Dubya action figure

Love it. Give it a look.

Finished the HS gig

my cats enjoying a sunny day

Finished that teaching gig at the high school. One interesting development is that the teachers have decided that the texts required by the Education Ministry are not appropriate for their situation. They have the luxury of using it or choosing not to. They are going to visit me on Tuesday and explore other options.

Don't you love him

He's not just a racist anymore. The Governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, fired all of the teaching staff at the Shuto Metropolitan University, set out to restructure the institution, and is considering rehiring some academics, with conditions attached, in 2005. Thisis an article about the university. It is interesting that they are having a hard time finding teachers right now.

I met one of the professors affected by Ishihara's putsch. He just decided that he didn't want to work there, and probably would have a hard time swallowing the conditions that Ishihara makes. He's out looking for another position. He won't have a hard time. He is well qualified and dynamic, an asset to any university.

My prediction is that the university will open in 2005, and that the metropolitan government will find all the profs they need, hardly any better than scabs. Students will attend, because the school will be cheaper than schools who hire quality academes.

Ministry of Education, "Japanese with English Abilities"

The Japan Ministry of Education issued a statement in 2003. Regarding the Establishment of an Action Plan to Cultivate “Japanese with English Abilities”

It is a relief that the country still states that English is important for their people. It is also good to see that they are still willing to insitute programs and revise their objectives, and make their objectives more accessable to the world by putting them in English.

There are some points which concern me, though. First, their reliance on commercial tests to measure student and teacher proficiency. Second, their insistance on refering to non-Japanese people as "foreigners" or "native speakers." Third, their willingness to ignore fundamental flaws in the system that make most or all of these policies immaterial.

In this policy statement, the Ministry says that it will use commercially available English tests, STEP, TOEIC, and TOEFL for measuring both student and teacher proficiency levels. For example, in the "Goals" section there is the statement

"On graduation from a junior high school, students can conduct basic communication with regard to areas such as greetings, responses, or topics relating to daily life. (English-language abilities for graduates should be the third level of the Society for Testing English Proficiency (STEP) on average.)"

Why have they even brought the STEP test into the picture? The Ministry has their own objectives that they have set for English classes all over the country. They control the publication and use of texts with iron rule. What do those objectives and materials have to do with the STEP test?

Will this test be a standard, and what if a teacher/student/school/prefecture doesn't meet this standard? Will there be sanctions? My guess is that there will not be. That in turn means that aside from some of the other programs that they have already started to implement, like the "Super School" scheme, it holds little meaning.

As for teacher language proficiency, the Minstry says, " Almost all English teachers will acquire English skills (STEP pre-first level, TOEFL 550, TOEIC 730 or over) and the teaching ability to be able to conduct classes to cultivate communication abilities through the repetition of activities making using of English."

Almost all teachers? Who will be exempt? Why? Won' their students suffer if this kind of teacher proficiency is important? Again, as a goal it can't be more than hollow words. Teachers participate in training courses in their first, and eleventh years now, but there is little chance that communities will pay enough money for a majority of the English teachers to develop that kind of proficiency. It may be possible with new hires, but not with teachers who are already in the schools. They are setting the bar very high for people entering the profession. Will teachers of other disciplines be held to these kinds of standards?

Another question is how do the scores on these tests relate? The STEP test includes a speaking test, as well as the multiple choise paper test. TOEIC offers an optional speaking test for test takers who score higher than 700. TOEFL does not offer a speaking test as such. The formats are different. STEP is a paper test and an interview. TOEIC is a paper test, with an optional speaking test which is taped. TOEFL is an online exam entirely now. Do any of these tests claim to make tests that certify teachers' ability or inability to teach? Is there any relationship with the contents of the exams and the content the teachers are expected to impart to their students? And again, will boards of education be responsible for teacher development and assessment in these areas? I doubt it, so again, the goal is mute.
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The Use of "Foreign(er)" to Describe All People Aside from the 150 Million who Call Themselves Japanese.

This is the number of times these words are used in the report to describe potential communication partners.
Foreign - 5
Foreigner- 1
Native- 9


There is an assumption that learners will necessarily be using Japanese with Japanese and English with non-Japanese. I have found that most of the English used in a school/university context is with other Japanese. For example in the course for English teachers that we do at Yokkaichi University, the Yokkaichi Teachers' Initiative, the teachers communicate with the coordinators during the class, but most often communicate with each other in English. That's simple math. If there are a dozen teachers and two non-Japanese coordinators, the odds are that they will be using the language with other Japanese.

