Furl and 10 cool things you can do with it

I'm sure we all have navigated to a page and would like to have a copy of it for further reference. There is a service called Furl that helps manage those articles for us. I found out about this service from Contentious, in an article called, "10 Cool Things to Do with Furl."

I have signed up for the service, but have truthfully not had the time yet to try it out. I will try out saving some articles to the service and then make my list public on this site. There are some drawbacks. Those and possible implications for use are covered in the article.

Generating Student Motivation

I received an unsolicited message from a representative of Longman Publishing Company the other day that I would like to share with you. It is a short paper by Michael Rost, entitled, Generating Student Motivation. It is a very informative paper that really provided some great new teaching inspiration for me. I put the report up on my university server if you would like to see it.

Generating Student Motivation, by Dr. Michael Rost

This article again gives me pause to consider traditional formal education cliches. I call them cliches, because I think that some modes of formal education are worn out, stale, trite expressions of a concept, and should be rebuilt in a different way in order to be effective. Home schooling and other styles of education provide some hope for motivating learners, but I'm not sure that the kinds of education that I am involved in, for example, can offer the kinds of learning environments that can help learners achieve to the best of their ability.

I think the best that teachers can do, those who are involved in very traditional education settings like me, is to incorporate ideas that will stimulate more successful learners. This article has some great points of departure.

A Partnership in Review: EAST ASIAN PERIL: Fragile ties

Interview of Manabu Hara of Ezra Vogel, professor and author of "Japan as Number One." The interview is a discussion of Japan's relationships with different countries, and included comments about China and Japanese relations.

Also included this quote:

As for Japan, it must better prepare its people for the ever increasing speed of globalization. As the world becomes smaller, Japan is hindered by the poor English skills of many of its people.

asahi.com : English

"An Elusive Concensus" an article on foreign labor in Japan

Intersting discussion of the issue of international laborers in Japan and their future.
ABS-CBNNEWS.COM

On Monday, November 8, I blogged about the results of some comparisons that I made of the "smartest" and "dumbest" states in the US and the way that they voted in the last presidential election. You can look to see which was which if you haven't yet in the charts below.

A gentleman named Lee Davis was kind enough to reply to the posting in the following way.

You forget to point out that about a quarter of Kerry's electoral college total came from "dumb state" #43 California! I think your "trend" fits very well into the mindset of many other elitists who haven't been able to figure out that you don't win friends and influence people by telling them how smart you are and how dumb they are.

This is just how elitist I am. I grew up in West Virginia during the Viet Nam War years in Morgantown, a university town. I saw lots of locals go off to war and some not come back. I went to grad school with some of the vets of that war, and listening to what they had to say, it became clear that the poor went and died in Vietnam in greater numbers than the wealthy. Take our current president for example.

So today I went a looked up some numbers. What were the numbers of US deaths in Vietnam by state, which I found already calculated in a usable form here. And how would that look if I plugged that into the rubric that I used before, the list of "smart" and "dumb" states.


Here are the results.

Smartest 10 Deaths Per 100,000 Population
1. Massachusetts, Kerry, 62% 23.2
2. Connecticut, Kerry, 54% 20.1
3. Vermont, Kerry, 59% 22.4
4. New Jersey, Kerry, 53% 20.6
5. Wisconsin, Kerry, 50% (bush 49%) 26.2
6. New York, Kerry, 58% 22.5
7. Minnesota, Kerry, 51% 28.1
8. Iowa, Bush, 50% (Kerry 49%) 30.1
9. Pennsylvania, Kerry, 51% 26.6
10. Montana, Bush, 59% 38.7
Average 25.85

Dumbest 10
41. Tennessee, bush, 57% 32.8
42. Hawaii, Kerry, 54% 35.8
43. California, Kerry, 55% 27.9
44. Alabama, bush, 63% 34.9
45. Alaska, bush, 62% 18.8
46. Louisiana, bush, 57% 24.1
47. Mississippi, bush, 60% 28.7
48. Arizona, bush, 55% 35.0
49. Nevada, bush, 51% 30.6
50. New Mexico, bush, 50% (Kerry 49%) 39.2
Average 30.78

And just for an added extra bit of data, my home state of WV (who went with Bush in the last election) was #33 in the education rankings, tied with Texas, our new president's home state. But in the Vietnam War, WV lost 41.9/100,000 people, while Texas lost 30.4.

