A funny thing happened between weeks one and two. While I was a bit of a nervous wreck preparing for the course, as week two rolled around, I was the coolest cucumber. My talks with colleagues and friends certainly played a role in rearranging my thought processes. Also, the nervousness that came from being in a new situation was gone.<\/p>\n
In the days before the second class, I had a few specific tasks to accomplish. The first, of course, is to prepare the lecture materials. The duo topics were the history of anthropology and then linguistic anthropology. Learning from the first class, I cut out a lot of slides that I had planned. For example, I had information on around ten major figures in anthropology, but I cut it by half. All slides\u00c2\u00a0on historical linguistics got dropped in favor of more sociolinguistics. I also found some video clips on Youtube (yes, like what they did on\u00c2\u00a0Community<\/em>) and Films On Demand.<\/p>\n In designing the lecture, I took to heart the advice that I should present what I want to teach. The\u00c2\u00a0phenomenon of code-switching<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0(Demby, 2013) is something that I found to be both fascinating and relevant so that made up a good chunk of the linguistics material.<\/p>\n As class started, my nervousness did go up as I only had four of fifteen students in the room. Had everyone dropped? Since my class enrollment was hovering around the minimum, people dropping would surely spell the doom of this section. I told the students who were there about the possibility of the cancelation, then went ahead with the lecture. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153The show must go on!\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Over the next half hour, students started trickling into the class. I really have to stop that in future classes. Since my roll taking is done at the end of class, there is nothing to stop students from coming in late. I may threaten a beginning-of-class question as well, and implement it if people are still coming in late.<\/p>\n Aside from the slow start, the lecture went extremely well. With a class of under fifteen students, there were a lot of good discussions on topics related to how anthropology is conducted. Someone did point out self-awaredly that three or four people did most of the talking, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also a third of the class, so I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m pretty fine with that. I have a mental block against calling out the quiet students, having been one myself. The team work was my solution, but alas there was no team activity this lecture.<\/p>\n I lectured for an hour or so about the history of anthropology and anthropological methods, ending with video clips on Boas and Mead. I had prepared a custom clip through the Films on Demand interface, but it would not work via the class computer, so I had to do it manually. The clip ran a bit long into the Derek Freeman criticisms of Mead\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s research, which I personally think are off base, so I had to refute that bit. After these clips, I gave the class a ten minute break. The day was sunny and gorgeous so the ten minutes seemed really short. Time was up, though, and I realized that I had to summon everyone back myself as no one was coming back on their own. Heading back in, one student said that we should have class outside. Gears started turning in my head\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n The second half of the course, on linguistic anthropology, seemed to have worked out really well in getting the students interested. As with the first half, I lectured first and then showed a few video clips. Everyone seemed to enjoy the section on the flexibility of human language, as I told them about imaginary\u00c2\u00a0plorbs, or carnivorous watermelons. I have a feeling that plorbs\u00c2\u00a0will show up in future classes. \u00c2\u00a0The last video clip was a segment on Ebonics\/AAVE<\/a>\/BVE from the classic documentary\u00c2\u00a0Do You Speak American?\u00c2\u00a0<\/em>(Cran, 2005). The clip ends with a segment on teaching Standard American English in an elementary school setting. The children were shown to be extremely excited about learning the dry subject of English grammar. I may or may not have picked that clip as a subconscious model of being excited in a classroom setting.<\/p>\n As the clip wrapped up and I offered some concluding remarks, I noticed that I had ten minutes left in class. Perfect! That was the ideal time to do the end-of-class question. In fact, the last student left the class at the exact time that class was scheduled to end. I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ask for a better-timed class and I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m fortunate that I have a good model of how many slides and how much material to present each day.<\/p>\n Of course, I am deviating from this formula immediately. There is no class this Friday to celebrate Lincoln\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s birthday, so I have a lot of leeway in designing the classes coming up. Since the weather is so good, the campus is so quiet on Fridays, and the next class is on subsistence strategies, I want to do an outside activity with the teams I had set up (there was no team activity in this second lecture). I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m still working out the plan, but it looks like we will be doing a combination of LARPing (Live Action Role-Play) and a play. I have a bunch of cocktail toothpicks that can serve as resources to acquire. I can plant those around the quad and then have the students act out foraging, pastoralism, and so on in a variety of situations. It should be fun and educational!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n References<\/strong><\/p>\n Cran, W. [Director]. (2005).\u00c2\u00a0Do you speak American?<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0[Documentary]. United States:\u00c2\u00a0Thirteen\/WNET.<\/p>\n Demby, G. (2013, April 8). How code-switching explains the world. NPR. Retrieved from\u00c2\u00a0http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/codeswitch\/2013\/04\/08\/176064688\/how-code-switching-explains-the-world<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A funny thing happened between weeks one and two. While I was a bit of a nervous wreck preparing for the course, as week two rolled around, I was the coolest cucumber. My talks with colleagues and friends certainly played a role in rearranging my thought processes. Also, the nervousness… Read more“Cultural Anthropology Week 2: Beware of Plorbs”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[20],"tags":[77],"class_list":["post-909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","tag-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/909\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.keithcchan.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}