I've been in the States for a wedding, but I'll be back in Japan and updating again next week.
JetSetArnett Out.
For amber waves of grain
Monday, June 23, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
ESID: Every Situation is Different
I'm nothing special.
I live in Misawa, a smallish city of 43,000 people with about 10,000 of them being Americans. This is because Misawa is home to a joint US Air Force, US Navy, and Japanese Self-Defense Forces Air Base. In turn, this means there are lots of Americans walking around and fighter planes whizzing through the air.
Hence, I'm just another white dude.
Other JETs, however, are celebrities. If you're a JET and happen to live in a small town in the country side, then very often every single person will know you by name. Just by being Western, you are instantly famous.
The difference between my experience living in Japan and the vast majority of other JETs is quite substantial. Indeed, that is the point of the phrase "ESID" because it really is true that every situation is different.
One of the great things (or worst things depending on your perspective) is that the experiences of individual JETs will vary by unbelievable margins.
Some people will teach at only one school but others might have to drive for hours to visit nearly 100 throughout the year. Some will teach only high schools and others at junior highs and elementaries. For instance, I teach only at junior highs because Americans from the base get hired to teach at the elementary schools.
Some JETs get unbelievably cheap, subsidized housing; others have to pay outrageous prices for shoebox apartments. Some are quite lonely in the middle of nowhere with no native English speakers to talk to, and others are constantly surrounded by them. Sometimes people come who are fluent in Japanese and make loads of local friends, but others will come speaking none at all.
How each person deals with their situation varies greatly, too. Some JETs get involved with local sports teams, traditional dance clubs, or other exciting activities while others peacefully seclude themselves with stacks of books and/or video games.
So what do I do? Well when I said that I was nothing special, I meant that I'm not a local celebrity like a lot of other JETs. However, I am special in the sense that I got a very lucky placement. Personally, I like to call Misawa "Japan Lite" because in a way that's what it is. I have nearby restaurants that few other places have because they cater to American tastes (with English menus), there's an American bar that's packed with service men and women on the weekends (named "My Place" which leads to a lot amusing confusion), and most importantly, there is an active theater guild that regularly puts on shows.
Thus, I fell into a position where I can continue doing my little acting thing as much as I want. Indeed, I was just in a production of Pirates of Penzance in April, and I'm going to be in a children's theater rendition of The Emperor's New Clothes in July. I probably couldn't do this anywhere else in Japan unless I was near another military base which doesn't happen often for JETs.
So, if you happen to be an incoming JET reading this, then be prepared for anything, and just try to embrace whatever gets thrown at you. The best and happiest JETs tend to be the most flexible. So go with the flow, relax, and come meet me at My Place.
JetSetArnett Out.
In my place, in my place, were lines that I couldn't change.
I live in Misawa, a smallish city of 43,000 people with about 10,000 of them being Americans. This is because Misawa is home to a joint US Air Force, US Navy, and Japanese Self-Defense Forces Air Base. In turn, this means there are lots of Americans walking around and fighter planes whizzing through the air.
Hence, I'm just another white dude.
Other JETs, however, are celebrities. If you're a JET and happen to live in a small town in the country side, then very often every single person will know you by name. Just by being Western, you are instantly famous.
The difference between my experience living in Japan and the vast majority of other JETs is quite substantial. Indeed, that is the point of the phrase "ESID" because it really is true that every situation is different.
One of the great things (or worst things depending on your perspective) is that the experiences of individual JETs will vary by unbelievable margins.
Some people will teach at only one school but others might have to drive for hours to visit nearly 100 throughout the year. Some will teach only high schools and others at junior highs and elementaries. For instance, I teach only at junior highs because Americans from the base get hired to teach at the elementary schools.
Some JETs get unbelievably cheap, subsidized housing; others have to pay outrageous prices for shoebox apartments. Some are quite lonely in the middle of nowhere with no native English speakers to talk to, and others are constantly surrounded by them. Sometimes people come who are fluent in Japanese and make loads of local friends, but others will come speaking none at all.
How each person deals with their situation varies greatly, too. Some JETs get involved with local sports teams, traditional dance clubs, or other exciting activities while others peacefully seclude themselves with stacks of books and/or video games.
So what do I do? Well when I said that I was nothing special, I meant that I'm not a local celebrity like a lot of other JETs. However, I am special in the sense that I got a very lucky placement. Personally, I like to call Misawa "Japan Lite" because in a way that's what it is. I have nearby restaurants that few other places have because they cater to American tastes (with English menus), there's an American bar that's packed with service men and women on the weekends (named "My Place" which leads to a lot amusing confusion), and most importantly, there is an active theater guild that regularly puts on shows.
Thus, I fell into a position where I can continue doing my little acting thing as much as I want. Indeed, I was just in a production of Pirates of Penzance in April, and I'm going to be in a children's theater rendition of The Emperor's New Clothes in July. I probably couldn't do this anywhere else in Japan unless I was near another military base which doesn't happen often for JETs.
So, if you happen to be an incoming JET reading this, then be prepared for anything, and just try to embrace whatever gets thrown at you. The best and happiest JETs tend to be the most flexible. So go with the flow, relax, and come meet me at My Place.
JetSetArnett Out.