I suggest less of a focus on the nationality of the interlocutor, and more on the functions of language.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

The ministry isn't addressing the fundamental problems of why learners aren't literate in a second language. It is a test driven system, with students who are assertively competing for a limited number of spots in prestigeous schools and students who are not and who do not benefit from a curriculum with goals that say that communicative ability is important, and course of study that proves just the opposite. The curriculum progresses at a rate that very few students can keep up with. Most are disillusioned and frustrated enough by the time they reach college that they have given up.

The Ministry must develop reasonable goals for achievement, and must make allowances for students who are gifted with languages and those who are normal. To treat a class of 40 students like they are all the same breeds frustration and resentment.

The police are all over foreign crime...or fear mongering

Yes, our constabulary has the situation in hand and they are doing their bit to clamp down on the foreign crime...aren't they?

The headline reads "No. of crimes involving foreigners in 2003 tops 40,000." The Japanese headlinereads "来日外国人犯罪、過去最多　就学・留学は５年で２．４倍" (Arrests of Foreign Criminals in Japan, Trade Schools Students・Exchange Students Rise 2.4 Times in 5 Years.) According to these fine papers, the number of crimes is up. And it is. The problem is that they only tell part of the story. The whole story is that the percentage of crimes that foreigners commit is down. The total number of foreigners is up. Foreigners are being arrested for visa violations in record numbers, crimes only foreigners can commit. Check out this from the Guardian. The title of the article is "Suspicious minds."

Suspicious indeed. It's clear that there's some fear mongering going on, but who profits from it? Haven't figured that out yet.

More on the high school gig

There was a new preoccupation at the high school, listening to music during class. We divided the class into groups and had them work on listening, writing, and speaking tasks in smaller groups. There were three teachers working in one class. We were hoping that would give them some individualized attention, and they could see how recycling vocabulary in various contexts would help them remember words.

The majority of the students profited from a little more attention. Some of the kids who usually don't participate with the whole class got a chance to show what they can do.

The rest did their best to ignore me. One way they did that was by putting on their headphones and listening to music. That was a first. My guess is that since they have so few other options, they choose to tune in to tunes rather than learning. That is their choice, and I am not offending by it. They chose to opt out of participation, and they weren't disturbing others. I couldn't hear their music, if it was music they were listening to. Maybe it was English learning materials. I doubt it, though.

Some of the students were adorable in their attempts to show their non-participation. They put on a good show of not participating, but they were interested nonetheless.

US War College

Dr. Jeffrey Record, Professor at the US War College, wrote an article critical of the Bush Doctrine and the US policies on the "War on Terrorism."

If he is correct, the implications are frightening.

Teaching at a high school

Today was the first day of a three-day stint at a local high school. It is a real eye opener. I enjoy some of the kids and can take some of the others. I have mentioned before that I'd like to get ahold of their curriculum. I'd also like to get the students some self determination. They are supposed to be training young people to be functional adults, but I'm not sure where that maturation is supposed to happen. Tomorrow is another long one. More on the high school situation later.

Beware "Technological Advances"

Blinger in Korea (see links on the right) blogged yesterday about classroom layout, and was saying that he would like to have some technological advancements at his school. That started me thinking about the situation at my previous employer, Prefectural University of Kumamoto, or PUK to its friends. (Yes, it does look like another word.)

Take heed, oh gentle Reader, this cautionary tale of Bureaucracy out of control...

When I was interviewing for a job there in 1990, I was asked if I would like to work in a place where I could use language laboratories. It sounded intriguing, and I said yes. It turned out that the building to which I was assigned was equipped with LL's, and those teachers assigned there were obliged to use them. It sounded fishy at the time, and got fishier. First, I was assigned to a BUILDING, Foreign Language Education Center, not an administrative body for education, like a department, school or faculty. Next, all of the people assigned there were non-Japanese. The building itself was a building for all of the non-Japanese educators at the school.

The administrator of the place, a Professor Arikawa, told us first that we would need to take classes on how to use the equipment. The vendors of the equipment came and started to show us how the stuff worked. They showed us, and we tried to remember, but they were techies, not teachers, and it was difficult to remember it all. It was also all in Japanese. None of the trainees were Japanese, but we got by with alot of cooperation. On top of that we were finding that even the stuff that we did remember, didn't work the way it was supposed to. In fact it would work in some places, but not others. We let Prof. Arikawa know about this, whereupon we were criticized for being lazy foreigners who were using this as a pretext for getting out of work. We assured him we were not, and next addressed ourselves to the techies. They assured us that we were correct, that the procedures for some rooms were different, because they were different models of the same kind of machine. What should have been an elegant system that would work the same way all the time, did not.

