Along Kamogawa river, Kyoto, Japan, April 13th, 2012 (click to see larger version)

New faces in class, with a few bad old pennies.

As last year, I have one class twice a week of the lowest ability students. Last year was a challenge. I made many mistakes. This year, I get to learn from those mistakes with a similar bunch of students. Lucky me.

What mistakes did I make? “Let me count the ways!”

1. Not laying down the law from the first minute of the first class on day 1.
1. This year, a student who continued chatting with his friend despite 2 warnings, was offered the choice of leaving the room to continue his conversation, or shutting up and staying in the room. He was so shocked, he stayed in the room. (It was lucky that his girlfriend was late and so missed seeing his discomfiture.)
2. Starting with stories. I used TPRS from day one last year. It didn’t work. I was forced to “go back” to TPR after a couple of weeks. This year, I’m STARTING with TPR. No textbook.
1. I tried TPR last year, enough to realize I didn’t really know what I was doing. So over the spring “vacation” I read the bible of TPR, James Asher’s Learning Another Language Through Actions. Luck me, it contains an entire semester’s work of TPR, complete with the instructions you give to students. I bookmarked that page and walked confidently into my first class.
2. Asher’s book taught me much that I had not paid enough attention to in the TPRS training I took at Shimabara 2 years ago.
1. Asher describes experiments that illustrate the difference between the right brain and left brain, including how the left brain can interfere with learning and the right brain can be more open to learning under the right circumstances.
2. Most school learning attempts to speak directly to the left brain, but the results are mixed, and in some cases exhaustion results as students attempt to learn and remember everything through verbal language only.
3. This paucity of input lines limits the potential for learning.
4. I was particularly struck with Asher’s suggestion that the right/left brain duality might be a more accurate explanation for what has hitherto been called the conscious and subconscious. I didn’t understand this bit so well and was in too much of a hurry to get to the “beef” of the actual TPR instruction to read it more closely, but it sounded intriguing.
5. The results of the experiments were striking: subjects fed data to the right brain only denied they had received any input when asked verbally, yet when asked to mimic the posture or action they had seen, they responded immediately.
3. Another error resulting from starting with stories: I thought I could simply teach the unknown vocabulary as we went along, by direct translation both verbally and written. This didn’t work, and now after reading Asher I understand why: “teaching” new vocab verbally is less effective and takes longer for retention (and for re-production) to occur than if you use physical action. (Davidheiser and Asher write, “Well, if comprehension is important, let’s translate! Sounds like a good idea, but it does not work very well.
1. Asher’s experiments showed that students who heard the instructions/commands but merely WATCHED other students responding to them (instead of carrying out the actions themselves) demonstrated the same level of learning. So you don’t have to have ALL the students moving ALL the time. Learning can take place even if they listen and watch.
3. Speaking too quickly, and introducing too much new vocabulary too soon. I am STILL making this error. I fall into the trap of assuming that students who have had 6 years of English instruction in high school are familiar with words like arm, eyes, ears, hands, leg, foot, need, want, stand, behind, in front of, next to, under, etc., so I move quickly on after a cursory “review”.
1. First, I now realize I have no idea what, if anything, students have learned in their 6 years of school. One boy last year frankly admitted he had learned nothing, and demonstrated that he was telling the truth (he also demonstrated not the slightest desire to improve, unfortunately, which rather dented the slightly favourabel impression made by his frankness).
2. Second, students may be “familiar” with those words, but they are not so familiar with how those words are used, or how they sound, in context.
3. Third, students use their brains to “retrieve” those words; they are not familiar enough with them, nor with the basic structure of English sentence, which is very different, often the complete reverse, of Japanese syntax.
4. Not helping students to experience success. Without intending to, I would blurt out novel expressions, only realizing after the words had left my mouth that students might not be ready. They usually weren’t. My “teaching” turned into “testing”.
1. Asher’s approach, if followed carefully, guarantees success. Students successfully carry out instructions, even novel ones they have never heard before, quickly and confidently after just a few minutes of instruction.
4. My students are complete beginners, for all intents and purposes. Again, not recognizing this led me last year to move ahead too quickly. This made telling the stories (obtaining comprehension) a much harder slog.
1. I’ve just noticed in the introduction to the teacher’s guide for Blaine Ray’s “Look I Can Talk” textbook that he says he doesn’t start with the stories, but uses TPR for the first 3 weeks and makes sure students have ALREADY learned all the words that appear in the first few stories before introducing story-telling.

