Halloween Scavenger Hunt

Today and yesterday we are doing a scavenger hunt with a Halloween theme in class. The students get ten questions, and have to find the answers which are posted outside along a trail through a bamboo grove. They get treats at the end. Here are the questions I used.

1. When did Halloween start?

2. Who started it?

3. A pumpkin with a face cut in it is called a __________?

4. Children dress up in _________________.

5. They go around the neighborhood. That’s called ________________.

6. Jack tricked ___________________.

7. Pumpkins were first used in ______________________.

8. Halloween comes from a combination of 3 words; _______________ ________________ _______________

9. Western ghosts have __________________.

10. A house where ghosts live is said to be ____________________.

Number nine may be a little tough to answer. Western ghosts have feet. Japanese ghosts are said not to have feet.

Use (English) education to fight terror

A Pakistani editorial promotes the use of education, with English as the medium, to help young people lift themselves up out of environments that promote violence as a tool for social change.

内容:

"Use education to fight terror"
- Pakistan Observer - Newspaper online edition - Article （Google サイドウィキで表示）

Japan's Centralized Education System is Becoming Unsustainable.

Japan's huge, unwieldy, education bureaucracy is too large to make even the most fundamental decisions, and the Ministry of Education issues proclamations without concrete follow-through programs of training, initiation, or evaluation. Elementary school level English classes start with no follow through. Nursing schools are now supposed to offer more rounded curricula to reflect the number of graduates who are employed outside the health care field, but with no hint about how they should do that and still ensure their grads pass their national boards.

Decentralization is the only answer for solving these issues and many others, including the number of children who refuse to go to school at all.

内容: asahi.com（朝日新聞社）：EDITORIAL: Decentralizing education - English （Google サイドウィキで表示）

Australia Boosts Funding for Language Education

Even in these troubled economic times, Australia seems to know which way the wind is blowing, and offering more funding for language education in schools.

内容:

"The Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, today announced funding of $46,000 through the School Languages Program (SLP), to extend and update the 2005-2008 National Statement and Plan for Languages Education in Australian Schools."
- Australia Invests in School Languages Programs | The Gov Monitor （Google サイドウィキで表示）

Learning Often Takes a Backseat in English Class

As a teacher in a fact-to-face classroom, you will meet learners who are only nominally interested in learning English. They will come to class religiously, participate faithfully, and take notes earnestly, but their language ability may not improve. Here is why.

This is their time. They have left work, taken care of their families early, or otherwise prepared themselves and have generated enough motivation to carry tmemselves to your class. They are there for reasons that you may not be able to fathom, but it doesn't matter.

• They may not learn anything.

Your learners may be with you every week for years and never make any progress. They may even lose language ability over time.

• They are multidimensional beings.

These people may appear to be flat and dull, but they are each dramatic, multidimensional beings that happen to intersect at your class once a week at a certain time. You know next to nothing about what happens otherwise, and it doesn't matter, because you will be with them for the next hour.

• They may dissappear without warning.

These ephemeral beings may decide to exit your time just as easily as they entered, and  you will never know why. The good news is that they may flit back into your class, again with no explanation. 

• Your class is a social outlet in addition to what you are offering as a subject.

People come to your class initially to learn English. They end up creating relationships. We get them to talk about their lives, so they make connections with others. Some of them will take their relationships outside the classroom. They may want to include you in their plans. A few of them will connect in lasting ways. 

• Some may actually pursue language.

As strange as it may seem after all of this, some will actualy pursue language learning and will include you in on their achievements and failures. They'll go abroad, take tests, apply for new jobs, and put themselves in positions where they have to use their language skills.

Learners will come to you initially because they want or need to be ale to communicate in English. It's hard work, but one thing that will keep them coming back is the relationlships they have made with others in the class.

Your relationship with these people is complex, not a simple giver/receiver arrangement. Enjoy the dynamic dance, the comings, the goings, the connecting and growth that comes with the learning in your class.

"I feel as though I am not Japanese"

This comment, "'I feel as though I am not Japanese,' she says, because she is able to understand the English speech so well," comes from an article in the NY Times, Obama becomes Japan's English teacher , about how "President Obama's Inaugural Address" has become a huge hit among the English learning population of Japan.

It is also indicative of one of the mind viruses that infects people here, the I'm-Japanese-so-I-can't-learn-another-language virus.

She needs some positive role models, like the folks in my Tuesday night classes.

Japan 11 Universities in The Times Higher Education QS World University Rankings 2009

Rankings help give people, perspective students, parents, tax payers, and investors an opportunity to compare institutions, but I wonder if they also may not lead to complacency, as politicians and administrators can point to movement in their charts as evidence for superior management or conversely, evidence of the need for more investment.

Japan universities seem to be improving, I mean if you ask the people at The Times Higher Education. This evaluation seems to be heavily weighted in favor of publications, and my guess is that it strongly favors research done in English. It includes scores based on peer review, employer review, staff/student, citiations, international staff, and international students.

"These countries have invested heavily in higher education in recent years, and this is reflected in the improved quality in their top institutions."  Wonder where this heavy investment might be seen? I also wonder where this investment might be coming from, industry, government?

 "They have also attempted to internationalise their universities by hiring more faculty from overseas ... this helps to improve their visibility globally." Is this where the investment is going, to hire faculty from overseas? It begs the question, why are researchers having to be imported? What systemic problems exist that make it necessary to import scholars, and are these barriers to domestic growth evaluated by The Times?

"These universities have also stressed the importance of their professors publishing in international journals, which has no doubt increased the visibility of their research." Publishing has always been one of those things academics do, but how does it help students? I've heard the arguments, and it may work in some cases, but it fails utterly in others.

At best these rankings can be used by people faced with short-term decisions about how to invest their money or which schools to apply for this Fall, but in the long run, they do not address long term solutions about how university education can be improved.