Kind of looked like it would be the perfect storm today, but the most of it went north. It cleared up here at around noon. Seems just a little early for typhoons.

Used the weather to work on finding some resources online. Wasn't really successful. I was looking for ready-made units on culture. I guess my ideas of what I want to do and what is actually available are different. Fine. I'll just put it together myself and put it up for students and teachers.

Yeah, working on the web page to make it more accessable to the students. Trying to figure out how people do all this cool stuff. It's getting there.

If students could use my web site as a resource that could help them, I'd be happy. The reality of it is though, that it is difficult for them to imagine using it, and there are infrastructure problems. Not everyone is connected for what ever reason. One of the big ones is the cost. There is a real lag in the process of making material accessable on the Internet, and actually getting students to value the tool as more than an entertainment devise.

This year more students are using my site than last year, but the students who really seem to need it the most, students who for whatever reason can't or don't make it to school, are least likely to use what is available to them.

Back on top of the wave and hanging ten here in Yokkaichi. Last night was the final class in a series of six that I do with the Community College here on speech making. The students who turn out for this speak relatively well, and have loads of life experience that makes the classes interesting. Since last night was the final one of the course, each person gave a longer speech, about 10 minutes each. Some of them are born salespeople. They did a great job of explaining which product they liked, and why. Some of them gave more informative presentations, one about human nature, one about travel. I was happy that most of them had taken what I said about organization on board. Good organization make speeches so much easier to listen to.

Some did compare and contrast, and others did argumentative styles, but they were all interesting to listen to. One participant spoke about two types of Chinese noodles in a cup. Great stuff, and very convincing.

Stuff like this irresponsible, hate mongering journalism really gets me. Give it a look if you have time.
http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20030526p2a00m0dm005000c.html
Any Japanese infant with an attentive ear can utter the words, "money." For a journalist to use that utterance from the mouths of desperate people as evidence of their foreignness is illogical in the extreme. Using that same variety of logic, I could claim that any human on the face of the earth had committed the crime in question.

How ironic that on the same page as this article they advertise an English vocabulary learning system, an American based hotel chain, and a German housewares company. The English vocabulary system that is advertised there uses the slogan, �h�p��͂�Bς�P�ꂪ��{�B�h
Do you think they understand the irony there? It would be interesting to see how they felt about the kind of shabby, hate inspiring journalism their ads are attached to.

I wonder if the criminals learned the word "money" the learning system advertised there.

Big weekend ended, and back to classes. One successful seminar for English teachers, and one significant night adventure.

Saturday's teacher development seminar was successful, I think. It is tough to read the audience's reaction. I enjoyed it, though. It is great to work with such a dedicated group of teachers and find out about what drives them. We did a section on autobiography for self development. We wrote and then presented the stories of how we became English teachers. Some of the points that we had in common were a desire to travel and interest in foreign culture(s).

From Saturday night to Sunday morning my son, his Scout troop and I walked. We walked from Tsu back to Yokkaichi, about a 30 kilometer hike. It was much more difficult than I imagined. I had imagined that I could put on a backpack and walk all I wanted. In reality, 30 kilometers is more than I can walk comfortably. The route was very well planned. The kids were in charge of reading the maps and keeping us on course, which they did very well. Only one or two minor detours. They were allowed to ask the adult leaders two questions per 10 kilometer leg. They were very reluctant to use this tool, though, and so took some wrong turns.

The kids built tremendous self confidence on the trip. Walking 30 kilometers for 11 and 12 year old children is a fete that few of their peers can claim to have accomplished. I guess that both my son and I are pleased with our accomplishments this weekend.

Peter Jarvis calls it "Practioner-research." Lots of other people call it "action research." Whatever you call it, it amounts to a very practical tool for bringing illumination to the dark corners of complacency. Up to now I have only heard or read about action research in the context of English second or foreign language education. Jarvis talks about using it in more general sense, as a way of examining any field of endeavor.