Useful books

April 1st, I bought a ton of TPR books. Obviously, your teaching situation may not be the same as mine, but let me here highlight a couple of titles that I found particularly helpful and that I carry with me into every class:

• Instructor’s Notebook, by Ramiro Garcia. This is a practical, hands-on book for the classroom. It includes a semester’s worth of instructions which you can just follow like a script. The commands include an interesting variety and humorous and unexpected ones that help keep students’ interest. Garcia’s humour and enthusiasm pervades the book.
• Instructor’s Notebook – TPR Homework Exercises. Companion to the above, it contains strip cartoons illustrating basic commands. I have just started using this: I copied out lesson one and two and practised them with students in class. Then I gave each student a copy to take home and told them there will be a test next week. Each strip contains a series of 5 illustrated commands (the cartoons contain no words). Each lesson contains 5 strips. The script for the cartoon strips are also in the book, in a section all to themselves.
• Todd McKay’s TPR Storytelling Index Cards. Extremely useful! Just carry these into class. As no doubt many instructors learn from experience, you can’t just go in and improvise suitable and appropriate TPR instructions. They need to be sequenced, using only vocab students already know or can easily guess. For native speakers it is especially difficult to “keep to the script” without a script. Todd McKay’s done the work for us! Absolutely brilliant.

Avoiding boredom.

I’m still new to TPR. Time in the classroom goes very slowly: after 10 minutes I’ve exhausted my supply of commands! Necessity is the mother of invention, so I’ve improvised the following activities. You have to do this, anyway, because, as Asher points out, familiarity sets in quite quickly: students get bored, so you have to ring the changes. You can’t just do 90 minutes of TPR. Here’s a list of some of the things I do when students and I get tired of TPR:

• write the new vocab and expressions on the board. This comes AFTER they’ve met and used everything in TPR. Have students copy down the words. I don’t test them later. I don’t give points if they don’t. I DO collect these papers from time to time to see how good students are at copying from the board. An amazing number make elementary mistakes, even though all the words I use are of junior high school first grade level.
  

  Davidheiser and Asher write, “One caveat: My students begged me to see the commands in German. So, I prepared handouts with the German directions in print (without translations). It is important that students not see the German in print until the end of a class and I limited vocabulary to about two dozen lexical items per meeting.”

• use Garcia’s cartoon strips (see above): I pass out the cartoon strips, call out commands, and students respond by pointing to the correct picture.
• have students practice what they’ve learned so far in pairs. This is probably a mistake: I assumed that we were just doing review and that students were getting bored with all this “junior high-school English and were eager and ready for a chance to create their own commands. Result? Mangled English and students disappointed with themselves that despite 50 or more repetitions they couldn’t utter these simple commands. Still, some enjoyed giving zany commands to their friends, and we all learned a lesson.
• talk to students informally about language learning – their experiences in school, their experiences abroad (if any), their feelings about today’s class, about the pace, about how much they understand.
• show clips from movies. I’m a big fan of the Japanese manga and tv drama series “Dragon Zakura”. There’s an episode which focuses on the students learning English to prepare for the prestigious university of Tokyo entrance exams. There are several tips on learning English for entrance exams, including this one which is also a good tip for learning to speak and write English: keep your sentences short and your grammar and vocab as simple as you can.

