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.