Back From the Dead.

An ancient bit of idiocy reemerges in the covid era.

What nonsense.  Every day another crisis at school.  I survived the first day back after summer vacation.  Just before class time a student arrived at the basement lab that was our classroom before summer vacation.  They usually arrived quite early, so seeing the sate of the lab and none of the students there as the start time approached I was concerned.  Admin forgot English classes started that day.  My boss’s second class was interrupted by another coming in and setting up as her her class was starting.  Admim double booked the classroom.   Just another SNAFU. I should have added in my earlier post that we in the basement were told that after the summer vacation we were likely to relocate to the smaller rooms. Not hearing anything since then, I was not sure if we were or not.

Back to the issue at hand.

Then an earlier issue has seemed to blow up.  There are 8 teachers from various nations and experience teaching English using the same textbook for classes of various abilities in the language.  Some classes are of students who can barely even speak the language while others have grown up abroad and are fluent for a person of their age.  Yet, we are to somehow give the same amount of homework at the same level of difficulty, same number of tests and quizzes so that every student in every class is evaluated as equals.  This has come up again and again over the years and we just ignored it as it is unworkable.

Academic affairs sent an email to our boss on the 14th this month saying that parents are complaining that contents and difficulty of assignments between class vary widely and they want to know why.  Simple answer is, because the ability of the different classes vary widely, but the school does not like that explanation.  It is part of my reply I sent yesterday.

What I did not send in my reply was that all this is meaningless as long as teachers and students are wearing masks for an oral communication class or using Zoom for other language courses.  They can move the deck chairs around as much as they like, but as long as masks and the barriers between each seat remain in place this ship is going down.  I have no patience for this level of stupidity from anyone and even less from a university and even less from a medical university.

It is Saturday here in Japan.  This morning we received another email from they school demanding the following.

“I am sorry to disturb your weekend. 

Many thanks to teachers who already relied to my previous email about your classes ! 

This time I would like you all to 

 1) submit your syllabus of this semester that should have been distributed to your students (For the teachers who already gave me personally, you don’t have to do anymore.)  

 2) tell me the assignment you gave this week. 

 3) tell me whether you have given vocabulary quizzes or some objective tests in addition to speaking test  in the spring semester 

because I need to report this to Prof. XXXXXX, our head of Intercultural Communication.

In order to remind you, I have attached the evaluation of each task in this semester. Please stick to this contents and grading rules.

Again, remember as for assignments, neither too hard nor too easy. “

Who the fauci cares!  Until they take the faucing masks off, all this is meaningless.  Monday is a holiday, we leave for a one night camping trip after the kids’ swimming practice tomorrow morning and I have other things for other employers to do that will keep me busy all day Tuesday. I teach at this “Med” school on Wednesday.

Schools in Japan have long played the game demanding things at the last minute ignoring the fact that we all work for multiple institutions.  But in light of their covid restrictions, this is just dumb.

I am a key stroke away from sending the following in replay to this morning’s email.

“Tell them that as long as masks and barriers and Zoom are used for classes, none of this means a damned thing.”