久し振りだな～

Commence the Weeaboonese! ( @ ⌓ @) i.e.
- Begin Rant -


Last semester I tried teaching a once a week Japanese class. Mainly just to skill up my teaching skills. Secondarily to promote the Japanese language and culture at UTEP. It was going really well at first but some problems arose as a result of my approach:

• 1.  The class is too short. 

The class I took in undergrad was every day of the week for one hour and the class I had was only once a week for 2 hours. So I had less time to teach more information.

• 2. Its too much information at once. 

Its a lot of information to throw at someone but IF I wanted to complete the first half of the book in one semester the students would have to learn at the pace I set for us which means that students would have to study everyday on their own...

• 3. No one was studying at home.

The purpose of the class wasn't so much to teach people Japanese pace by pace so much as to teach you the foundation of Japanese grammar and vocabulary for the students to then go and build on. Unfortunately, people here are bad at studying and tend to not study even for their important classes.

• 4. Most of class was spent recapping which in turn made the class longer and made me fall behind in the syllabus and made my classes longer.

People have trouble enough staying awake, attentive, present even at a 1 hour class at this university and here I am asking them to stay almost 2 hours.

• 5. Its hard to keep the class motivated to attend class, participate in class, and study for quizzes/tests.

Its a free class so the motivator of "I paid for this so I should do it" is gone. Its not for a grade so the motivator of "I will flunk out of college if I fail this class" is gone.

-End Rant-

THIS TIME!
I've changed the pace of the class to be slower with more piece by piece teaching so we won't have as much information to cover. We will get through about a 4th of the textbook if we're lucky haha. Hopefully classes will be shorter as a result; probably ending around 6:30 instead of 7:30. I'm also just going to go ahead and assume the students don't study so with any luck the pace will be slow enough that they can remember all of the previous lesson or quick study before tests. Also I will give grades! Sure, there is no real consequence of getting a bad grade but I'm going to do it Asian education style and post the test results for everyone to see. The embarrassment of their grade being public and the effect of seeing the grade they're receiving on paper will hopefully be enough motivation to study at least a little. XD


P.S. I didn't initially think that the culture part of the class was going to benefit anyone until one guy in the class bowed to me like this

And I was like "the fuck was that?" and corrected the guy to bow like this.

Turns out every one thought that picture #1 was the ACTUAL way people bow to greet each other in Japan...everyone...not a single person knew otherwise. I mean people do bow like this but usually only in prayer or if they're a monk or martial artist or something. I realized that culture exposure even in classrooms is very important and so I will incorporate culture into my lectures as well as post interesting pieces onto the facebook page.

K-dramas are a gateway drug ( ³⌓³)

These days I've been watching a lot of Kdrama. Usually I alternate between watching only kdramas and watching only anime every few weeks but for most of this year I've been watching kdramas. Its weird.

I remember I would finish every anime I started even if I kinda didn't like it. Like with Clannad! Clannad is a slice of life anime but I thought it was an shonen type anime so I watched the whole first season, second season, movie and OVAs thinking that "something would happen" because to me slice of lifes are very VERY boring. In the end I still don't like Clannad and I wasted time watching the whole thing. I kept doing this until at one point I was complaining to my friend Bree about a terribad anime I was watching when she goes "If you don't like it then just stop watching it". Which of course is common sense but my wanting to know how the anime ended subconsciously overruled how bored/silly I thought the anime was. Since then I've been kind of half watching animes. In almost every anime there's those few slow or filler episodes in the middle so before where I would have watched them, I just stop watching the anime entirely.

Kdramas for some reason are not like that for me luckily haha. I think I'll have to "force" myself to go on an anime binge soon. There's a lot of characters on r/anime and at the recent anime cons I went to that I don't recognize at all. I'll probably start with Tokyo Ghoul and Shokugeki no Souma since I've heard good things about them.