Archive for August, 2007

Japanese women start off thinking the fact that their foreign boyfriends treat them like gentlemen means they will be even more weak than their seemingly gruff fathers who end up letting their wives make all the decisions.

Foreign guys start off thinking their Japanese girlfriends are more meek and submissive than their more obviously combatative and straightforward Western mothers.

Leave to stew for a few weeks, months or years, and let battle commence…

So, the Beijing Olympics is totally on schedule. Damn!

That reaction is partly my fear of what a future China-dominated world could be like. Quite apart from the human rights issues, have you ever been in a restaurant, casino or hotel full of just mainland Chinese? Can you imagine the whole world like that? I just hope Japan will still be a little oasis of calm…

The main reason for my “damn”, though, is my own national pride. Sydney was great, Beijing will be amazing, even the Greeks managed to get their act together- where will I be able to hide when the British fk up London 2012?? So, to take some of the negative publicity away from that organisational mess up and instead give such much needed positive publicity to my much maligned profession, I would like to propose the TEFL Teacher Olympics. Provisional event list:

• Long distance voice projection
• Pre-school children herding (like a sheep dog contest)
• Tag team teaching
• Lesson planning sprint- Finding a particular page in the mock up Teachers’ Room as quick as possible
• Headway quick draw (find the article about how great British food is quicker than your opponent)
• Herding kindergarten kids with a sheepdog
• Throwing chalk at students (points for distance, accuracy and artistic content)

Any other ideas anyone?

Katie from www.tefllogue.com must be trying to get herself into the Guinness Book of TEFL Records (which sounds like the title of another post to me!) , because after being the first person to review TEFLtastic she is now our first guestwriter too. Now, without any further ado, here she is, give her a big welcome round of applause ladies and gentlemen, it’s Kaaatiiieeee:

Do’s and Don’ts for Bosnia and the rest of Eastern Europe

I heard that teachers are beating down the TEFLtastic door with requests for information on Eastern Europe, especially Bosnia.  So I thought I could help out by sharing a few hard-earned do’s and don’ts for Bosnia and its region.

Do go there!

Do try local foods.  In Bosnia, try cevapcici [which I’ve heard described somewhat unappetizingly in English as “skinless sausages”] with kajmak [its mottos are: “The Most Difficult Cheese to Translate” and “Actually, Not a Cheese At All!”], and pita [pick one at a time: meat / cheese / spinach / potato pie].

Don’t eat these food every day.

Don’t drink boza. http://www.tefllogue.com/the-teaching-life/whats-that-thing-in-bread-that-grows.html

Do ask locals to tell you jokes.  Bosnia may be the only country in the world where people are okay with laughing at themselves. Rest assured there are plenty of general jokes, so you don’t have to be in the position of laughing at Bosnians.  Don’t accept it when they say they cannot translate these jokes. 

Don’t think too hard about why DVD’s at the outdoor market might cost €2..just stock up!

Do make sure you do everything right with your metro ticket in Budapest, because they will seek you out, find you and fine you if you don’t.  Public transportation systems in other cities, most of which use the honor system, vary in their “ticket inspector aggressiveness” level…but you probably will get caught if you don’t stamp your ticket.  Not worth it.

Don’t assume that what you can read or google about Bosnia or other countries in ex-Yugoslavia reflects the views of people who actually know the country.  Some of it might; but stereotypes about this region and its people are unfortunately a dime a dozen. 

And a few for teaching:

Do try to speak the local language once in a while in class – a well placed and correctly pronounced “egeszsegedre” goes a long a way in Hungary!  And if you mess it up, that’s funny too.  Local language grammar may be a hurdle, but people everywhere like it when take the time to learn to pronounce their names correctly.  I’ve even reached the conclusion that, once you learn their basic pronunciation rules, Eastern European surnames are easier to pronounce as a group that surnames in the US.

Don’t expect anything less than a cloud of second-hand smoke during class breaks or if you join your students somewhere after class.  You’ll get used to it.

Do know that, while I suspect cheating happens fairly equally throughout the world, it seems to take the tone of “we’re all helping each other, I can’t let my classmate fail” in former socialist countries.

Do take of your shoes or at least offer to when you visit a home anywhere in Eastern Europe…but don’t assume those who remove shoes are necessarily adhering to any ancient tradition other than “keep the pretty carpet clean”.

Do visit residential neighborhoods out of the center; there is nothing quite like gigantic socialist high rise apartment buildings against a stunning mountain backdrop.