We were also finding that even with those issues taken in to account, the machines did not work as they should. When we made this an issue at one of our training sessions, the techies gave up. They decided we needed a real trainer, one who could speak English. They decided that language must be the problem, not the machines. They enlisted the aid of a trainer, conversant in English, who could show us how the machines worked. Victor Japan sent a someone who would show us how to master these machines. She left in tears, because our Japanese was better than her English, and her efforts to tell us anything in English was a hindrance, so we asked her just to stick to Japanese. Then the machines would not work the way she was told they would work. One of our number took her and her employers to task right then and there.

In later questioning we found that Victor Japan had sold Kumamoto Prefecture a prototype of a machine that they had no intention of ever manufacturing, in fact the computers that controlled the LL's were very old at that time. There were bugs in the software, and bugs in the machinery.

I used the machines for tasks that would aid my students. I never used the LL's a learning laboratory with the Audio Lingual Method, the teaching/learning method that spawned LL's. Hardly anyone makes resources for that method anymore.

When next the prefecture decided to build language classrooms, they came to us for ideas. Their initial idea was that since the LL's had worked so well to begin with, they would repeat their disaster. We convinced them that it really had been a disaster, and that the people of the prefecture would be better served by not installing them. When asked what we wanted, we gave them a list. The problem was that our list would not come anywhere near to using up all of the money already allocated for the construction of the classrooms. Japan Inc. would get its share from the prefecture whether the stuff was useful or not.

We worked with an ingenious public servant to have useful, reliable equipment installed and still use up all of the money that the bureaucracy was throwing at it. When the building was built and the machines installed, we attended the training sessions. There were similar problems, but nowhere near as outrageous as before. We stopped going to the training sessions.

We learned, and there is still evidence, that in this kind of acquisition of great amounts of machinery, human resources take a back seat. Look at the pictures in the link above. There are people in those photos. Some of them are teachers. One of the teachers in the photos is still teaching at PUK. The others have gone, me included. I believe that is my photo on the top, where the students are sitting in a circle. I am not using any machinery in that photo. Convenient room that one. There was very little machinery in it. The machinery is still there.

Tips for teachers in decision-making positions:
1. Make sure you are not buying a prototype.
2. Simple is best. The bells and whistles break.
3. Try to make sure its about people, students and teachers, not the machines.
4. When it comes down to it, the students learn from the teachers, not the machines. No student ever wrote on any of my course evaluations that they liked or hated the machines. They did say that they liked or hated ME.

Godzilla Retires at 50

Godzilla will retire after its latest movie production. The cultural icon is 50 now. I'm jealous and relieved.

First, I'm jealous, because I would also like to retire at 50 with the kind of resources Godzilla has.

Next I'm relieved. According to "Godzilla Filmography", the film "Godzilla vs. Destroyer" was not released in the US, so I don't know how familiar some readers are with the film. That is actually the newest Godzilla film I have seen. There are two newer films, but I haven't seen either one of them. I don't imagine I will either. The plot was terrible, the ending a huge disappointment, and everything else was predictable and boring. I am sorry that the producers of the film couldn't do anything more to bring more people to know and love the creature.

I'm happy to keep my memories of the first Godzilla from Saturday afternoon movies on TV just the way they are. I remember watching the film in black and white. I didn't understand the social implications then, but the film produced very strong images of Japan for me. An exotic place where giant creatures still roamed. Little did I know that I would someday be a resident of that magnificent place.

If he does come out of retirement someday, I have a list of suggestioned places where I'd like him to do a little dance. But until then, happy retirement Big Guy.

Rat out a foreigner, or anyone, today

Since us foreigners are such a bad risk, according to Koizumi and the fascist right, they are employing the power of the internet to flush out the bad seed. The Japan Bureau of Immigration has set up a new web site where you or anyone can rat out any foreigner, or I suppose non-foreigner, that you like.

The site deputizes the nation, so that anyone with internet access can turn in a visa violator at will. You can find the Japan Times article about ithere. The problem is that those deputized may not know what a violation is, since there is nothing explaining what a violator may look like. In fact the whole ploy is racist in conception and employment. If a person "looks Japanese" they are much less likely to be reported, guilty or otherwise, than someone who looks like me.

Amnesty International has come out against it. You can find an article about that here, in the Japan Times. The group says the Immigration Bureau is "encouraging reports without any concrete proof."

