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Small Wins
Today I finished reading my first book in Japanese. “Reading” and “book” are both perhaps exaggerations; the book in question is the first volume in a manga series called Shirokuma Café, widely recommended to beginning Japanese learners. It is 165 pages long, and it took me 7 months of painstakingly reading a page per day… Continue reading
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Keep Going: Maintaining Motivation
At first, learning a new language is super fun. So many interesting words! Quick progress from zero to … something! Apps apps apps! But then things become a bit routine, and then, stale. The dopamine hits are less reliable. You advance more slowly, or hit roadblocks. For Japanese learning, apparently (according to my very scientific… Continue reading
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A Japanese Study Routine
YouTube is full of videos with titles like “How I Became Fluent in Japanese in 4 Days!” or “My Journey to Knowing 10,000 Kanji Even Though Japanese People Ask Me Why I Bother,” or even just “Study Japanese Like I Do and Soon You’ll Be Really Jouzu [good at it]”. I watch these videos occasionally.… Continue reading
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Ten Japanese Pop Songs to Listen to on the Way to Work
My musical tastes are not sophisticated, but they are narrow. I go through long periods when I don’t listen to music at all, as I find it emotionally unsettling and/or overstimulating. When I do, I restrict myself mostly to tunes that are happy, pretty, and a bit weird. Fortunately for my language learning goals, a… Continue reading
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Old Lady Studies Japanese
The other day, someone I don’t know well wrote me a short message in Japanese. He’s not Japanese, and I don’t know how he knew that I can read simple words in hiragana (“ありがとうございます” = “Thank you.”). The delight I felt over this tiny connection turned my day around. Last week, my Japanese teacher asked… Continue reading
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My Top 10 Books of 2016
It’s time again for the list of books that I enjoyed most this year. As always, only some of these books were published in 2016, but they were all a part of my 2016 experience. 1. The Trespasser by Tana French I have loved all six of French’s “Dublin Murder Squad” novels, and when she has a new… Continue reading
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A Query
When one returns a student’s work with the message, “You failed this assignment because your essay is much too short,” and the student replies, “Miss I don’t understand, I failed my essay because it is too short?”, why does one feel a surge of fury? Why does one not just feel a gentle throb of… Continue reading
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How Do I Get Out of the Way?
I was standing in front of my classroom yesterday and I had a professional existential crisis. My students had walked into their first exam of the semester in various states of tension, resignation and hope, and a couple of them seemed uncomfortable to the point of rudeness – sticking their legs out into the aisle and… Continue reading
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The Advantage of a Mean Neighbour
Today, anticipating the beginning of my winter semester and wondering if I have anything to say about it, I opened my “Drafts” folder and found this post, written in August but never published. At the time, the experience was too raw, and I didn’t want to dwell on it. Now, looking back, I see that my thinking around this… Continue reading
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The Last Test and Proof
If I were to ask, What should be at the center of our teaching and our student’s learning, what would you respond? Of the many tasks that we as educators take up, what, in your view, is the most important task of all? What is our greatest hope for the young people we teach? In… Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 