Three Classes on Thursday

Today is the eleventh day of the spring semester 2024. Before the class in the morning, I was grading quizzes that I assigned to the first-year students on the first day of this semester. If I analyze the result, I could extract many information about errors my students made.

For example, many students erroneously answered for the question about a particle (postposition) that indicates where action takes place. Of course, Japanese and English are not the same, but let me explain what my students’ error are like through English. Bad answer is as follows;

I read a book to the library.

I think the sentence would be “I read a book in the library”. Again, Japanese and English are not the same, but in this particular case, I want to say Japanese postposition”-ni” is like “to” in English, “-de” is like “in”. My students should use “-de” for where action takes place. But they use “-ni” whose basic concept is a destination that an action heads towards. There are so many errors of this type like;

   I eat my lunch to the cafeteria.

   I study to the classroom.

   I work to the office.

When I see these on an answer sheet, I want to scream. I am even suspicious there might have been a teacher who taught wrong postpositions to the students.

Another example is what I found in one class of the two. It is about Ko-So-A words. I am not sure if there is an order of “This, It, and That” by distance in English or not. But anyway, there is words for middle distance in Japanese. It is a kind of intermediate word between here and there. Students in one class know the word. But students in another class don’t know the word. Probably it is because different teachers taught each class. The latter class’s teacher didn’t teach well about words for intermediate distance. Now what I am supposed to do is clear. I need to teach the word so that my students can learn.

That is about the first-year students. Two classes of today’s three were for the second-year students. I assigned a small quiz at the beginning of these two classes. Now I have got about 50 answer sheets on my desk. I have to grade them. But I would like to go to bed early tonight, because I am tired from three classes I had done today. From tomorrow, I have to grade much more answer sheets. Those are retests of the students who failed the final examinations of last semester.