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The Public is Personal: The California energy crisis causes blackouts at Chaffey College. I hold office hours by candlelight. I get red wax all over my desk and mousepad! My classes sit in the dark and talk. I have to handwrite my assignment sheets and drive down to the local drug store for copies. We go to the bathroom by a feeble flashlight. There is no heat and no hot food on campus.
My new whiteboard marker is a wet erase, not a dry erase. Before I figure this out, a moment of panic occurs as I believe I have now permanently wrecked the whiteboard in LA-15.
Fun Surprize: Many students from last spring's paragraph class chose to take my composition class.
Annoying Fact: A. B. Miller High School moves the classroom we are to have three times! I'm convinced some drops occur because students cannot find the correct classroom!
Cultural Contrast: In an short exercise on the topic of how to save money, my American students talk about renting videos and cutting coupons while my Japenese students talk about skipping meals and walking to school.
Amazing Fact: Most of the class shows up for our class on Halloween night from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m.!
Sweet Surprise: When studying "Sonny's Blues" I took in a boom box and a tape of Willie Dixon to class, so we could listen to some blues. At the end of the quarter, a student gave me a copy of a tape of John Coltrane which is more relevant to the Harlem setting of the story.
Awesome teaching moment: A student tells me, "I used to hear those terms, point of view, theme, etc., all the time and not know what they meant or how to figure them out. Now I do."
The Bonding Moment: We discover the white board marker I handed to group three is a permanent marker. Frantic efforts, involving all the men of the class (who all felt compelled to help) eventually scrub off all the black marks. Ten minutes of tension and laughter create cohesion in the classroom.
The Weirdest Moment: Have to ask a student not to discuss LA bondage/whipping clubs for fear another student will file some protest.
The Next Weirdest Moment: We discuss things that ex-husbands have burned up in rages (cars, bureaus, etc.)
The Most Glorious Moment: Student says, "I didn't think I'd like an old book like Pride and Prejudice, but it was great. Can you give me a list of other great old books to read?"
The Best Group Exercise: Groups of student pretend to be characters in excerpted reading from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Particularly fun renditions of Shakespeare, Judith Shakespeare, Nick Greene, and Anonymous.
Best Moment: One of the brightest and most creative students in the class asks me to do an independent study with her. (Alas! part-timers cannot do independent studies!)
Best Bad Video Moment: Benny Hill as Bottom
Biggest Challenge: Genealogy of the History Plays
Best Part of the Class: Eager, bright, interested, well-adjusted, talkative students!
Biggest Problem of the Class: Shifting the pre-class discussions (on everything and anything) to class discussion
Student getting a B bursts into tears in my office over the horror of her grade.
Student misspells "heroes" twenty-seven times in a two-page paper. As a result, I still have an occasional panic attack on how to spell heroes.
Students tell me that if they give a wrong answer, I give them "the look." They all agree about "the look" but are unable or unwilling to tell me what "the look" actually looks like. I resolve to be more poker-faced in class.