Last teaching week got off to an interesting start.
Last Monday around noon when I started preparing for the week’s classes (Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday) I discovered to my horror that our Internet had stopped working, which also meant that our telephone had stopped working (because they are part of the same system here), which meant that we were in big trouble. Tor one thing, neither my wife nor I has a smart phone or cell phone etc. So how would we (I mean my wife, because she takes care of everything in our life that requires Japanese, which is one reason why my Japanese ability doesn’t advance) contact NTT to have them send someone to repair or fix or solve etc. our problem? My wife used the common room phone on the first floor of our apartment (mansion) complex, which was not easy because to use it we need to talk to our kanrinrin (like a concierge), and he’s very protective of his domain and resentful of intrusion, despite the nature of his job here. She finally was able to talk to an NTT person, who told her that the earliest we could get help would be on October 7, ten days later! That meant that for me to prepare and teach my classes until then, I’d need to go to school and do the online classes in my office. Now, so far this semester I’d had two meetings with my Introduction to American Culture and Literature class, and both of them had been badly interrupted by Webex freezing up on me when I was sharing screens. The first Wednesday (9/16) required me to half-way through the class tell all 100+ students to leave the meeting so I could end it and then return to the meeting after I’d restarted it. This lost at least five precious minutes and cost at least five months of my life span. Then on 9/23 the same thing happened, twice in the same class! Luckily, the second time was close enough to the end of class so I could just give them their daily quiz and say goodbye. I was hoping that by doing the class on campus in my office, things would go more smoothly because in my office I could use Webex’ desktop app, which is more stable and easier to use for sharing things etc., whereas at home I must use Webex online, which is very unstable and tricky to use for sharing things etc. (I won’t bother you with an explanation of THAT situation…) But, as I am the King of Technological Incompetence and Technical Troubles, things suddenly went haywire. When I tried to play a youtube clip (embedded in PowerPoint) from 12 Years a Slave, where the protagonist starts singing a spiritual with his fellow slaves for a funeral of one of their number, suddenly a super helpful student turned on her mic to say, “I can’t hear the video.” So I tried to play the clip from within my browser on YouTube itself, but the same thing happened. The students could hear my lecture but couldn’t hear any video I played! So I thought… Hmmm… I used a USB headphone and mic set for the class before this one, and then for this one I decided to go back to using the mic and speaker inside the computer, and though I changed the settings in Webex, I didn’t change the settings for the computer itself, so (I THINK), the video sound would not come out. After the class, I experimented a bit and finally hit on that possibility… and so I reset the computer’s audio settings and started a one-person Webex meeting to see how it’d work, and it seemed OK… so I THINK that was what was happening, so I will try again next week and hope for the best. I feel so sorry cause every week so far has had problems that wasted our time in class, and I really wanted to play a Beyonce song (“Brown Skin Girl”) and to play Gwendolyn Brooks and Morgan Freeman reading “We Real Cool,” and so on and so forth. Instead, I had to weakly recommend the kids visit our class website to play the things, cause I had uploaded links to them there… Miraculously, later that day I got a call from my wife (a telephone call from my wife!), saying that NTT had come and fixed the problem! Hallelujah! So I could do Thursday and Friday classes at home. Which is much easier than schlepping to school. And my butt starts hurting when I sit in my office all day at school, cause the chair is a normal chair, whereas the super nice (and expensive) chair I use at home won’t hurt my butt no matter how long I sit in it. Not to mention coronavirus being Out There. I guess my other classes went OK last week. Grad School Seminar (the students are bright and not too shy and the number is nice, six, and we keep our videos on the whole time, so we can see each other’s reactions and so on, unlike with all my other classes), Conversation, Reading and Listening, Conversation, and then my university seminar on Friday (I like those kids a lot, too, cause they are interesting and intelligent and fun to spend time with). Thursday is the draining day: periods 2, 3, and 4, right in the middle of the day, and all three requiring much talking and focus etc. Period 2 is the conversation class where I’ve been experimenting with the kids in using Zoom for Breakout Rooms (small groups inside the big class of 27 people ). It’s seeming to work, but it does depend on how motivated they are to use English only. In the last class I had them in groups of two and told them to find out everything they could about their partner etc., and when I visited the pairs, the first seven or so were actually communicating in English, but the last ones were using Japanese, perhaps having become tired of using English or shy to use it or something, so… so… maybe three or four people is better than two… Now it’s Saturday, and I’m still exhausted from classes last week, and have to start preparing for next week seriously NOW. Good luck in next Wednesday’s class!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
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December 2023
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