saying something and the screen showing something. I was a little appalled that more couldn't get a perfect five. If they read the handouts and listen in class, five should be rather easy to get. This tells me 1) their English ability, some of them, is really low or 2) their powers of concentration or preparation are pretty low. Another weird thing I noticed for the first time since I've been teaching the class is that many of them are very quick to take pics of the powerpoint slides on the screen with their smart phones. I suspect that many of these people are taking the pic and not trying to read the screen or listen to my explanation of it. So i'm thinking that in fall semester I might ban taking pics OR give them designated times (15 seconds now and then) to take pics or something... it's disconcerting and I suspect they're relying on their devices instead of on their ears, eyes, and brains. OTHER CLASSES I taught basically three conversation classes for the General English education at our university. One class I was lucky to get was 23 first-year English majors (who were also taking my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class). They were great, fun, funny, diligent, capable, active, etc. I think we had a good time together, too. I've given them mostly 90 or higher (A grades). No big problem other than the universal one where they tend to speak too much Japanese when I'm not hovering over their group. One class was first-year Business majors. They were mostly fun and nice... though there was a guy with low English ability, desire, confidence, etc., who refused to use English even when I was talking to him. He had a rather unpleasant attitude as well. Lucky for him he had good attendance! Anyway, they were largely fine and good to spend time with. The third class was second-year law students. They were lively but had terrible attendance (though not as bad as my English majors English conversation class!). My GRADUATE school classes were mostly fine. My class for my first-year seminar student was always great because we spent the first few weeks reading and talking about The Iliad and then the next nine or ten weeks reading and talking about Emily Dickinson poems! I loved those talks a lot and learned to appreciate Emily's poems even more than before, cause we always discovered something new by reading and talking about the poems. My classes for my two PhD students (sisters from China) were fine, really, though they've started wanting to make presentations and write papers rather suddenly, and so it's become rather demanding in terms of time and thought to help them. And my seminar for any of our grad students is always fun--we're reading and discussing adventure stories like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Tuesdays at the Castle, and in Fall Semester The Book of Three and The Coldest Girl in Coldtown. My only regret is that I didn't do any Le Guin with them. Oh, one thing of note happened when one of the seminar students used ChatGPT to post writing on our Facebook Group, and I quickly realized something was off because suddenly her English was too good, and yet there was something weirdly superficial about the writing... It turned out that she had written in English a version of what she wanted to post, and then asked ChatGPT to turn her English into a native speaker's English or something. I was impressed, because it was pretty good English without discernible mistakes, but it also was too slick somehow. Had she been a native speaker of English, I might not have caught the infraction! Anyway, she apologized and I let it go at that, wondering a bit about where AI will take us and about what the difference is if I correct student English to make it sound natural or if Chat GPT does it... Right, so I have ONE more class, an online graduate school class, the Emily Dickinson one-to-one tutorial kind of thing coming up on Monday, and then I can make final grades etc. etc. I can do it!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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