I am bumbfounded by the election results. Why would these people, the people with the greatest need for education, be misled by the lies of the current administration? Because they promised them there would be, "No child left behind?" No, our armed services are great at bringing our dead home for a proper burial. We leave very few fallen Americans behind on the battlefield, which is a tribute to the bravery and honor of our military.

What do they see in it for themselves? A brighter future? Only for those higher up the earnings ladder, sorry. A British friend expressed to me his bewilderment at the situation, but said that it was similar to the Thatcher years, when the poor voted in great numbers for a power base that had nothing to offer them but more of the same.

My point here is that education is important to survival. Education, controlled by the rich to maintain the status quo, puts the poorest and most in need in uniform and sends them to war easier than the rich. That's just how elitist I am.

Discussion with international student

Yesterday I had a discussion with an international student that I thought that I would blog about. After class was over he asked me some questions about what we were discussing in class and about some problems that came up in a book that he is using on his own to learn English with. He is from China, a part of the country that borders Korea, so he is bilingual in Mandarin and Korean, because those are the languages that are used where he grew up. On top of that he studied enough Japanese to get into this university, and is now bent on learning English. He claimed that he came to this university in order to study English because the student to teacher ratio is good, especially for English.

I mentioned that he would be a valuable asset to any company now with his Chinese, Korean and Japanese ability. He said that he was happy to know those languages, but without English it didn't mean much. I was a little incredulous, and he said, "Japanese is a minor language. There aren't that many people who use it, and they all live here. Look at English. I can use that where ever I go." He is right, of course.

We discussed the competitive nature of new Chinese companies and how important it is to have English ability to get into a position in a good company, and that even with the English program that we have in this program, it won't do for the student who really wants to master the language. That they will have to do on their own, and with the teaching staff here as long as he attends this university.

It was very enjoyable to talk with such a motivated student. I hope some of that wears off on some of the others in his class.

English Club Web Page

The Yokkaichi University English Club finally has a web site. I have been trying to encourage the students to come up with their own. Then one student said that she would. She didn't do it, so eventually Shoko had to. She is the other club advisor.

Raising multilingual children

I recently published a paper on multilingualism. It was fun to write the paper. I thought I would include a couple of the better sources that I found while writing the paper.

There are all kinds of worries out there for teachers and parents. The children don't seem to be worried though. They are bilingual and loving it.

Baker, Colin (2000) A Parents' and Teachers' Guide to Bilingualism, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters LTD.

Tokuhama-Espinosa, Tracy (2001) Raising Multilingual Children: Foreign Langauge Acquisition and Children, Westport: Bergin & Garvey.

Great guides for parents raising multilingual/multicultural children.

The Thurday show at the city English class

As I have blogged before, every once in a while I go to help a teacher friend of mine who teaches a class for the city. The students are all retired folks who come to learn English for a variety of reasons. Some of them are interested in traveling. Several of them have relatives overseas. One woman has a daughter, her husband and children in California. Another woman will soon has her son and his family in New York.

One woman was curious about her grandchildren becoming bilingual. She was worried that if they lived in the US that they would never be able to speak Japanese. One person asked what I ate everyday when I was in the US and now that I live here.

None of that is very unusual, but what was surprising was some mail that I got from the regular teacher of the class who said that one student skipped because, "They hadn't learned enough English to talk to a foreigner." My answer to the teacher follows.

I am a little confused by the member who did not attend the class, who
said that their English was not good enough to talk with foreigners.
First, I am bothered by the importance that my nationality has for this
person. Regardless of people's nationality, making links with other
humans is a great way to spend a couple of hours on a rainy Thursday
afternoon. As for their ability to speak English, if a learner does not
make the most of every opportunity they have to use the limited ability
that they have, they will not improve. Finally, my Japanese is fine, and
if the person really wants to communitcate, I'm sure we could have made
some kinds of arrangements for translation.

Generally a good time, though. We had some great homemade cake and a good discussion.

More volunteerism

Back out again today to teach a class for one of the participants in the Teachers' Initiative. This one is not at a school, but is one sponsored by the city, mostly for retired people. I guess the theme this time is American culture. I look forward to that, mostly to dispell some strongly held beliefs about the US and Japan as well.

I will report Saturday on the outcome.

Entrance exams

This week we didn't have classes on Tuesday or today because of entrance exams. The school is conducting some exams for students who want to enter in the 2005-06 school year.

