Big days

Wow! So much stuff happens in a day that the next time I lift my head up it's Wednesday. I'll go volunteer tonight. Then I got asked to teach a class for a teacher in the Community College late tonight, so that's run down to the shelter and then run back here to teach another class. Classes from 5:30 to 10 tonight.

Better eat something now, cause There won't be much time later.

Bullying

I mentioned the "Kodomo no Ibasho Kai" in my last post. One of the reasons some of the kids here refuse to go to school is because they have been bullied. Psychology Today has an extensive article on the subject.

Party?

I was just invited to a party with a group of students on Wednesday night. I will be teaching at the "Kodomo no Ibasho Kai" that night for the children who refuse to go to school, so I won't go to the party. I was pleased and surprised, though. It just doesn't happen that much that students come out of the blue and ask me out. I was happy for the invitation, though.

Immersion school graduates its first class

Katoh Gakuen graduated its first class from its immersion program. 17 grads from the high school, all of them attending universities in either Japan or the US. Pretty impressive numbers if you ask me.

Language skills for national security

An article on learning languages to keep the world safe. The spin on this one is that some languages (guess what they are and then look at the article. No fair peeking.) are more imporant than others in our world for security issues.

Thursday class

Yokkaichi University has instituted classes to improve students' basic skills in Math, Japanese, and English. Students, mostly first-year students, can take the classes for free and university teachers teach them.

They are scheduled once a week, and each is leveled. Most of the students take the classes with the hope that they will take and pass a variety of achievement tests, like the TOEIC test for English.

I'm teaching one class of eight students who are interested in taking the TOEIC Bridge test. That is an achievement test for students who would like to have their English ability evaluated for more remedial skills than the regular TOEIC test can measure accurately.

My philosophy is that we can study for the TOEIC exam and learn some vocabulary along the way, as well as some listening, speaking and reading skills. The TOEIC preparation text that we have is really focused on the exam and doesn't really do much to help learners improve general language ability.

Some of the results I'm interested in seeing is how many students enrolled actually take the exam. Unfortunately, there is no real pre-test, so I don't know the students ability right now, but it would be nice to see how they improve in the future. I am also interested in attitudes. I would like to know how student attitudes have changed over time.

beautiful day in the neighborhood

April 24th dawns as one of the most beautiful days of they year, I'm sure. The air is clear after a wind from the north west has blown all the nasties out of the air. It is cool and delightful outside. The Suzukas are spectacular.

University union

The following is a post about unions. If there are any non-Japanese nationals out there, who are teaching in Japan, I encourage you to find one, get in it, and stay in it throughout your tenure here. The reason I am writing this today is that we have officially started ours here at this school. Finally.

After ten years at Kumamoto Prefectural University, and all the discriminatory bile that we (my non-Japanese colleagues and I) were subject to, I moved to Yokkaichi, and now work in a great environment. You can read some of what happen at Debido Arudo's site. My experience here has renewed my faith in Japan. There are places where people are treated fairly. This, I am sorry to say, may be one of the minority, however.

If you are working or teaching at anywhere in Japan, you should join a union. The individual has far fewer rights here than a socially recognized group. This high context society is based on the group, not the individual. If you want to make any changes in your working environment, need protection, or just want a little insurance, join one today.

If you are not in a union and want to be in one, it is easy to join one that already exists, or you can make your own even if there is only one of you. Japan has some excellent labor laws, and if you are in a union or beginning the process, you are very well protected. It is the people who trust their employers to do the right thing that get called into the loading dock one morning to find that they will be out of a job the next day. It has happened. I have seen the victims and heard their tearful story, but since they were without a union, there was little anyone could do. The NUGW (National Union of General Workers) is a great group of dedicated, experienced people. They are used to working with non-Japanese, too.

Join a union. It is your constitutional right, guaranteed by the Japanese Constitution and United Nations treaties.

Tuesday classes

Have two classes on Tuesday morning, meetings in the afternoon, and two classes at night. Long day for sure.

One bright spot in my day, Mr. H from one of the local high schools came by. He was transfered to a nursing school. He has been taken out of his high school classroom and has been elevated to a nursing school, where he will be teaching only one class per week and doing adminstrative stuff for the rest of the time.

Isn't that the way it always is? The really dedicated, good teachers have to take the administrative posts in order to get an upgrade, which they wouldn't get if they just stayed in the classroom. I hope to go work with him and his students. I do feel sorry for his highschool students.

More on the flag and national anthem

More outrage against the regulations forcing teachers to stand for the national anthem and national flag from Australia.

Language Extinction

Here's an article in the Daily Yomiuri about a speaker from LINGUAPAX, one of the orgainzations in the UNESCO rubric, who I guess was in Tokyo on Saturday the 17th, speaking about languages becoming extinct. This article mentions languages becoming extinct in Japan. Fascinating.

