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Poetry on my door

When I was in the States last March, I bought a set of magnets that have words written on them. The words can then be arranged on a piece of metal to make phrases. I have left them on my door, and have invited students to make some of their own poetry. I'll share a few of them with you.

Consumers shun frozen food amid 'gyoza' poisonings | The Japan Times Online

Don't know how much y'all are paying attention to this circus, but it appears that some poison somehow found its way into some frozen gyoza. No one died from it, and it is certainly not a widespread problem, by that I mean to other frozen foods, but it has gotten so much press that it has become rediculous. No one is on the TV telling us that bad diet and inactivity kill tens of thousands every year.

Come on, frozen prepared stuff in supermarkets isn't healthy to begin with. The poison just makes it a little more unhealthy.

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Consumers shun frozen food amid 'gyoza' poisonings | The Japan Times Online

"I want to get better at English"

This research is from "goo Research", an online research firm. They teamed up with Yomiuri Newspaper to do an investigation , and published it at the site below with the title, "I want to get better at English" 86% Women are more serious (my translation)

This research was conducted by the NTT Resonant Internet Questionnaire Service (goo Research) from December 21 to the 25th. 549 10 to 30 year old men and women responded. There was a 1:1 ratio of men to women. 40% were school students, 28% were permanently employed people, 12% were homemakers.

When asked to respond to the question, "Do you think you would like to be able to use more English," 86% answered yes, while 14% answered that they do not think that.

When asked when they think they would like to be able to use more English, 44% said that they think that while watching movies; 44% answered that it was when they were traveling; 31% said it was when they use the Internet; 36% said it was when they were studying for tests; 34% said when they were reading English newspapers, magazines and books, 32% said it was when a "foreigner" asked them directions, 27% said it was when they use English at work; 7% said it was when they study abroad, and 3% was other.

When asked, "What English language skill do you feel is difficult to acquire," 78% said speaking skills, 61% listening skills, 40% writing skills, 29% reading skills; 2% said other; and 1% said that there was no special difficulty.

To the question, " Were you satisfied or dissatisfied in general with the your junior and senior high school English language education," 3% were satisfied, 23% were somewhat satisfied, 49% were somewhat dissatisfied, and 25% were dissatisfied.

The respondents were asked, "If you were to study English outside of a school classroom, what would you choose to do." Their responses included:
Language school or English conversation school (Women 51%, Men 42%)
Radio or TV courses at home (Women 26%, Men 21%)
Study abroad with language as the goal ( Women 21%, Men 13%)
Home tutor (Women 5%, Men 4%)
Commonly available texts and study materials ( Women 28%, Men 31%)
Internet study (Women 16%, Men 31%)
I have no intention to study outside of school (Women 16%, Men 14%)
Other (Women 2%, Men 3%)

First, I don't think this is terribly reliable data because of the small sample and the bias in types of respondents that they got, but it is interesting to look at.

I was most interested in the data on whether people were satisfied with their education in junior and senior high school. Regardless of the sample population, there was an overwhelming dissatisfaction among the respondents.

第13回［トピＱ・ネット調査］＜英語について＞｜gooリサーチ ポータル

Ferris Wheels

Sometimes this country is just so cute I want to pinch its cheeks and talk in baby talk. This morning on the radio one of the regular programs, called "Number One in Japan," broadcast a show on the biggest Ferris wheel in the country. That happens to be in Fukuoka and is called Sky Dream Fukuoka. They said that it's a 20-minute ride and offers a great view of the city. They said that it had been the largest in Asia, but now there are larger ones, the largest being in China. It appears by looking at the Wikipedia that the largest one is in construction in Peking in anticipation of the Olympics there this year. The Fukuoka wheel is now eighth in the world, but Japan has eight of the world's top 20 largest Ferris wheels.

Let's Diabetic!

Today was the last Japan/US Comparative Culture class of the 2007-08 school year. We ended with individual presentations on topics that the students chose. They were to choose a point for comparison based on our discussions in class, or after consultation with me. They did a pretty good job, talking about manners, a general overview of the class, tipping, food culture, and language varieties respectively. The manners topic was a little thin and focussed mostly on table manners with the presenter finally decrying the state of Japanese manners.