I am in doing a little studying and preparation for next week. We also have a teachers' seminar on the weekend. Looking forward to that.

Homeschoolers' success

A colleague lent me a book, Brining up Boys, by Dr. James Dobson.(2001, Tyndale House Publishers) I have been reading it off and on for a while. I can't really recommend it, though if you are Christian and would like to have like minded advice for raising children it isn't awful.

There was one interesting statistic in it about homeschooling. It was a quote from Bill Bennett, the former Secretary of Education under Reagan and drug czar under the first Bush.

The kids in public schools score, appropriately enough, at the fiftieth percentile on tests of academic competence. In other words, their combined score is "average." Homeschoolers, however, are at the eighty-seventh percentile--for about one-sixth the cost. The homeschool kids are getting into the colleges that their parents want them to attend and the program produces a high degree of parental and child satisfaction. (p. 192)

I did some homeschooling with my children here in Japan through American schools, and I will continue to balance the best of both formal and homeschooling. In discussions with my eldest son, he claims that he would have preferred to have done more home schooling. The more I read, the more I like the idea.

Who did the "smart people" vote for?

Election 2004 in the US saw lots of people at the polls and a win for the new president bush. Since he didn't actually win the last election, my conclusion is that he is new. But Who voted for Whom? Lets let the facts speak for themselves.

A report on Netscape this morning caught my eye. "States Ranked from Smartest to Dumbest." I gave it a look. There is a ranking of states, which is,"... the findings of the Education State Rankings, a survey by Morgan Quitno Press of hundreds of public school systems in all 50 states." The rankings looked familiar somehow. Something like election results. So, I checked in with CNN on the election results. I compared the smartest 10 states and their election results with the dumbest 10 states and their election results. Here are the results.

Smartest 10
1. Massachusetts, Kerry, 62%
2. Connecticut, Kerry, 54%
3. Vermont, Kerry, 59%
4. New Jersey, Kerry, 53%
5. Wisconsin, Kerry, 50% (bush 49%)
6. New York, Kerry, 58%
7. Minnesota, Kerry, 51%
8. Iowa, Bush, 50% (Kerry 49%)
9. Pennsylvania, Kerry, 51%
10. Montana, Bush, 59%

Dumbest 10
41. Tennessee, bush, 57%
42. Hawaii, Kerry, 54%
43. California, Kerry, 55%
44. Alabama, bush, 63%
45. Alaska, bush, 62%
46. Louisiana, bush, 57%
47. Mississippi, bush, 60%
48. Arizona, bush, 55%
49. Nevada, bush, 51%
50. New Mexico, bush, 50% (Kerry 49%)

Don't know. Looks like a trend to me.

English speech contests

A junior high school English teacher mentioned the other day that one of her students was in an English speech contest near here. Speech contests around this time of year are many, and they are held in different parts of the country. There are a variety of sponsors, and are targeted at a variety of grade levels. This particular contest included a section for junior high students.

She had a problem with this contest because the mother of the winner happened to come from a country where the predominant language is English. (I am withholding the name of the country in order to protect the identities of the subjects.) The teacher said that it wasn't fair because the student who won had an unfair advantage. Two or three years ago, I may have agreed with her. Now I do not.

I think that the competitors in a speech contest should be allowed to compete regardless of their backgrounds. As for the specific speech contest mentioned above, the child who won had been through the Japanese school system, which would give no advantage to either student. With that educational background, that means that the student's family was responsible for her success. I know plenty of multicultural families where the parents speak a variety of languages, but the children know very few. There is no reason to expect a child growing up in Japan to be fluent in English, regardless of the parents background. Multicultural parents does not equal multilingual children. That said, even if the parents value a language other than Japanese enough to make it a focus of their family life, is that a reason for disqualification? No. If it were a baseball game, would the child be disqualified if the father took the child to a batting center everyday? Of course not. That child, with alot of effort and ability, could grow up to be Ichiro. But when it comes to English, that kind of parental interest becomes a cause for disqualification.

I think multicultural, multilingual children should be encouraged to take part in speech contests, because it will raise the standards of language ability. If native-speaker levels of language ability become the norm in speech contests, one can only hope that standards for the whole education system would follow suit.

Keep on Rockin'

In the immortal words of Niel Young, "Keep on rockin' in the free world." The right has another four years to really screw up. Like victims of abuse, Americans have said, "But we still love him."