Here’s a clip which suggests the writer of Dragon Zakura was familiar with some ideas about the brain that are similar to what Asher writes about (Asher’s explanations aslo shed interesting light on Multiple Intelligences, tho Asher makes little mention of that). The science teacher illustrates the principle of friction using a cartoon of his own devising, and compares it with how the concept is usually presented in textbooks. The textbooks use a predominantly left-brain approach, whereas the cartoon (and its humour) is more right-brain. (You can tell I’m a brain expert!)

And here’s the first part of the episode with the English teacher, usefully subtitled in English.

Thanks for reading. Do you use TPR? What has been your experience with it?

How to do it? Ah. Erm. Forgotten. Maybe it’s something in Twitter? A tool or a widget? Nope.  As I will no doubt forget this and want to do it again at some stage, here’s the procedure. Basically you use the “socialize” option in the “publicize” menu of Feedburner.

I’m teaching a class of university freshmen, in an English Dept. Some of them learned absolutely no English in high school. Some seem to have learned nothing in JHS. Some do not recognize the word “young”. One boy said he doesn’t understand “does” (as in the written question “Does it take a long time?” and this is after 20 x 90-minute sessions of me circling and using TPRS! I think that student was pulling my leg, don’t you? Or is he mentally retarded?).

At the beginning of the semester, I started off circling with questions, but many did not understand the questions. I checked comprehension with my barometer students, but became bogged down: I had to translate and explain EVERYTHING! And write it down on the board.

There are also some wise guys in the class who ask questions just for fun.
There is also one boy who asks picky questions that require complex answers (he’s the one who said he didn’t understand the word “does”). That’s why he asks them. I think he asks questions out of nervousness. I don’t think he understands my answers. I’m not sure he’s paying attention to my answers.

So I stopped checking/explaining/translating “every little thing” (http://www.avexnet.or.jp/elt/ also [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5aUXAodv4Y])

This meant going back on my promise to make everything 100% comprehensible.

Tuff? Or have I taken a wrong turn here down the TPRS road?
Waddaya think?

One is, they don’t pay much attention to what the teacher says. You first have to get their attention and show that you mean business right from the start. The sooner you demonstrate this (not talk about it), the better. They won’t pay attention until you do.

Like Coach Carter does here (or go visit splicd if you’re short of time and just want to cut to the chase):

Notice how Carter doesn’t fall into the trap of answering when Timo Cruz’s asks “What for?”

The reality is that raw English ability alone is unlikely to produce any significant change, even assuming that Japanese students go on to have basic conversational skills in English which is often not the case anyway. The problem for many Japanese doesnt necessarily stem from the English lessons themselves, nor the lack of opportunities to use English in Japan though this does exacerbate the situation. The big problem is often the significant cultural barriers.

I’m going to comment on a few points of this article, as it’s well worth reading and makes an important point, but needs amplifying. Ogawa’s point is that Japanese don’t learn to discuss or argue in English class, and that this severely cramps their English communicative ability, and that (inevitably these days) the government should do something about it!

I think he’s right. Partly. But the situation is more difficult than he implies, and I don’t think the solutioncan be implemented by governmental regulation or initiatives.

OK with you so far: the big problem is cultural barriers rather than English classes themselves (there are plenty of them, both in school and in zillions of private language schools) or even in the lack of opportunity to use English, although I’d add that the “lack of opportunities to use English in Japan” comes close to meaning “no need!” If there aren’t many opportunities to use English here, then what’s the point in learning it? Surely a lot of Japanese high-schoolers and university students ask themselves this question (though they’re mostly too polite to ask it aloud, to their teachers). They “know” it’s important (because they’ve been told so and because an increasing number of company’s are setting English-requirement entrance conditions or promotion conditions) … but they don’t “feel” it.

Setting that aside, so, what cultural barriers are we talking about here?

Japan’s collectivist ideals necessarily arose to allow the nation’s large population to live comfortably together in a comparatively small archipelago. This has given rise to some commendable traits, such as an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese. But it has also led the Japanese to eschew disagreement and argumentation, even though these can be extremely beneficial forms of social interaction. Simply put, Japanese culture and etiquette doesn’t groom people to become confident communicators in English.