Massive Protests? No idea.

Had no idea until now that there were protests by people to withdraw Japanese troops in Japan. And now I also know why.

The Japanese press has supressed it.

More on the national anthem and flag

This was a waker-upper this morning. An article from the BBC on Japan's national anthem and flag and how teachers are being persecuted and prosecuted for not showing symbolic respect for them.

'Takayuchi Tsuchiya is a (Tokyo) city councillor who wholeheartedly backs Governor Ishihara's new rule. "Singing Kimigayo will help promote a sense of national unity," he told me.'

'Mr Takayuchi has no sympathy for rebel teachers. He dismisses them as communists who want to indoctrinate the children.'

'Open debate on divisive issues is strongly discouraged for fear it would disturb social harmony.'

Teachers' Seminar

Saturday was the first seminar for teachers in the new academic year. That is always a good time. The teachers participating this time are teachers at public junior highs and in private schools around the area. They are such a dedicated bunch. They spend their Saturdays with us a couple of times a month, studying, when they could be doing something else with their time. Their schedules are a panic, but they are here to improve themselves. I envy their students.

A first

Just went to class to teach a class for a colleague who is out of the country on study leave. It's a group of repeaters, meaning that they need to get a credit for this English course, but have failed to do so in the past, so they organized this class especially for them. Seven people are enrolled, but on the first day NO ONE showed up. I am surprised. Usually attendance is spotty in these classes, but otherwise the students are fun.

I was lonely.

Teachers' Seminar

On Saturday another round of the Yokkaichi English Teachers' Initiative begins at 9:30 am. (I'm afraid the page that is up now is dated. Sorry.) I always look forward to those. My colleague, Andy Mellor, and I coordinate the course through the Community College at the university. Our goals are to help teachers develop themselves as English language users, language teachers, and as computer users.

We meet six times during the course of the seminar. For our first meeting we go over the objectives of the course, and then we plan a project for each of the teachers to conduct in their classes in the interim. In each of the next four gatherings Andy and I do a workshop on a topic that the teachers choose at the first gathering and discuss the progress that they are having in their projects. In the final gathering, each of the teachers has time to explain their project and how it went.

We produce one synopsis of the projects at the end of the seminar. I will try to get our last one online as soon as I can.

Teaching to the resistors

Last night I had my first class with children from a group called "The Group for Thinking About a Place for Kids to Be." The English isn't as elegant as that Japanese. The children in attendance are all refusenics, kids who refuse to attend school. There are quite a number of children in Japan who, as a result of bullying by students, teachers, or the system in general, refuse to attend school. Since the home schooling system here is so poor and disorganized, these kids are in really bad positions.

This non-profit organization contacted me and asked if I would like to work with the students in the group and teach them English. They aren't interested in really working hard, but they are interested.

The smaller children, entirely grade school children, were lively and I had a lot of fun with them. The other group, the junior and senior high group was not NEARLY as fun, and were a trial. Not sure why they're there. Probably because their parents told them to go. We'll see.

I just talked with them a little to find out who they were, and to try to find some topics that would be of interest to them. Then we did a thing on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. That was a lot of fun. I did a rhyme, the kids chant

peanut, peanut butter, jelly (x2)
First you take the peanuts and you smash them, you smash them (x2)
peanut, peanut butter, jelly (x2)
Then you take the berries and you smush them, you smush them (x2)
peanut, peanut butter, jelly (x2)
Then you take the bread and you spread it, you spread it (x2)
peanut, peanut butter, jelly (x2)
Then you take the sandwich and you eat it, you eat it (x2)
(and with a sound like you have pb stuck on the roof of your mouth)
mmmm mmmmm, mm mmmm, mmmmmm(x2)

Then we made pb and j sandwiches and ate them. None of the kids have ever eaten one before. They were pleasantly surprised. It was fun for everyone, except for the older kids who were too cool to have fun.

Keeping Foreigners out of Japan

I'm starting to like Aljazeera more and more. They offer a wonderful counterpoint to the rose-tinted press of the America and its colonies. Here's a good one on how Japan treats its foreign population as it embarks on a "humanitarian mission" to Iraq.

Second class welcome and well met

Met the second class of first years today. They seem like a sharp bunch. My plan with them was to explain the class, but also to get started learning. I organized the desks, long tables actually, so they were in groups of six, and then gave each group tasks, speaking, writing, and vocabulary, that they completed at their seats. Each table was given a different task, and then the rotated to a different skill area.

I enjoyed that set up as it gave me a little more time with individuals rather than trying to coordinate one activity at a time with the whole class.

