Tuesday, December 04, 2007

ok, back

So nice to be done with the day. On Tuesdays I teach four one-and-a-half hour classes from 8:00 in the morning until 5:40 in the afternoon separated by a three hour break for lunch and whatnot in the middle of the day. Exhausting...

The following day I have another 8 AM class and a lecture in the afternoon, but compared with Tuesday it's a breeze. Thursday I feel is my most relaxing day. Office hours at 9:30, two classes in the afternoon, and an evening lecture. The lectures I'm giving are part of my class on American culture which is the third leg of a class consisting of a broad overview of culture, British culture, and my section.

I absolutely love giving these lectures as opposed to my oral English classes. In those classes I never feel I can really grasp what the students will latch onto or really enjoy participating in. I'm always having to come up with these weird discussion activities that direct the students to interact with each other and then with me and then back with each other again. It's especially difficult to try and monitor 45 20-year-old students at 8 AM who look like they just rolled out of bed.

Anyway I really enjoy giving these lectures because I can really just put on a good show. And I use the word show because that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm not forced to do these stupid games or design inane conversation activities. I get on stage, load up my powerpoint, and expound on American culture 90 minutes. It's exhilarating, really, to see 200 students in one classroom listen intently about the rise of racism in the post-bellum South. I had the chance to observe the previous two teachers who taught the first two parts of the course, both of whom will remain nameless. They are great teachers, knowledgeable in their fields, but their presentation was amazingly uninteresting. They stood for 90 minutes, perhaps shifting their feet a few times, reading almost word for word from a powerpoint with black text on blank white slides, complex vocabulary words, and obscure cultural concepts. In some ways I'm the one eyed man in the land of the blind, but I put everything I have into the classes and I know it shows.

The last class I covered the 1800s in America, focusing on manifest destiny, the Civil War, and immigration/America as a melting pot. I could have done a lecture on each one of those topics alone but seeing as I only have four more classes and I know the students are more interested in contemporary times, I'm hurrying through the early American years. The first lecture I gave on Wednesday was a bomb (though still better than the other teachers if I may say so) as the electricity was off (some generator was blown or something, the entire campus was dark) and I had to talk for 90 minutes about the 1800s with only some chalk. The following day I gave the same lecture to the other half of the junior class and completely rocked. Singing "America the Beautiful" (again, to a class of 200+ students) and throwing different colors of chalk into a big metal bowl and stirring it up might have been the highlights.

Other highlights:
-Mass groaning upon viewing a picture of Chinese workers on the Transcontinental railroad.
-A student coming up to me (actually my fault on the oversight) after class and saying that one of my slides had a picture of the Hong Kong flag and not the Chinese flag. I had just copied and pasted different flags and made a compilation. Stupidly one of the flags I chose was the HK flag. I was advised that HK was part of China. I advised that I knew and apologized.
-Shocks and gasps at pictures of KKK members marching near the Capitol building.

Tomorrow I'll be tackling the early 1900s and up until WWII, and in the next class the civil rights movement and transitioning into the present day. I wish I could teach the class again next semester, but alas it's only one semester.

About 18 people came to my office yesterday, more than there were enough chairs for, and people were even turned away. It was the most people I've ever had at office hours, and we played some interesting games that I need to remember to write down so I don't forget them. Good fun though.

I'll be updating more frequently now that my computer seems to like blogger.com... We'll see if it lasts...