OK: collectivist ideals – check. Large population: check. Small archipelago: check. Japanese “eschew” disagreement and argumentation: check. [That word "eschew" gives me the willies: why does the writer have to show off his erudition? What kind of writer eschews the simpler word "avoid" and pick the rarer and more pompous "eschew"? But I digress.] They avoid it like the plague. But the writer’s cultural bias is showing. He assumes that being good at “disagreement and argumentation” makes people “confident communicators”. Japanese would probably disagree. After all, if indeed “an appearance of agreeableness among Japanese” is important for living “comfortably together in a comparitively small archipelago” (i.e. cheek by jowl with your neighbours) – something I don’t dispute – then that would make “agreeableness” or its appearance, a key communicative ability, rather than argumentativeness. Which is exactly what we find. A retired company executive once told me companies in Japan like to hire graduates who played sport in college. Why? Because they’ve learned to work hard and do as they’re told. (The Japanese don’t “play” sport in college: it’s a very serious business, more like becoming a monk – practice every day for several hours, and that includes vacations of course.)

Another problem: if the Japanese “eschew disagreement and argumentation” (they are, after all, famous for not being able to say “no”), then how can they eschew that eschewing, so to speak, just in English classes? Can they be argumentative in English class but not elsewhere? Perhaps. If they’re brought up bilingually or biculturally, like that lady with the American father and Japanese mother I wrote about a while back.

And another thing. Let’s agree for the moment that being good at arguing helps make you a better communicator (although as I said, the Japanese tend to value diplomacy and tact far higher than argumentativeness). If that’s true, then being poor at arguing will leave you worse off as a communicator, period. It doesn’t matter in what language. And in fact, this is a common complaint of Japanese company HR managers: that young people hoping to enter the workforce are poor communicators, generally speaking. Hiring employers are looking for people with strong communication skills. They have difficulty finding them. That may be true in any country, I don’t know, but it certainly seems true in Japan.

In my “problem” class this year, I have one student who is particularly argumentative. In fact there are several who are in that class, but he’s the best (or the worst, whichever way you want to look at it). At first, I was irritated. I actually had to speak sternly to him (privately), something I rarely have had to do in Japanese colleges. But then I recalled an article about the relation between argumentativeness and communication – written by an American, of course! In What We Can Learn from Chinese Mothers… and what They Should Learn from Us (But Won’t) (members only), Gary North wrote,

The [Chinese] mothers expect their children to get straight-A’s in everything except gym and drama.

The kids learn to work hard. I’m for that. They learn mastery. I’m for that, too. But there is a flaw in the training. The child is not encouraged to discover what he is really good at and spend extra time on that. He is also taught to shut up. Not good.

North compares this with a typical Jewish upbringing. Jewish parents also expect high standards and hard work from their children (read The Promise for a particularly astonishing, and probably astonishingly common, example) :

Jews are another highly educated minority group. They also excel academically. But Jewish kids talk back . . . early. They argue

…

Chinese culture produces engineers. But where are the Chinese lawyers? …. If I knew nothing of two lawyers, and my life was on the line, I would hire Schwartz rather than Wong. Call me prejudiced, but I cannot imagine Wong leaping to his feet: “Objection!” Where are Chinese politicians?

(So that brilliant female lawyer in Red Corner was fiction? Damn!)

…

Mastery of textbooks — high school skills — is a skill that ceases to be relevant at about age 20: upper division in college. Then the student had better be able to think on his own for himself. He had better be able to defend himself verbally. “I’m right. I’ll show you why.”

Why is this important? It’s important for sales, for marketing, for advertising, for success in business, particularly for entrepreneurs, perhaps less so for corporate drones. Dr. North refers to an essay by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Lost Tools of Learning (1947!) in which she makes a case for bringing back the three pillars of education in the Middle Ages: grammar, logic and rhetoric. The trivium. They are taught in that order, for a reason. Each nurtures skills necessary for the next level. Dr. North says the Chinese never get to the 3rd stage:

Chinese education focures on grammar and logic. It discourages rhetoric. This is a major failure. The first two are necessary skills. But around age 13 or 14, you had better move into the rhetoric stage. This skill takes years to develop. Asian kids do not get this training early enough. ..