"Genuine understanding of any field can only be developed through practice in that field." Extraordinarily empowering quote from the dust cover of the book.

In putting together a workshop on reflective development for the Yokkaichi Teachers' Initiative, a teacher development program Andy Mellor and I do at Yokkaichi U., I have run across some more great titles from Jossey-Bass on reflective teaching and action research. They do a great job of putting together collections of books on adult learning, teacher development, critical thinking, and education theory in general.

Today I've been looking at two books, Stephen D. Brookfield's, Becoming a Critically Reflective Teacher, and Peter Jarvis's, The Practitioner-Researcher: Developing Theory from Practice. I'll end up using more quotes from Brookfield, because Jarvis centers more on action research. I won't spend too much time on that, because we only have one day to focus on the reflective development issue. There is so much fun to be had with all the ideas represented here.

Don't know who's responsible for the various myths that go around, but in my years 17 odd years in Japan, there's one that I've heard often. "Japanese students can read and write English, but they can't speak and listen." That is a myth that has not rung true after associating my students. The reason I mention it is because I evaluated my students today on material that they have learned this semester. There is a spoke section as well as listening, reading, writing and culture sections. They do pretty well when it comes to speaking and listening, but have a very difficult time reading or writing. (All of my unit exams are on my web site if you care to look.) When I say, "...a difficult time," I mean that they can read a word on the paper, possibly sound it out, but then have difficulty relating it back to the katakanized word they know. For example, in an exercise we were doing in class today was the word "gardening." A fictional character had the hobby. One student asked what it was, started to sound it out himself, and it didn't register with anything he knew. I said it for him, and he made the association between the word I said and the katakana version he knew.

My students rely heavily on what is written on paper, and have a hard time doing without it, but when they no longer have a paper to rely on, do very well at producing and understand language. When they have to go back to the paper then, and associate the words they have been saying with what is written on the page, there is a gap. There's a lag between seeing the word on the paper, sounding it out, and relating it with what they have been listening to and saying in their speaking practice. They have seen the words before, but the way they pronounced them before and after the speaking practice are different. It is great fun to watch them make the connections.

The Japan Civil Liberties Union
( http://www.jclu.org), a group of lawyers and legal experts, released yesterday a
proposal for a law eliminating racial discrimination in Japan.

Did you have any idea that racial discrimination was not illegal (at least)?

You want to know how many elementary schools used English for all or part of their "comprehensive studies" courses in 2002? Give a look at this article from the Japan Times:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20030501b7.htm
"NPO looks for English boost via teacher-accreditation plan"
The answer is 56%. The NPO plans to list teachers and institutions that train teachers for teaching English at the elementary level.

It is an interesting scheme, and private. The MOE doesn't plan on starting their own accredication system, but says that public schools can use this one.

This is what it's called in Japanese:
�uNPO���w�Z�p��w���ҔF�苦��v�i�ʏ�J-SHINE�j
www.j-shine.org

I'll read up on it and explain more later.

This is a continuation of my 5/16 reflection on the review by Jeff Kingston on Japanese Higher Education as Myth:

I know I should be reviewing the book itself, but being the country it is and where I am, I'll have to wait for my copy do be delivered. Maybe that should be an entry in itself.

The next quote from Kingston's review is one on testing.

According to McVeigh, the greatest tragedy of the education system is the
emphasis on examinations and the consequences of this focus on students. He
is not so concerned about the content of the exams, rather it is the process
of preparing for and sitting exams that is so devastating. Learning is
trivialized, "Because it is used merely for testing, knowledge is sliced,
disconnected, disjointed, stored, packaged for rapid retrieval, and is
abstracted from immediate experience. Consequently, knowledge loses its
meaning as a body of information that points to something beyond itself, and
acquires an overly practical, banal, and dull character. _Daigaku_
[universities] rest upon pyramids of shattered knowledge, with the more
substandard schools sitting atop small pieces of knowledge ground into fine
bits by the crushing stress of examinations."

