Aaah, the beginning of fall semester, the promise of new students... And although its only been one day, it looks promising... I teach:
That's plenty... Anyway, the students seem pleasant. certainly in bungo. I think they came knowing it would be difficult, so they are all pretty majime types. The Readings in Modern varies from those who are pretty good to those who might struggle. I talked to J-Major who is in class and it dawned on me that of the 15 students only 2 are J-majors. That means the other 13, those who don't really need to take the class are taking it anyway because--if I may be allowed to brag a little--I think we have a pretty good program. Just to set the record straight there is one person who lived in Japan but came over here when she was in middle school, so her J is pretty good. But of the other students, only two have a J surname, one came to our school with zero Japanese, the other with a little. There is another who is seemingly half, and can understand a bit of J but needs to work on reading. The remaining 11 have virtually no J background. 2C, 2K, and the other 7 are non-East Asian. In the first year course there are generally 50 students, which means 30% remain. Doesn't sound like much? Well, at my alma mater, there were 20 students in 4th year Japanese, and one third were clearly from Japan and virtually everyone had a J surname, including me. In fact I don't remember any non-J/JA in the course. 1st year students? 250. That means there are fewer than 10% remaining in the program... Yeah, I think we're pretty successful. Now if we could only get the right people to acknowledge this...
Off to school!
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