What he says about Chinese education is also true to a large extent about Japanese education. Japanese teachers do not encourage questions or a questioning attitude. (I recently attended a presentation in English by an Englishman to a largely Japanese audience. The presenter, as is fairly common among English presenters, said there would be time for Q&A at the end, but please feel free to ask questions at any time. I did. Frequently. Afterwards, I was told that one Japanese gentleman present had been irritated by my many questions: “He shouldn’t have asked so many questions, he should have waited till the end. My students do the same thing. I hate it!”)

Is that attitude likely to encourage enquiring minds?

The Diplomat article and Gary North’s article have caused me to reconsider my “problem” students who argue. If they’re right, then young Japanese need to learn to argue effectively. That doesn’t mean just talking back, but that can be the start. That’s a bud that might, with care, bloom later.

Finally, what does Mr. Ogawa in The Diplomat article suggest as solutions? More government initiative.

For one, the Ministry could address the appalling lack of English discussion in classes in Japan—from elementary to high school, there exists a rigidly structured course that leaves few opportunities for students to apply the English they’ve learned in a practical way.

Could the Minsitry address this? How? Last year, with an advanced class, I tried some simple debates. About half the class were Japanese students, and the other half Chinese. Most of the Chinese students had had some experience of debates back in China. None of the Japanese had. The first step should be discussions and debates in Japanese, not in English.

[T]he English curriculum largely consists of teaching to tests, which is why you’ll see word count guidelines such as ‘1,000 words to be learned during junior high school.’

This is an old chestnut, although it still has a grain of truth, particularly in high schools, and it mostly applies to Japanese teachers of English, there is now a large number of non-Japanese teachers (or assistants) of English in many schools and universities around the country. Some, perhaps many, are not teaching to tests or insisting on vocabulary memorization. Some are teaching discussion and debate.

Modern English, at least in professional settings, is frequently employed in a direct, straightforward manner. This isn’t done to trigger confrontation, but simply out of a desire for efficiency. English isn’t as encumbered with many of the genteel honorifics of Japanese, nor does it rely so heavily on implication.

True, but you can’t separate the language from the speakers! The Japanese speakers live in a hierarchical world. They must constantly be aware of the social levels of themselves and the people they are talking with. As Mike Rogers wrote recently in Modern Marketing Japan,

Sumimasen and a sincere attitude and bowing of ones head shows that you know your place in society and that you respect people.

This is not a “know your place” meaning be a good little Egyptian, but rather be aware of your relationship with the people you are talking to. Japanese use different language to talk to different people depending on whether those people are their superiors or their inferiors. (There are almost no equals in Japan.)

English-speakers do, too, of course, but they are largely unaware of it and are often surprised when it is pointed out. For the Japanese, this is deliberate and conscious; it is a survival skill. Such a hierarchical society does not lend itself easily to the kind of straightforward and efficient communication style that Mr. Ogawa describes. Yes, English is unencumbered by the large number of honorifics that Japanese must know and use, but that doesn’t mean that Japanese can abandon their sensibilities at the drop of a hat, just because they’re in English class.

At the end of a recent 2-day communications workshop that I attended with an American and several Japanese colleagues, during which we did little other than sit and talk and play games like the “NASA Moon Survival” game, all my Japanese colleagues were completely exhausted, whereas my American colleague and I were both fresh as daisies. The reason? The Japanese must constantly remember who they’re talking to, what is the pecking order in the group, when should they speak and who they should let speak first, plus of course the possible repercussions of whatever they say on their future relations with their colleagues. They must be constantly on their guard, careful of what they say, and watching their colleagues faces and body language for clues as to how they are thinking. Displeasure will rarely be expressed verbally.

