Last Saturday we held the annual Theme and Method event for our first-year English Department Graduate School students. They make twenty-minute presentations about their plans for their Master's theses, which they'll write in their second years. One student will research primary, secondary, and tertiary stress in pronunciation of English words, and the other will write about solitude, society, and nature in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. There was also a lecture about graduate school, about why students decide to enter it, about how teachers should teach in it, and about the role of administration staff in it, and so on, given by another university's professor who once years ago attended our graduate school.
All in all it was a good event, reluctant though I am to leave home on a Saturday. After the Theme and Method event, we had a party with sushi and sashimi and motsu nabe and spicy tomato chicken etc. Our graduate school department is a good place to be, what with the family feeling among teachers and past and present students. I hope we'll get a few more students in future. This year we have but two new ones, plus two second-year ones, and my own PhD student. Meanwhile, the semester continues to chug along, the seventh week just having been completed. The university students were given their applications for choosing their courses (language or culture-literature), which they'll have to do in the first few days of December. Yes, it's that stressful time of year again, when the kids are confused (many of them) and the teachers stressed (some of them) and I always find myself wondering why the heck we have to make the students choose one course or the other after their first years, and why we can't just have one big English Department and let them take any classes they want to take, more or less... I'm about to receive ten first drafts of graduation theses from my seminar students--eeek! The deadline is November 4. I wonder if I'll be able to edit them all properly and if the kids will be able to revise their theses appropriately and if all deadlines will be kept and so on and so forth. I have just a couple days before that typhoon hits me. Right! Here's hoping I can keep my head above water through November--
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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