I on the other hand am interested in the content of the tests, because I believe it is a crucial piece of the puzzle that answers, not the question of [what] or [why], which I believe McVeigh will probably answer, but [how] the tests work to shatter knowledge. The content of the national, "Center Exams," are created by a mysterious, specially selected group of professors, who then sequester themselves and create an exam. The exam is published without being checked for reliability or validity. My own experience with the English portion of a "Center Test" is an example. After proctoring a Center Exam, I received a text booklet. On the English test were several questions that required students to select the syllable of written sentences that were stressed in normal speech. Those this may be possible in some cases, since the sentences were presented in the context of a dialog, others were impossible to predict. My guess was that there was a code, a kind of pattern that students were taught to follow when they answered these kinds of questions, so I asked a few of my better students about how they would answer. They gave several different answers, and reasons for them, and then asked what the "right answer" was. I told them that I did not know, as I could not predict it for myself. As it happened, I attended a presentation the summer after these exams where a highly regarded university professor was explaining English entrance exam questions to high school English teachers. He happened to use one of the very questions that I found to be troublesome as an example. I went through my misgivings about the problem in detail, and he agreed that the question was unanswerable in it's given form.

Now, does one strange question make it important? Only to the student who needed one score to enter a university and missed that mark by one point. Were there those students? There had to be. Was that as a result of that question? Who knows? My point is that the content of the exams is such that students cannot be fully prepared for exams, because the material to be tested is arbitrary and in at least one case, faulty. Tests are taken by the students, they are evaluated by others, scored by others, and students are left to feel that they are "smart" if they are lucky, somewhere in the middle, or "stupid."

The message is clear. Knowledge is in the posession of others. The average student cannot posses it. The only recourse for them is to submit to the system, roll the dice, and accept the outcomes.

logging about how difficult FTP is to get right.

A friend sent a copy of this review the other day. JAPANESE HIGHER EDUCATION AS MYTH_
by Brian J. McVeigh.
M.E. Sharpe: Armonk, NY, 2002, 301 pp., $25.95 (cloth)
Reviewed by JEFF KINGSTON
You can read the interview here.
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fb20030427a1.htm

Having not yet read the book, I am only reacting to the review, but the content is too interesting to pass up. My guess is that this will take several entries to work completely out.

First, let's begin with the quote in the review, "There is a dark spirit plaguing the Japanese university classroom. It is the ghost of opinions suppressed, voices lost,
self-expressions discouraged, and individuality restrained. The ghost is
malevolent, and in its vengeance demands silence, self-censorship, and
indifference from the students it haunts."

Though this ghost haunts university classrooms, it isn't confined to them. Children are plagued by this kind of supressed creativity and expression from the beginning of their formal education careers. One could make the argument that the seeds of this supression come from an even earlier age, when they beging to interact with society in general, including the media.

I have seen bright, cheerful five-year-olds begin school and become quiet, passive, sad people within a very short period of time. The causes of this kind of behavior change are probably numerous, and worthy of address at another time. I do not believe, however, that universities alone could create the kinds of students I have seen in my 12-year tenure in Japanese higher education.

The quote above does not suggest that all students graduate from university with the personality of a beaten dog. I was very pleased when I went to a rally in March for one of the candidates for Governor of Mie Prefecture. Several students from the department in which I teach were there, volunteering in the campaign. My guess is that this was the first time that they had done anything like stand in public in support of an issue or a person, but as a result of their increased awareness of events surrounding them, they decided to participate. Until this time, the students were busy sacrificing their young lives to university entrance exam preparation, and so had little time to be aware. But after having entered the university, their time for these activies increased. University for these students has been a calm between the confinements of school life and the servitude of working life. It gives them four years to be away from home and at the same time be free of the strictues that employers will place on them.

Granted, not all university students will use this period in nearly as constructively. But neither are they all being stripped of their personhood by ghosts.

Being my first post here, I believe it would be good to make it brief and to the point.