To sum up, Mr. Ogawa is right to point to cultural barriers or differences as being major hindrances to Japanese people developing good communication skills. But his solution is not going anywhere: how can Japanese learn to discuss and debate in a forthright and direct manner in English class when they can’t do it in Japanese? They can’t be expected to set aside their Japanese persona just in English class.

via Why English Is Tough in Japan | A New Japan.

A treasure, stumbled upon by chance: a whole series of videos illustrating the Greek myths, or some of them at least. Here’s the one of Theseus and the Minotaur, starring Michael Gambon (aka Prof. Dumbledore) and a Muppet dog but don’t let that put you off: it’s good quality and to the point.

When young Theseus learns that he is the son of King Aegeus of Athens, he goes to Athens and is warmly accepted by his father. Theseus wants to help the king so he decides to go with the yearly tribute to Crete: every year, Athens must send seven youths to be eaten by the Minotaur. If Theseus can slay the Minotaur he can save many Athenian lives. Once in Crete, the prince seduces the princess Ariadne who helps him defeat the Minotaur. But when Theseus marries her and then abandons her on the way home, Ariadne curses him to a tragic end.

via YouTube – Greeks Myths “Theseus and the Minotaur” 1of3.

As usual:

1. Re-arrange the furniture.
2. Assign seats. Today they filled seats from the front in the order in which they showed up. I gave them their card (with their student number and family name in Roman letters) at the door.
3. Today’s  bell-work was, write as many of the lyrics of “Love Me Do” as you remember.

New addition: PAT – 10 minutes per week (2 sessions of 90 mins each). Today’s was watch the first 10 minutes of  an English movie.

Problems:

The main problems are now coming into focus.

1. Talking out of turn, either to neighbours or shouting out to me or to the class generally.
2. Not having the right materials.
3. Eating or drinking in class. A minor problem, that has occurred just twice so far and quickly taken care of at the beginning of class. But it happened a second time. 
4. Failing to complete assignments on time or as directed.

The first problem is the major one. The loud-mouthed students are all boys; the loud-mouthed girls have settled down. At first, their loud comments or chat were good-natured banter. However, the last 2 classes the nature of the banter has changed: students are trying to disrupt the class and see what they can get away with.

The banter is taking my attention: I still do not know the names of the quietest students in the class. Worse, I do not know how much they are understanding by their facial expressions or their vocal responses. I ask all students to fill out a feedback sheet each class where they circle a % number to indicate how much they understood, and leave a brief comment. This has been very helpful, but I am not used to relying solely on this.

A couple of students at the front of the room were starting to “fade”: their body-language was telling me they found it difficult to concentrate, and it was pretty clearly due to the constant interruptions.

Solutions:

For problem #4,  I use an Excel spreadsheet Homework Checker (thanks to Mr. Belshaw) with a list of students’ names and a list of assignments. Using conditional formatting, I can quickly produce a colour-coded chart that is easy to read. Red shows assignments not done, yellow shows assignments handed in late or incomplete, and green for assignments  completed on time.

A combination of what Fred Jones calls “Responsibility training” (Getting students to stop doing what you don’t want them to do…[and] getting students to do what you want them to do the first time you ask) and “Omission Training” – dealing with those students who are ruining the activities just to prove that they can.

A backup system. In over 20 years of teaching, I have never had to use a backup system – expelling a student from the class or more serious consequences for inappropriate behaviour.

I need one  now. Here is my first draft.

