Education spending renders Japan second to last in OECD | The Japan Times Online

This article is loaded with interesting statistics. First, Japan spends 3.5 percent of its GDP numbers on education, the second lowest of 30 OECD countries. (lowest Greece) This is also down from 3.7 percent in 2003.

Second, the country has 28.4 students per class at elementary, and 33.5 students per class in secondary education, second highest after Korea.

Where are they cutting corners? Well with these numbers it's obvious. Fewer classrooms and teachers. (Just talking about this the other day after seeing a large public high school. Terribly depressing, dreary place to learn. Won't send my kids there.)

Finally, international students in Japan schools are 5 percent of the world's total foreign student population, sixth among OECD nations.




Education spending renders Japan second to last in OECD | The Japan Times Online

Super online lexical tools

Last semester one of my colleagues, who is working on a linguistics PhD sent me a link for a concordancer that he found to be useful. I gave it a look, and it wasn't just a concordancer, there are several of them along with 22 other tools.

I have used, and was using today, the vocab profiler. It is great. Just type or paste in some text and get a full accounting of the vocabulary included. I am doing a presentation at a speech contest on Monday next week and used some of this data in preparation.

In the past I pasted in a movie script for a feature length film and generated a word list for my students that shows them all of the words in the film according to the frequency of their occurrence. It was also a great lesson, because it showed them that the individual words aren't so difficult, but that difficulty in understanding comes because they are not used to listening.

The site is the Compleat Lexical Tutor (not my spelling). Give it a look and enjoy!

Peeper

windowfrog
Originally uploaded by touzanka

This is a peeper peeping in on us at home. Fortunately the peeper was outside and the cats on the inside. They looked very interested.

A Happy/Sad September 11th

Another September 11th and another year older in Japan. I came to this country 21 years ago yesterday, and though the date stands for me as an anniversary of a life changing event, it represents a similar kind of event for the US and the world. At 47 years of age, things personally are great. My family is happy and healthy, and I have a job that I enjoy in a profession that I value. We live in a community that functions in a country that allows us to do things like educate our children as we wish and speak freely.

Unfortunately some of what concerns me outside of my immediate personal life is far from improved. Ten years ago, I was a flag-waving patriot. Six years ago I grieved for America's losses and stood in line with a score of others in the hot Arizona sun to give blood because it was the only thing we could do. Today America's reputation is a sullied, pathetic thing. Today I plan a life here and grieve for different American losses. Liberty, privacy, dignity, honesty, compassion, ingenuity, respect, humility, equality, and justice are treasures gained at great cost and lost in a great American sell-off by a few greedy people.

My personal life is much better than it was ten years ago. Unfortunately my country is not fairing nearly so well.

Japan Inc. Is Drinking Again - TIME

Japan Inc. Is Drinking Again - TIME
Let the good times roll! I remember coming here and waiting for a friend in front of Kokura Station. I had never seen so many obviously drunk people, nor smelled so much alcohol without being in close proximity to a bar or a hospital in my life. I drank alot then, too, but jeez, I couldn't keep up, so I quit.

Actually the country seems to have a problem. Surprised? Five docs at Tottori University published a paper that concluded,

CONCLUSIONS: This study revealed that problem drinking and alcohol dependence are a serious problem in Japanese general population. The problem of females drinking may be growing. The government should emphasize the prevention of alcohol drinking problems in adults and continue the conduct of nationwide prevalence surveys to monitor the problem.

I'm not sure why females who drink is a problem, but it looks like they found that there are indeed some dependence problems. I have never seen or heard any warnings about alcohol drinking aside from posters at schools that discourage underage drinking, and posters at stores that say that alcohol won't be sold to minors.