OK, so for the first two and a half months of our new ONLINE school year, I'd been dutifully dressing as though I'd be teaching in a normal on campus in person classroom setting, figuring it would help me do a better job with classes online if I dressed as if they'd be held in person. So I was also shaving in the morning of each teaching day and so on.
But last week (or was it the week before? my sense of time is so discombobulated during this weird coronavirus school year) it got so hot that I thought to myself, "Hey, the kids won't know if I'm wearing shorts or jeans, so..." and I just wore my around the apartment shorts with my teaching collared shirts! Is that the beginning of the end of decorum? Will I start skipping shaving here and there? start wearing around the home t-shirts? Hmm... another temptation is that we're supposed to conduct our classes with our video off, to avoid running through the students' data plans too rapidly (for those who only have smartphones with which to participate in classes). I have made it my practice to leave my video on for the first two minutes of each class, so as to say hello to the students as they join our meetings and to give them a face to go with my voice to (I hope) help them focus or pay attention a little more... but if I stopped doing that, I could then wear whatever I wear when I'm at home rather than at school! But if I started doing that... ANYWAY, classes I guess have been going as well as can be expected, under the circumstances. The classes most negatively affected by these circumstances are my three conversation type classes for Freshmen. As our university bought a cheapo plan from Webex that does not include break out rooms, we are unable to divide our conversation classes up into small groups, so every class has to be a big group of 24 to 29 people, which means that I cannot get all the students to say very much in English in any given class. I really feel sorry for them... I had been doing pronunciation practice with them, focusing on the difficult sounds to distinguish between for Japanese people th/s/z, r/l, and b/v, which usually in a normal classroom situation I can do in one day. But something about the online class setting meant that I ended up taking one whole day for th/s/z, and then a second whole day for r/l, and then I suddenly realized it must be horribly boring and unhelpful for the poor kids to sit there while I practice r/l with one of their number and then the next and then the next and so on. therefore, i decided to take a break from that and play Twenty-One Questions with them! Usually I do that by dividing the class up into groups of five or six people, so everyone can be "It" two or three times and everyone can ask the yes/no questions many times. That was impossible in our online class setting, but at least I could get every student to ask one question and some to ask a few and several students to be "It" after I did the initial example one to give them the idea how to play the game. It was pretty fun, I think, in two of the three classes. For some reason, it was a slog in the third... In the first two classes, the kids were rather lively and on the ball and active, whereas in the third one... It was odd. For some reason in the third class, I started a bad example, I think, by being a Character, and they guessed that I was Winnie-the-Pooh way too fast: are you an animal? yes. do you like honey? yes. are you Winnie the Pooh? yes! THree questions! Then the students did ones that were also too easy and or for some reason guessed too quickly: Tokyo Tower, tomato, and lemon. And then the next two were too hard! Ruffy from One Piece and then pudding. The other two classes, luckily, seemed to work better, with students being Steve Jobs, rabbit, elephant, the genie from Aladdin, and so on... ANYWAY, I hope they could learn how to play Twenty-One Questions and enjoy somewhat the break from practicing pronunciation. And we are getting close to the end of the semester: just about three more weeks of classes...... It's gone really fast, one of the fastest semesters I can remember.
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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