1. Introduce PAT (started today). This should take care of, or go towards solving, problem #2.
2. Repeat the rules of the class, and make sure all students understand them. This should take care of problem #3.
3. Have a semi-private interview with each student (in class) to try and get to know them.
4. Students who break a rule will receive a warning. (I may use a “yellow card” system devised by a colleague.)
5. Students who receive a warning must see me after class. This will be a private meeting, a heart-to-heart talk. I will make sure they understand why they received the warning, and try to find out what is going on, why they are not cooperating. They will be clearly told what is the next stage of the back-up system.
6. Students who receive three warnings in a semester must see me after class, and I will speak to their parents/guardians. They are now running a high risk of failing the class and/or of being expelled from the class. They must meet me to discuss their future participation before the next session at a time and place designated by me. This will be less private: the Dept Chair and someone from the office will also be present. Again, I will check they understand why they have been called to the meeting, what rules they have broken and why this is a serious matter. They will again be asked to cooperate. They will also be clearly told the conditions on which they will be allowed back into the class. They will also clearly be told the consequences if they break a rule again. I may give them a written contract to sign at this stage.
7. The next stage is if they return to the classroom and get another warning for inappropriate behaviour. In that case, they will be asked to leave the classroom right then and there.
8. There will be a phone-call to their parents or guardians and a “full-court” meeting with the Dept Chair and the Dean. Students and their parents will have to beg on bended knee and explain exactly why their miserable offspring should be allowed back into the classroom, and what conditions/penalties they offer. It had better be good.

This is a first draft. It follows Fred Jones’ condition that each level be “more expensive” than the previous one, such that the price of misbehaviour keeps getting higher and higher until the student “folds”.

Re-arrange the furniture

Problems:

1. Today’s bell-work was not so hot. I was so busy photocopying and cutting and pasting (literally, not digitally) to prepare for today’s classes (which run back-to-back with just 10 minutes between each) that I forgot to properly plan the bell-work.
2. Rowdy behaviour. Students got me off on the wrong foot by rattling the rear locked door before entering the classroom before the bell rang.
3. A girl was eating in class before the bell rang. I told her the classroom was for studying; eating and chatting with friends takes place outside in the hallway. She said she understood but 3 or 4 minutes later I noticed she was still eating! The “troublemaker” students clearly have a problem understanding that no means no.
4. The first activity was an explanation by a tech assistant on how to access the university’s e-learning system and then how to register for the online version of this class. I introduced her by name and immediately one boy blurted out a similar-sounding word that got everyone laughing.
5. Shouting out the answers during the quiz.
6. The “evil eye” worked, but it took a long time. During the class, I learned to make it more effective by waiting longer.
7. After a student shouted out the answer to a quiz question for the 2nd time despite a (general) warning, I shusshed him. He immediately sat back in his chair, put his pen on the desk, folded his arms and just looked at me.
8. The loud-mouthed troublemakers are taking most of my attention. There are several low-competency students in one class whose names I still do not know (do you think I know the names of the loud-mouthed ones?) and this is bothering me. Distracting me and capturing my attention is, of course, the prime purpose of the troublemakers. They are succeeding too well in this regard.
9. I divided them into 3 groups for one activity. The loud-mouthers ended up in the same group (with one exception). The result was that this group took twice as long to do the activity as everyone else, and I had no sanction or incentive in place. This would have been  a great opportunity to use competition (to see which group could finish fastest) or to use peer-pressure (e.g. offering PAT bonuses if EVERYONE finished on time), but I did not have my PAT ready (see below).

Possible solutions:

