Another first day of school

Yesterday was my first day of teaching...in years. For the last two months I had been observing a couple of classes as I waited for papers to be processed and permits be signed. Once that was done, I was legal to work.

The course is simple. Each week, the students read a short story or essay written about or by a particular ethnic group. A group of three students then presents about that group, takes some questions from the rest of the class based on their report and a short discussion ensues. Really there's only a little amount of teaching (maybe twenty minutes about of the hour and forty minute class). Since the students had their midterm exams last week, this was a good time to transition from the other teacher to me.

The only problem is that when it was time for class, only about half of the students were there. Also, the other teacher and the group who was supposed to present were also missing. So I started without them and spoke for first half an hour with material I planned on using at the end of class.

When the missing students several other stragglers and other prof arrived, the group explained that they were not ready with anything. Only one of them had even picked up the material and I doubt he had read it. But not a problem, I could always lead a discussion about the material we read.

Except only a couple of students in the rest of the class had picked it up. Literally, something like three people had read the text. The other prof thought it wouldn't be a good use of our time to lecture about a short story about Norwegian immigrants and the cultural contributions of the vikings that only five of us had read.

So for the next hour I gave an impromptu lecture on cultural centers, ethnocentrism, adaptation vs assimilation and a lot of odd references to American sports and 1980's pop culture.

Maybe eight years of extemp and impromtu did teach me something.