日: 2020年5月13日

Tomato and Egg Plants in the Garden on May 12th

These days I work through the night several times a week. I don’t like TV says “tele-working” is new normal and “Online education” is wonderful, this and that. I would say it is too hard for me to spend day to day because I have to make three hundred PowerPoint slides a week. I can’t go outside. Even I cannot find a time to go shopping in the nearby supermarket located in the place of 10 minutes walk from the house. Actually I could not take a bath for several days because I worry I may fall or get a heart attack in the bath. My fun these days is just to look at the garden and take a photo.

 

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Because I have to work very hard for online teaching kind of things, I do not have time to manage the garden. So I asked a neighbor to plant something on the garden. He and his friend planted some vegetables already.  The photo is a tomato. The card on the ground says that this is Tomato that is easy to grow.

 

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Yellow flowers of tomato.

 

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He planted egg plants.

 

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The fruits of peach are too many. I have to reduce the number of fruits for better harvest. And comes below are Azalea flowers in the garden.

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Azalea flowers last short. When they are gone, the garden will have little flowers. If I had a time, I would like to plant many flowers to make the garden colorful and beautiful. But it is sure that the online education kind of things prevents me from doing so.

Online Teaching for Class 1939 (Listening) on May 13, 2020

Date: May 13th on Wednesday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Listening 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 66 slides

Numbers of Students: 27

Every student stayed with me from the start to the end.

Students’ Responses:

– Attendance Check : All of the 27 students typed his/her attendance on BBS.

– Quiz 1 : 26 students answered.The question asked the relation between “Naze” in the question and “-karadesu” in the answer which seems to have similarity with English’s “Why?- Because”.

– Quiz 2: 26 students answered.The question was to distinguish the function of a noun “tokoro” that can mean just before, ongoing, and right after

– Quiz 3: 26 students answered. Question was about a noun “koto”. The students were asked to choose one sentence from four, in which “koto” meant a decision by the one’s will.

– Quiz at the End: 26 students typed their own sentences that meant like “A person can d osomething”(of course in Japanese) .

Teaching:

1: Basics of Japanese grammar

– Intransitive verb predicate sentences and particles used in such sentences.

– Wa-ga construction for existence focusing on relations between the topic “wa” that contains and the subject “ga ” that is contained; in other words, “wa” for the entire and “ga” for a part. The students not only over-generalize “Wa-ga construction”, but also reversely place the entire thing and a part in the wa-ga construction. Also a caution was given to the students. the subject is unclear in a “Wa-ga construction” because it has the topic and the subject. It is better to use another construction that has a clear subject in order to make a sentence to say an existence of a thing and matter.

2: Review of grammar in the last class

– The section 18 of the textbook that contains some expressions using “V-te iru”.

3: Introduction to the section 19 of the textbook

– Functional nouns like koto, tsumori, and tokoro. Especially the expressions for capabilities were explained for both two types. One was that a person has potentiality to do something and the other was that the situation allows someone to do something.

– Exercise1 and 2 of the section 19 in the textbook.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned.

Issues and Problems:

– I used many PPT slides to make the students understand that there is a relationship of “contains – contained” in Wa-ga construction. “Contains” uses “-wa” as the topic and “Contained” uses “-ga” as the subject. But some students often place those words in reverse. It seems that, rather than teaching the same thing over and over and over again with a lot of repetitive PPT slides, I wonder that there might be a decisive way to make the students learn a correct use in just one time. If I repeat the same teachings again and again, but the students didn’t understand, it would be wasting the hours and it would mean that I am just damaging students’ opportunities to learn.

Online Teaching for Class 1836 (Composition) on May 12, 2020

Date: May 12th on Tuesday, 2020 from 15:30 to 17:00 (16:30 – 18:00 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 59 slides

Numbers of Students: 28

22 students participated for whole 90 minutes.

5 students were recorded for their short attendances: 83, 86, 42, 33, and 20 minutes

1 student was completely absent today

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

– Attendance check by reporting his/her-selves: 27. ( One sent a message to tell me his absence beforehand)

– 5 Quiz were given to the students during the class. Answers to the 5-quiz were sent to me right after the class. Quiz to be posted on BBS was not given today. 24 students sent the answers to me.

Teaching:

– Review and explanations for two questions of 5-question quiz in the last class.

-1: Particle “-o” should not be used for the intransitive verb “Naru”.

1st question of 5-q quiz was given for this issue. Still one student thought it was okay to use “-o” for the sentence of intransitive verb ” Naru”.

-2: There is a difference between “V-te ita” and “V-te kita” in terms of tense-aspect.

– A new task for the last half of the second semester

The student were asked to start a task to write with good formatting as a document. The topic was sightseeing of a particular prefecture in Japan. Students were asked to write a paper with internet research and to make a suggestion for the better sightseeing services of the prefecture. Each student chose his/her prefecture in the class.

– Learning using the textbook.

2nd question of 5-q quiz: Choosing the right combinations of particles. Over-generalization of “Wa-ga construction” is one issue. But there is another issue that even in the case that “Wa-ga construction” can be used, many students make error for uses of particles “wa” and “ga”. 10 students made this type of error.

< For time limitation, the rest of the teaching was suspended to be recorded here>

Homework:

– The students were asked modifying the template for the paper by filling the chapter titles of our task

Issues and Problems:

< No time to write now>