1. Working the crowd. Despite re-arranging the furniture to facilitate this, today I noticed that I wasn’t roving as much as I did in the first session. In particular, I cannot recall getting close to the troublemakers more than once during the class, twice at the most. “Working the crowd is prevention.” (p. 219).
2. Responding more quickly to disturbances or unwanted behaviour. The “we are not amused” look works well, but I need to have a backup plan for when this is not going to work. “Thinking when you should be acting is fatal. If the student has stepped over the line, you either do something about it or you “pull your punch.” (p. 189.)
3. Two disturbances early on got me hot under the collar. I responded but out of feeling rather than a calm response, although I did not lose my temper. “Don’t consult your feelings. Discipline management is a game that you play out of your head, not out of your gut. Your boundaries coincide with your definition of unacceptable behaviour. They have nothing to do with how you feel.” (p. 189)
4. Responsibility Training: “Getting students to stop doing what you don’t want them to do [meaning business] is only half of discipline management. The other half is getting students to do what you want them to do the first time you ask. (p. 20)
5. Omission Training: “Unfortunately, there is usually at least one student… who will ruin any group management program just to prove that he or she can. How do you succeed with the highly alienated and oppositional student?” (p. 20) Gonna read this chapter next.
6. Teaching routines: “Each routine must be taught with the care of any other lesson. This is time-consuming at the beginning but it pays large dividends for the remainder of the semester.” (p. 145)  I may have to spend more time on teaching the routines that I want. What are they, exactly?
7. Bop Till You Drop (p. 86). Today’s class contained too much input and too little output. This pretty much guaranteed bad behaviour, although the bad behaviour started even before class had begun. Overall, it wasn’t a bad class, but I wasn’t satisfied because I spent so much time managing and not enough time teaching (providing comprehensible input in English).
8. PAT (Preferred Activity Time). Haven’t got this worked out yet, but I can now see how vital it is. Fred Jones (in whose book I first came across the term) explains in Tools for Teaching that PAT is a key part of an overall class management and discipline system.
   

   If you 1) offer a preferred activity and 2) utilize a criterion of mastery as you 3) check the students’ work, you have it all – hard work and high standards. This, of course, is our goal…. Everything you do in the classroom creates an incentive system of some kind. You get effective management or you get mismanagement depending on whether you have the whole package or just part of the package

   He distinguishes PAT from run-of-the-mill “incentives” in a section that says some of the

   

   motivation matrix, from Tools for Teaching p.113

   most intelligent things I’ve read on the matter of classroom behaviour management:

   Education has had a love-hate relationship with incentives in the classroom. In the 960′s many educators were anti-behavioral. In the 1970′s, after accepting the notion that reinforcers produce motivation, educators went “hog wild”. Teachers were encouraged to offer “rewards” for everything under the sun… “

But, it’s not a bubble fueled by student debt, like in the U.S. or the U.K. because in Japan students themselves rarely go into debt to pay for their college education: their parents pay, and parents pay out of savings. They start saving up for this when the babies are born, in many cases (as I did).

So what do you think? Is higher education in Japan a “bubble”? And are we going to therefore see an increase in less expensive options such as online/distance courses for degrees? Here’s “Cyber University“, for instance, but it doesn’t offer a wide variety. There’s also this rather thin Japanese wikipedia article on online universities. I don’t think people are going for it yet.

What do you think? What’s the trend going forward here in Japan?

Here’s Kevin Carson (he’s not talking about Japan):

To challenge the college mystique, Thiel is in the process of selecting the twenty most promising candidates under age 20 to drop out, in return for $100,000 over two years to start a business….

So the organization and selection of educational options will be driven much more by producers’ own assessments of what they need to learn to be able to produce effectively, instead of a curriculum set to the specs of HR  at GlobalEvilMegaCorp LLC. Curricula will be set on a much more decentralized, bottom-up and ad hoc basis, with the student — not the corporate employer — as the real customer.

Higher education, as conventionally understood, is a legacy of the 20th century model in which giant interlocking bureaucratic institutions — large oligopoly corporations, centralized government agencies, bloated bureaucratic universities — dominate society. 

via Beyond the Education Bubble.

And here’s JOURNAL: The Education Bubble, by John Robb on his blog Global Guerrillas:
.

So, what should you do?  Thiel says you should refuse to participate and drop out.  Unfortunately, that’s not a solution.  Just because something is vastly overpriced (like houses or stocks), it doesn’t mean that it is worthless.  A degree is still valuable because it’s valued in the workplace (even though it’s not the golden ticket to employment anymore).  

The solution to this problem is to help create employment  opportunities (like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don’t use a degree as a gating mechanism.  A solution that creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques). A solution that delivers something better than an Ivy league eduction and then backs it up with economic and social opportunities that exceed what you get in the global economic and social sprawl. 

Create the pull (the opportunity) and the rest will follow.