Now English is "essential" for our career's

There's an article in the Daily Yomiuri On-Line that says that English is essential to our career's, to our students' career's. Even though it reads like an advertisement for the TOEIC test, it further emphasizes how important a solid English background will be to our students when they enter the job market.

I also believe that it sends a message to the government and MEXT that industry is demanding people with solid English backgrounds. I hope that industry becomes more forceful in demanding that the Ministry produce results, not charming platitudes about a nation that can communicate in English.

First classes under my belt

First two classes done! They went pretty well. They were English conversation classes with about 10 people per class. The first days of class are always heady times.

classes start tomorrow

Waxing philisophical here at my desk. Classes start tomorrow, and I'm excited. I remember my father, a biology teacher by profession, saying that he used to feel guilty because he was happy when classes were over at the end of the school year, but that he didn't think he was really bad, because he was always excited for classes to start at the beginning of the new year.

I feel the same way. I'm always optomisitic that I have done everything to prepare for the new batch, and that I will finally land on the secret for teaching the perfect class. That's how I feel now.

Mastery Goal Orientation vs. Performance Goal Orientation

After a little research on the internet, I found that the way I was using the term "mastery orientation" in my last post was somewhat misinformed, and that the term has a specific meaning in the field of education, as does another term which was new to me, "performance orientation."

I mentioned in my last post that I wanted to orient my students toward mastery. As I wrote that, I was using "mastery" to mean a mode of learning by which the learner focuses on acquiring a set of skills and knowledge fully before moving on to the next task. I had used my class orientation in the past as a contrast by saying that before students could earn a passing grade by learning 60% of what was on offer. My intentions now are to focus on each set of skills and knowledge as a prerequisite for moving on to the next set.

I come to learn, after looking at a few articles that I found on this search from Google, that "Mastery" is lingo used in the field of education, and its partner is something called "Performance."

My reasons for that kind of focus were that students know that if they limit my expectiations by non-performance, they will be passed on. Conversely, if they know that the bar is set higher, and that they are in control of first when they jump and how often, they can use that control and learn in a setting more condusive to their styles.

One really easy to understand explanation of these two types of orientation is this one by Dr. Kevin Pugh at the University of Toledo. He has a page called "Motivational Project-Goal Theory," which is loaded with information on what goals are and how to incorporate them into your classroom and school system.

I'm really looking forward to understanding them better and trying to incorporate the concepts into my classroom.

Mastery Orientation

This academic year, that starts on Tuesday, brings with it yet another project. Last year I tried writing a newsletter for my students. It turned out that I prefer the blog format, and will continue this year with more entries for my students, that is in Japanese.

This years project is Mastery Orientation. Up to now, a passing grade has been 60%. Tests, quizzes, and writing assignments have all been passing at 60%. A passing grade in the class overall is 60%, and I drop the lowest grade from each of the categories. This year, I am going to go with a system where learners must get a 90% on their work. They can repeat it as many times as necessary.

I worked out a form that I can use to track students' performance over the year in each unit that we will cover. I also worked on posting tests quizzes and study guides for each unit on my web site. It isn't complete yet. I haven't linked all of the quizzes that I have uploaded yet.

I am considering making it possible for students to submit quizzes by email. If the student visits my web site, they can copy a quiz and then paste it into the body of an email. They can do the work there, and then send it to me. That would not be sufficient to complete the whole test or quiz of course. There is a speaking component that they would have to complete in person, but it would be a start.

more editing

The high school teacher who writes extensively about a seaweed grown in Okinawa called "mozuku", is coming by again today for editing of his latest paper on the subject. Last time he came he did a find job of incorporating the suggestions that I had. A rare event, really. He does a really fine job of writing in English, though his spoken langauge isn't as good. He probably just gets more practice with writing than with speaking.

no national anthem

There was no national anthem yesterday at my son's entrance ceremony. There was a "Hinomaru," along side the school flag at the front of the room but that was it.

Kimigayo at entrance ceremonies

"Kimigaiyo" was made Japan's national anthem in 1999, and the "Hinomaru", the white flag with the red circle in the middle, was made the national flag. There was considerable controversy about the move, but the Diet decided, without national debate, to make the decision. BBC has a good article outlining the various arguments.

The Tokyo Board of Education has made it manditory for all schools to play it at their entrance ceremonies. Some teachers have refuesed to stand for the song and the flag.

Today is my son's entrance ceremony, and I am interested to see if they play it there.

BACK!

Yes, it is as Blinger suspected, I was traveling. I went back to the US to visit family, many of whom have passed a difficult winter. My hope was that a visit and some festivities may have brought some joy.

Classes begin again on the 13th, and there has been a placement test for first year students in our department. I will venture into the university to sus out the results of those tests.

Travel helps to shine a little perspective on things. I am re-energized and looking forward to classes, participation in English education in Japan, and blogging.

Thank you for your patience