In my place, in my place, were lines that I couldn't change.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Teaching, an Introspection
I often think about teaching. By that I mean that I think about it both generally as the conveying of knowledge and specifically as how an individual subject is taught. In this regard, one might say that there is a macro-level of teaching and a micro-level of teaching.
Macro-level involves the way long term and short term memory works and also how neural pathways are created within the brain for functions like motor skills but also language, spacial abstraction, mathematical processes, et cetera. This is both the realm of neurobiology and psychology, but frankly I think the vast majority of psychology is fatally flawed because it was developed at a time before we had brain imaging hardware. It's sort of like only studying what biologists said before the invention of microscopes; they will be fundamentally and unavoidably wrong in a great number of aspects.
Honestly, I've never studied childhood development or teaching theory, and I'm sure they have some wonderful ideas. But sometimes I wonder how consistently good those ideas are. Have people thought all this stuff through with open minds? Or have they merely taken age old concepts and rehashed them with some different spins?
That's where the micro-level of teaching comes in. This includes the specific techniques for teaching certain subjects (math, science, language, et cetera) and concepts in those subjects (addition, grammar, et cetera). One of the obvious techniques is traditional testing, testing in which one has a set number of points and you try to get all of them.
As an example of a flaw I see, I was grading tests the other day, and I thought about the process I was going through. In front of me were pieces of paper that the children wrote on. There was a maximum score possible, and for students who did well, I counted incorrect answers and then subtracted from the total.
So, they had an absolute maximum that they could reach, and it was my job to knock off points, to shave little pieces off of the top of their hopes and dreams.
I'm sorry, what were we doing again? What's the goal here? We want these students to know things and develop abilities, right(He asks inquisitively without trying to be antagonistic)? They need to have certain things memorized and be able to accomplish certain tasks, but I wonder if this is the best, most efficient way to go about it. Don't get me wrong, it might be, but for some reason I get the feeling that it isn't.
Maybe I think that way because in life there isn't a maximum score. You can't get 100% in the real world. However in academia, we teach students that that is the be-all and end-all of success, that there is a set limitation on life and your actual score is deducted from it.
In real life there is no perfect score, and I think it's wrong to set up children with that expectation. Of course, I'll keep doing it because it's my job, but one day many, many years from now if my 12 year-old comes home with a B or a C, I won't get angry. Instead I'll ask him how his stocks are doing, and as long as he's up for the quarter, he'll still get ice cream after dinner.
That's right. I just equated a preteen's monetary success with getting a tasty treat. He won't know when Columbus landed, but he'll sure as Hell understand Capital Gains Tax. Besides, Columbus was a jerk.
Note: There's no intonation on the internet; that was a joke. My kids will learn history, but it'll be from books and not teachers.
JetSetArnett Out.
We don't need no thought control
Macro-level involves the way long term and short term memory works and also how neural pathways are created within the brain for functions like motor skills but also language, spacial abstraction, mathematical processes, et cetera. This is both the realm of neurobiology and psychology, but frankly I think the vast majority of psychology is fatally flawed because it was developed at a time before we had brain imaging hardware. It's sort of like only studying what biologists said before the invention of microscopes; they will be fundamentally and unavoidably wrong in a great number of aspects.
Honestly, I've never studied childhood development or teaching theory, and I'm sure they have some wonderful ideas. But sometimes I wonder how consistently good those ideas are. Have people thought all this stuff through with open minds? Or have they merely taken age old concepts and rehashed them with some different spins?
That's where the micro-level of teaching comes in. This includes the specific techniques for teaching certain subjects (math, science, language, et cetera) and concepts in those subjects (addition, grammar, et cetera). One of the obvious techniques is traditional testing, testing in which one has a set number of points and you try to get all of them.
As an example of a flaw I see, I was grading tests the other day, and I thought about the process I was going through. In front of me were pieces of paper that the children wrote on. There was a maximum score possible, and for students who did well, I counted incorrect answers and then subtracted from the total.
So, they had an absolute maximum that they could reach, and it was my job to knock off points, to shave little pieces off of the top of their hopes and dreams.
I'm sorry, what were we doing again? What's the goal here? We want these students to know things and develop abilities, right(He asks inquisitively without trying to be antagonistic)? They need to have certain things memorized and be able to accomplish certain tasks, but I wonder if this is the best, most efficient way to go about it. Don't get me wrong, it might be, but for some reason I get the feeling that it isn't.
Maybe I think that way because in life there isn't a maximum score. You can't get 100% in the real world. However in academia, we teach students that that is the be-all and end-all of success, that there is a set limitation on life and your actual score is deducted from it.
In real life there is no perfect score, and I think it's wrong to set up children with that expectation. Of course, I'll keep doing it because it's my job, but one day many, many years from now if my 12 year-old comes home with a B or a C, I won't get angry. Instead I'll ask him how his stocks are doing, and as long as he's up for the quarter, he'll still get ice cream after dinner.
That's right. I just equated a preteen's monetary success with getting a tasty treat. He won't know when Columbus landed, but he'll sure as Hell understand Capital Gains Tax. Besides, Columbus was a jerk.
Note: There's no intonation on the internet; that was a joke. My kids will learn history, but it'll be from books and not teachers.
JetSetArnett Out.
We don't need no thought control
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