Thanks to Alex for giving me this opportunity to spread the word about tips in this region!  I hope it serves to address the mad rush for Eastern Europe info.

Two thirds- Fraction of women in Japan who have been groped on a train.
8%- the amount of park space Tokyo has compared to London 42.8 servings a year- the number of servings an average ramen noodles eater eats
60- The number of exits from Shinjuku station
243- The number of different vendors in the food hall of the Tobu department store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo’s largest department store
532- the number of MacDonald’s restaurants in Tokyo.
2,300 tonnes- The weight of fish delivered to the Tsukiji wholesale fish market in Tokyo everyday.
80,000- The number of restaurants in Tokyo (there are 15000 in New York and 6000 in London)
250,000 The number of people who cross Shibuya pedestrian crossing in central Tokyo every Saturday.
3, 200,0000- The number of people who pass through Shinjuku station in Eastern Tokyo everyday. This is more than the total population of Panama.
1,400,000,000,000 yen- The total cost of Tokyo’s Oedo circular underground line,  the most expensive underground railway line ever built.

There’s a pairwork game worksheet of this for student practice of numbers (especially useful for Financial English and Technical English classes) here:

http://www.tefl.net/alexcase/worksheets-japan-by-numbers-pairwork-game-numbers-practice-technical-english-financial-english/

Please let me know if there is any more demand for numbers practice and/ or Technical English worksheets, because I’ve got loads more I could put up.

Yesterday’s Asahi Shimbun took the occasion of Angela Merkel’s visit to tell the Japanese government they could learn a lot from Germany:

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200708280055.html

They are talking about green issues, which is one area we could all learn from Germany in, but really despite the impeccable trains and outrageous modern architecture (the Yurikamomo line just coming out of Shimbashi station through Shiodome has to be the closest thing to being in sci-fi I have ever experienced) Japan is far behind Europe and America is so many ways:

• Working mothers
• Rights for gays
• Rights for minorities
• Education (in terms of creativity, top universities, English language skills per classroom hour, equivalence of a Japanese degree and a foreign one, attracting foreign students, bullying, kids dropping out and staying home,  vocational training- you name it. In fact, virtually everything except maths and literacy- and the second one is taught in such as way that kids can read but desperately don’t want to and end up as salarymen reading manga or watching TV on the mobile phones)
• Use of the internet and the standard of most websites (almost all searches in Japanese come up with a blog as the first result- because no one ever listens to them and they can never say their true feelings if they don’t blog perhaps??)
• Software companies
• Connecting homes to the central sewage system
• Burying cables
• Preserving old buildings
• Dealing with immigration
• Pension reform
• Teaching children about green issues
• Parks
• Using the waterfront
• etc etc.

Some of these are explainable by local conditions (e.g. there are less internet sites because most people search for info through their mobile phones), but others are things that the Japanese are going to have to sort out sooner or later.

Even the apparent advantages like lack of youth crime, immigrant riots, abandoned factories and urban squalor are just because the Japanese haven’t got to the stage of even starting to deal with them yet. As much as the post-colonial apathy of the UK hardly makes for the happiest of lifestyles now, the fact that solutions are being attempted for those problems gives some hope that things will be sorted out and the country will move onto the next stage.

For better or worse, Japan is still living as if they are in a 1950’s USA fantasyland of Dad works hard, Mum makes lunch for him, kids study for a better future. When things do indeed work out like that it is better than Dad takes drugs, Mum walks the streets, kids joyride, but the average Neo-Tokyo sci fi anime shows that I am not the only one who thinks Japan is going to have to deal with those problems sooner or later, and it is not going to be any easier for them than for anywhere else.

In the meantime though, when I don’t make the mistake of thinking about it too much, this semi-futuristic Japan is much more liveable than that Neo-London distopia back home…

As endless fascinating as it is to find more and more differences between Japan and everywhere else I’ve been and then try and explain them, there is a danger involved in always thinking about things that are not the same of coming to the conclusion, like many foreigners and also Japanese do, that the Japanese are so unlike everyone else they are like a different species. In a similar way, when pointing out to students the differences between the language they speak and the language they are learning there is a danger of the overall impression being that the task is impossible or at least that they have to change everything they first think of saying.