The food culture topic was lots of fun, with the presenter discussing sugar consumption in the US and Japan. He said that sugar provided about 8.4% of the total calories consumed in Japan, and 16 to 20% in the American diet. One of the students exclaimed, "Let's Diabetic!" I had to laugh. It was the perfect combination of bad English grammar and timing. Had a great time with this class this year.

Japans top school uses English to lure Asians from US

The programme will each year admit 15 students for master's degrees and eight for PhDs, aimed at students from other Asian countries who plan to work in public policy, diplomacy and journalism.

Students from other Asian countries? What, given up on their own students?
Japans top school uses English to lure Asians from US

Center Exams, 2008

It was the season, and another rite of passage for 543,385 would be college students was conducted on this last weekend. This was the weekend of the Heisei Year 20 Center Exam. This exam is offered all over the country at exactly the same time. There are exams in History, Geography, Civics, Math, Science, Japanese and English. There are other foreign language exams offered, but very few people take them. Depending on a student's college entrance requirements, they choose which tests they must take.

The English test has two parts, a written test and a listening test. The written test is an eighty-minute exam and the listening is thirty minutes. Both are multiple choice. As a test, I am still baffled by many things. First are the aims of the exam. If it is supposed to be a test of language learned in junior or senior high school, the current exam doesn't make sense. This year there were no clearly ambiguous questions as there have been in years past, but it certainly isn't communicative. The Ministry of Education states that their aims for junior and senior high English are to get students to a communicate level in the language. This exam tests nothing of the kind. It would have no direct connection to the English programs at any college, either. It is a self-referential instrument for the purpose of discriminating between students. Since there is no transparency in the system, there is no evidence that the test is reliable, that it accurately measures language ability, or that it measures or predicts academic success.

That said, the logistics of the exam are a marvel, a tribute to planning and lots of money. Take for example the English listening test alone. According to the Japanese press, 498,800 took the test simultaneously. Test takers come to the test site at the appointed time. Tardiness means you forfeit the opportunity to take the exam and must wait until the next year. Each student gets a test booklet, a mark sheet, a personal audio player, and an IC chip memory card. At the exact time all students begin the listening test, a magical experience from a proctor's-eye-view. They don their earphones and silently obey the recorded instructions. Pages are turned in unison, answers marked, and pauses taken. Then in a synchronous movement, all of the test takers remover their earphones, place them and their pencils on the desk close their test booklets, and face front. All is silence. In a technological miracle, of the individual audio players distributed for the test, only 288 malfunctioned. Last year 1,254 machines were faulty. Four times fewer glitches in one year.

The exams were a logistical and technological miracle, but a pedagogical nightmare.

Perfume-- a movie review

Last Friday was movie night, and the selection was Perfume:The story of a murderer. The cinematography, costumes and narration were good. The story line as average, but the acting was below average. In general, a nice looking film, but not so well acted.

The story is set in mid-18th century France, mostly Paris, where a child, Jean, is born to a fish-monger mother, and begins his wretched life being discarded into the fish guts and filth that was a Paris street. He is raised in an orphanage and sold to a tanner. His only joy is odor, as he is born with an extraordinary sense of smell.

He survived working in the tanner long enough to be given delivery tasks, and one day he had the good fortune to make a visit to a perfumer owned by an Italian had-been creator of scents. He demonstrates his knack of identifying and creating perfumes so well that he is bought from the tanner and begins to learn the perfume trade.

Jean, while being gifted with a sense of smell, is bereft of any other human qualities aside from the ability to survive and the desire to preserve scent. He is an idiot savant with no social skills, no emotions other than a passion for smell, and no real concern for others. He accidentally kills a young plum seller in the dark streets of Paris, and after his ecstatic sampling of the odors from her recently killed body, he becomes obsessed with being able to capture those smells. No romantic attraction to the girl, no remorse in having killed such an exquisite being, just a desire to be able to possess the scent. He killed more young women, filled only with the obsession of collecting their scents.

Any joy or happiness in the film was short lived. Even the joy that inadvertently he brought to people through his creations was brief. His unintentional git of happiness also came at the expense of great sorrow and loss.

It should have been a better movie, really, although the story line expects us to accept a fantasy tale on top of the fiction. The acting, aside from a few bright spots from Dustin Hoffman, Alan Rickman, and the narrator John Hurt, was vacant and wooden, and in the case of the main character, almost non-existent.

A visually rich film with an interesting premise, poorly acted in general.