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.