So, here is my list of things that seem to be the same everywhere I go:

Universal Japan Part One

Anywhere you will go in the world, including Japan, you will find that:

1. The worst drivers are, in order, white van drivers, taxi drivers and Mercedes drivers.
2. The nouveaux riches have a “certain taste” in clothes and furnishings
3. Older ladies start wearing brighter and brighter colours
4. Older ladies (and some older men) are both the most likely to complain about others’ bad manners and the most likely to have a conversation over the stranger sitting between them, elbow you in the ribs pushing their way onto the train, have a loud and annoying ring tone etc. etc.
5. The posh sometimes like to slum it. In France that meant “rustic cottages” in the grounds of Versailles, and in Japan that meant tea ceremony “huts”
6. Pictures of cats cannot be art
7. Upper class art is complete self-indulgent tosh (e.g. “Why do the cherry blossoms/ So restlessly scatter down?”- part of a Heian era poem, to which I reply poetically, Tales of Genji-style, ”Why don’t you/ Do something useful and get a job”)
8. Religion attracts the best (Kobo Daishi/ Dalai Lama) and the worst (Nichiren/ Pope John Paul II)
9. Most people have always done pilgrimages just for fun
10. Everyone wants democracy, and everyone feels cynical about it once they get it
11. Sometimes having your freedom is a pain in the arse

More coming up in Part Two…

Why is Asian bread so sweet?

No a hundred percent sure about this. It could be that at the time they borrowed the idea from the West it tasted more like this and has stayed the same here while it has changed where it came from, like Japanese curry rice (also sweet). Alternatively, it might have spread from one Asian country with a sweet tooth to the others. In general, though, Asian countries do not have the clear distinction between sweet foods and savoury foods (or even, in Japanese, a word for “savoury”) or between courses. In fact, this could be said to reflect an Eastern avoidance of black and white either/ or distinctions at all.

Japan now fully explained on my new blog, Japanexplained.

It seems Japanese semi (cicadas) interfere with communication not just by making it difficult for me to hear Youtube, but by actually boring into fiber-optic cables and laying their eggs in them:

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200708270073.html

If someone would only write a haiku poem about it, that would make the “Japan is a weird mix of the new and old” cliche complete!

Meanwhile in the Japanese J League football tournament. Actually, who cares about the J League?? Next!

Where the action is really at is in the Pokemon world championships:

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/08/14/america/NA-GEN-US-Pokemon-Championship.php

If you think kids back home went crazy for Pokemon you have seen nothing. This summer they had a “Pokemon stamp rally” in Tokyo, which basically means travelling from station to station to station to station filling a book with rubber stamps from each station forecourt. That must be the ultimate proof of how Japanese parents indulge their kids. Can you imagine anything worse than spending your August holiday crammed in the Yamanote circular line and then queueing with 20 more kids with Pikachu hats to get your hands on a rubber stamp??

And maybe only Pikachu can save us from another Japanese recession:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=ahsH0SqcUUVM

Putting my “having to say something about this in Business English class” hat on, it really wouldn’t surprise me to see Japan in recession again. To start with, nothing has changed since the last one! At least we can rely on Shinzo Abe to appoint someone corrupt enough to take our mind off it for a while…

Why do Japanese (especially men) use an open handed chopping motion to show they want to get past?

Apparently, originally it was meant to show that you were not carrying a sword. The fact that polite table manners in France means keeping your hands above the table is apparently for the same reason.

Everything else about Japan explained on the Japanexplained blog.

Hope that headline got your attention, but actually I have nothing to say about the MA today at all…

Right, now to talk about the CELTA. I have decided to trust a whole lot of people I have never met and take the PGCE (standard British 1 year postgraduate teaching qualification) to be totally superior to the CELTA and a whole lotta learning more than a DELTA. The only compensation for me as someone who has done the C and the D but not the P is to imagine that the PGCE powers that be have been ripping off the CELTA as they have introduced classroom teaching earlier and earlier in the course.

Anyhows, as few more people are likely to start using 5000 pounds of someone’s money and two years of their lives to do a PGCE before popping off to Spain for a year I think the only sensible thing to do is combine the best of the two. And here it is:

The Super CELTA (although Advanced CELTA might be a better name!) will be a combination of the CELTA just as it stands now and in-service training once you start your first job, which will be set by Cambridge and admininstered and run by the employers. The employers will be able to easily justify checking up on their first year teachers and making sure they continue their training, the teachers will be able to choose a good school simply by the fact that they offer support for this extended qualification, and Cambridge will be able to use it to spread good practice in teacher observations and what have you.

So that’s decided then. You can disagree with me, but then I will just edit your comment to make it look like you’ve been blabbering on about lobsters invading the earth…. Only joking! Bring it on! And there’s also a similar thread in D’s E C you can comment in as well/ instead.