Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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.
Monday, January 28, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
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
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, January 21, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
How Japanese ESL learners process English mathematical equations
This morning, in our last English class of this school year, we were doing a mathematical warm up where I would say a long series of equations and the students would keep a running tally of the total and would say the answer at the end. (Like 3+5-4x2... I know that on paper it would be done differently, but they were just hearing the running equation.) They did a fine job of keeping up with an ever-increasing pace, but what was interesting to me was how the answer always kept coming out in Japanese. I was saying the numbers in English, and they were producing a Japanese answer. So I asked them how they were processing it in their heads.
The reply surprised me. They said that they were doing the calculations in their head with an abacus, a skill that they learned in Japanese, and so the numbers were becoming just numbers, not words. They would visualize the beads on an abacus, and the totals were coming out in Japanese as they would in their abacus classes. Great stuff!
The reply surprised me. They said that they were doing the calculations in their head with an abacus, a skill that they learned in Japanese, and so the numbers were becoming just numbers, not words. They would visualize the beads on an abacus, and the totals were coming out in Japanese as they would in their abacus classes. Great stuff!
Friday, January 11, 2008
Kagami Biraki- mirror opening
Today is the eleventh day after the new year in Japan, and today marks "kagami biraki," or "mirror opening" in direct translation. What it means is that families around the country who have decorated their houses with kagami mochi, or round mochi similar to mirrors that are used in Shinto shrines to symbolize the god Amaterasu, break them apart on this day.
There was an interesting discussion of the event on the radio this morning. It seems that the event was originally celebrated on the eighth day after the new year, but after the son of a Shogun died on the eighth, it was moved to the eleventh. Of course, at that time they used the old solar/lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar that is in popular use today, so it is even different from that day, really.
The word biraki, which actually means open or spread, is used because breaking or dividing carry negative connotations. When the tradition first started, knives were not used, and instead the mochi was broken with a wooden hammer, like the top of a sake cask, an act which is also called "kagami biraki. "
People bake or fry the mochi and eat it with salt or soy sauce. I like it with cheese!
There was an interesting discussion of the event on the radio this morning. It seems that the event was originally celebrated on the eighth day after the new year, but after the son of a Shogun died on the eighth, it was moved to the eleventh. Of course, at that time they used the old solar/lunar calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar that is in popular use today, so it is even different from that day, really.
The word biraki, which actually means open or spread, is used because breaking or dividing carry negative connotations. When the tradition first started, knives were not used, and instead the mochi was broken with a wooden hammer, like the top of a sake cask, an act which is also called "kagami biraki. "
People bake or fry the mochi and eat it with salt or soy sauce. I like it with cheese!
Thursday, January 10, 2008
"Sell the house"
I'm back with a post, finally, and a book review.
I recently got a book by Celeste Heiter, Ganbatte Means Go For It!: or... How to Become an English Teacher in Japan, published by Things Asian Press, 2002.
Ms. Heiter was teaching in Japan for two years, and in that time she was thoughtful enough to put together sufficient information to complete this book, a real help for newcomers to the country. Some of the topics that would be most helpful would be her list of ten "must do's." They are all spot on, especially her encouragement to learn some of the language before coming. My father remarked once when he visited that a working knowledge of the language would be a must to live here. Her "survival tips" are really helpful, too.
The one problem I had with the book came at the very end, where she writes, "Every foreigner who has ever lived in Japan realizes at some point that it is time to go." Go where? I think she means "home." Which for me and lots of other expats doesn't mean where we were before we came to Japan. That is a problem for non-Japanese living here, the "When you going home," mentality.
On the back cover of her book she has a quote by Mark Twain:
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the one you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover."
In answer to her back cover I am going to use a quote from "Apocalypse Now":
I recently got a book by Celeste Heiter, Ganbatte Means Go For It!: or... How to Become an English Teacher in Japan, published by Things Asian Press, 2002.
Ms. Heiter was teaching in Japan for two years, and in that time she was thoughtful enough to put together sufficient information to complete this book, a real help for newcomers to the country. Some of the topics that would be most helpful would be her list of ten "must do's." They are all spot on, especially her encouragement to learn some of the language before coming. My father remarked once when he visited that a working knowledge of the language would be a must to live here. Her "survival tips" are really helpful, too.
The one problem I had with the book came at the very end, where she writes, "Every foreigner who has ever lived in Japan realizes at some point that it is time to go." Go where? I think she means "home." Which for me and lots of other expats doesn't mean where we were before we came to Japan. That is a problem for non-Japanese living here, the "When you going home," mentality.
On the back cover of her book she has a quote by Mark Twain:
"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the one you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, Dream, Discover."
In answer to her back cover I am going to use a quote from "Apocalypse Now":
SELL THE HOUSE
SELL THE CAR
SELL THE KIDS
FIND SOMEONE ELSE
FORGET IT
I'M NEVER COMING BACK
FORGET IT
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Happy New Year
Happy 2008! I am looking forward to a great year with many things starting, mostly starting with getting my attitude back in order.
There are so many things we can do with a positive mental attitude. I saw a movie trailer that I recommend heartily, and have been really enjoying a podcast that has gotten me super motivated and moving in great directions.
The Secret has been a great kick in the pants for me.
Also, Morning Coach has a great daily podcast. Great juice to get your day started.
I'm looking forward to incorporating some of these activities in my classes, too.
Let's get this party started!
There are so many things we can do with a positive mental attitude. I saw a movie trailer that I recommend heartily, and have been really enjoying a podcast that has gotten me super motivated and moving in great directions.
The Secret has been a great kick in the pants for me.
Also, Morning Coach has a great daily podcast. Great juice to get your day started.
I'm looking forward to incorporating some of these activities in my classes, too.
Let's get this party started!
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