You can have a look at the sitehere. It is rather complicated if you ask me. To find out where to add details about the violator, you have to select the kind of information you will be giving on them. You'd have to be pretty computer savvy to understand that. If you can't read the Japanese, here is a translation of the reasons that you have turned in someone. These are translations by Debito Arudo, whose link you will find in the link bar to your right.

Preset reasons for reporting a foreigner are:
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1) "I can't let violators get away with it" (ihansha ga yurusenai)
2) Neighborhood disturbances (kinjo meiwaku)
3) Repugnance and anxiety (ken'o fuan)
4) "I am an interested party" (rigai kankei)
5) Police haven't dealt with it (keisatsu futaiou)
6) I have suffered damages (higai o uketa)
7) "Sympathy or compassion" (doujou)
8) I can't let the employer or business get away with it.
(koyou nushi (kigyou) ga yurusenai)
9) I can't let a job broker get away with it.
(buro-ka- ga yurusenai)
10) I was fired because of a violator.
(ihansha no tame ni kaikou sareta)
11) I was not able to get employment because of a violator.
(ihansha no tame ni kyuushoku sarenakatta)
12) Something else (sono ta)
13) Unclear (fumei)
------------------------------------

Doll Festival

Today, the third day of the third month, is Hina Matsuri in Japan. Doing a little research online for myself this morning, I found several bits of information that I didn't know about the festival before.
1. The festival originally came from China.
2. The dolls were first made of paper, rubbed over the body in order to absorb impurities, and then cast into a body of water or burned.

Here is a site with good information on dolls. I'd never made the connections between all the dolls. Pretty interesting.

Teaching at a high school

This afternoon an English teacher from one of the local private high schools is coming by to talk about some classes we are going to do at his school later this month. He is a dedicated and hard-working teacher. He really cares about his students, and would like them to hate English classes just a little less.

I have taught at this school several times now, and I am struck by the number of kids who have just tuned out. Number one suspect, the school system. Lots of the students respond and participate despite the beatings they have taken at the hands of the Education Ministry. A few kids sleep through class, read comic books, or send mail with their cell phones. What would they rather be doing? It would be refreshing to see kids planning the overthrow of the free world rather than wasting precious hours of their lives in an uncomfortable chair with alot of people they don't communicate with.

We will plan our classes for one week in March today, but I would love to get my hands on that curriculum there and get the kids going.

Ski trip

Took my son skiing with the Boy Scout troop over the weekend. What a trip. The kids had fun, but the adults were driving most of the day. What should have been about a three-hour drive turned out to be 5. One way. The roads to the slopes were jam packed with skiers.

We left at about 6am, loaded with kids and equipment. Lots of people have their own ski stuff. I was surprised at how many. The only person who had to rent everything, skis, poles, and boots, was my son. The drive up to Gifu Prefecture was really nice until we were almost to the slopes, then the traffic started. The signs along the way that report traffic were saying 12-15 kilometers of traffic.

When we arrived we parked, boarded the shuttle bus and headed up to the base of the mountain. I didn't ski. My job was to hang out at the "lodge" and wait around in case of emergencies. Fine with me. I didn't have anything. At least my son could borrow my wife's ski wear. (Luckily, she doesn't go in for the flowers and frills.)

The cost of the event was staggering. I paid somewhere around 80 dollars for equipment rental, lift ticket and fees for my son. I went as a volunteer, so I didn't have to pay for gas or anything. But then there was food. I wouldn't really mind if the place were comfortable and if there were places to hang out, but basically, it was a building with enough chairs and tables to call itself a lodge. Nowhere enough to accomodate the number of visitors. The experience was far too costly for the quality of the accomodations. It was packed with people. Fortunately I took food with me, because there was no way I was going to fight the crowds to eat anything there. My son ate what I had prepared for him and then ate something on top of the mountain. There was a small restaurant up there I guess. The snow was pretty slushy. I guess one cannot expect miracles at this time of year.

The good part was that he and all the kids enjoyed their experience enormously. My son repeated over and over that he wanted to go back. It was his first time on skis. The leaders were very good about teaching the kids how to ski and then sticking with them as they tried it out for the first time. I guess it took my son an hour to get down the hill the first time, but by the end, he was up and down in ten or fifteen minutes.

Great experience for the kids. A very long, ten-hour drive and ski trip for the adults. It was worth it to have the kids have that kind of experience, but if we decide to spend money on skiing next year, we are going somewhere good. My guess is that there are package deals that include bus transportation, lodging and ski fees. Sounds like the ticket to me.

The place gets good reviews from some people.