So I survived the second week of in person classes.
There were some challenging moments! In my Interactive English class (basically English conversation) for English majors, I was saying "Good afternoon," to the students before class one by one to practice their names and faces etc., when I got to a boy sitting in the front row, and when I greeted him, he turned to his friend and asked him in Japanese what I was saying, and his friend told him, "Konichi wa" (hello during the day in Japanese). I then said to the first boy, "Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good-bye!" He looked at me blankly. In short, we have here a first-year English major who doesn't know what "good afternoon" means, and who, it turned out, couldn't even understand that I was saying "good" plus "afternoon." Later in class I told him that he is "interesting," and he couldn't understand me, so I tried giving the word the katakana (Japanese syllabry) pronunciation so see if that would work, saying, "You are interesutingu," but he still didn't understand me! Yikes... luckily, apart from a girl who's not much better at English in the class, the other students are pretty good and should be OK with my spoken English, but I feel sorry for this one boy, because I am not going to speak in Japanese just so he can understand me, because then we won't be doing a proper class and the students' English won't improve much. Oh, and I also lost my temper with that class because the last six people giving their three-minute self-introduction speeches pretty much all did only barely one-minute speeches, so I finally said in a loud voice that their speeches are supposed to be THREE minutes, not one minute, and that they should have practiced them to be sure they lasted three-minutes... Another tough class was my Thursday period 5 Reading and Writing class for commerce majors, because it suddenly dawned on me that I was teaching a deadly boring class that's too hard for them to follow, because, I realized, I was still teaching basically the online version of the class instead of doing it as for an in person class. That is, I was just talking and reading and lecturing etc. at them instead of trying to get them to do some things... So I will have to change my approach and try to remember how to do it in person.......... For example, in the next class, I'll have them find on their smart phones some videos of opossums playing dead and some pictures of porcupine quills stuck in dogs' jaws, and I'll have the kids tell me the answers to the comprehension questions instead of telling them the answers. Duuhhh... On the plus side, I had some good experiences in other classes, like a lively speech (though in a very faint voice) by a girl with a catchy name, Urara, in which she talked about her great love of the J-pop group Arashi, and because her name is so catchy, when I asked her a question about Arashi, I accidentally called them "Urashi," which made the class crack up in a fun way. Also, I again enjoyed my Friday period 1 American Culture Class (covering American English pronunciation) and my graduate school classes were great as usual. So--it's on to the next week in person!
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Jefferson Peters (JP)
Can you find me in the picture above? Archives
December 2023
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