Update: Class confusion and eating problems
Classes started a couple weeks ago, and I got a big surprise on the first day. I walked into class and said, “Welcome to Oral English for Ph.D. students!” The students looked at me, shocked, and said, “We’re not Ph.D. students!” It turns out they are all in their first year of M.A. study. Nobody thought to tell ME, however. I believe I was told my students would be the same as the last time I taught the class. I was upset and embarrassed, and complained to the grad school’s contact person. She replied in an e-mail that she had told me they were postgraduates. I informed her that both M.A. and Ph.D. students were postgrads, and this situation had caused me a lot of embarrassment, not to mention trouble. I could have been preparing new lessons, asking the other people who teach the M.A.’s what they do in class, making sure all of our workloads and testing procedures around about the same, etc. But instead I thought everything was hunky-dory, and went to Qingdao. So, since then, I’ve been talking to Ed, another one of the teachers here, to see what he does with his classes, and tomorrow I’m going to have dinner with a student who had Doug Cooper’s class a while ago.
In other local problems, Dog Man’s father has stopped eating. I hadn’t seen him for like a month, and was thinking of asking if he was okay. Then the other day I saw him, and he was really skeletal. I asked about it, and Dog Man told me that he’s barely eaten anything for a month. They’ve asked him what’s wrong, offered to buy him any food he wants, tried to cook things he’d like, but it doesn’t work. They wanted him to go to the hospital, but he wasn’t willing. Dog Man got really upset talking about it, and almost cried. He and his big sister are really worried, although his oldest brother doesn’t seem bothered by the situation at all. I saw his dad the day before yesterday, and talked to him a bit, asking him if his stomach hurt or anything like that. He said no, but that he didn’t have any appetite. I do wonder if he is depressed, since he does not really do anything all day (even though his kids have tried to encourage him to play mah-jiang and spend time in the elderly people’s clubhouse in the back of the housing development). Then again, he has had a few strokes, and maybe that has impaired his ability to feel hungry. Yesterday they finally arranged for him to get an IV for some nourishment. The whole situation is really tough for Dog Man and his sister, who have been taking care of their dad for the past eight years since their mother died.