Kakuta Haruo---Decoding Japan---

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Location: Sakai, Osaka, Japan

Saturday, June 30, 2007

June, 2007

So little have I accomplished, but an important steps have been taken in spite of some noises or disturbances. Noises and disturbances are inevitable in my life. The point is how smoothly and swiftly I would push, or push forward.
Mental Toughness for Sports was what I read while the basketball exercises were taking place. That was worth quick reading, though I doubt if I had better purchase a copy, even in English, when its English copy is out of print and the second-handed one costs a lot. Its contents are a mixture of Csikszentmihalyi (a flow theorist), Zen, and some experiences of top level sports players. How tough can I make myself in my actual life?
How should I take advantage of the mailing list "English Learners"? Am I too advanced to take part in it? Should I post short messages which introduce some aspects of the Japanese culture? Izukoh_ecom has already been a habitat for my English writings. My writings need a habitat, or habitats?
How ironic questions work? A textbook for business writing suggests we should avoid using them. No wonder! It works as a rhetoric, but either negatively or positively. The latter cases, I suppose, are rare. The figure of speech sounds arrogant or offensive to me.
Curriculum is a framework; teachers are contents. Whether the new curriculum will work or not will depend on its contents. What will the contents be like?
How should I cope with fools? Why do they get panicked so easily? It is really difficult to enjoy meaningful communication with those panickmongers.
Intriguing against some is to intrigue with others.
Piling meaningless attempts doesn't make any sense. You must rather lay bricks, each of which has a meaningful shape and its own message.
Watching a video taken in a class in SELHi. Teachers are watching it. What are they getting from that? Are they going to imitate it, or just killing time? Mimetic pays as far as teachers are the organized. As soon as he/she becomes an organizer, mimetic hinders them.
Sponsorship vs leadership; why the former is the better? The former has something to do with knowledge management.
Keep reading "Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology" by the help of a Japanese translation of "Blackwell Dictionary of Cognitive Psychology." BDCP and BDCP(JT) henceforth.
English Seminor C's Unit 8 is about the Jew refugees on this ship St. Lewis just before the start of World War II. The story was totally new to me. How should I deal with the topic and the students who are to struggle with the text?
Would-be the-first-graders' English teachers are choosing their textbook. The question is not what textbook they will use but what they will do for their students.
Preparing for vocational admission is arriving at its climax. The candidate students should have had 2 mimic examinations this week, and are expecting for another on this weekend. 3 exams in total within a week!
To implement a set of constraints needs a set of procedures. Menscious thinks the set of procedures leads to the implementation of a set of constraints. A chicken lays an egg? Or an egg hatches to be a chicken?
The language of cognitive science has provided a new way of speaking about education. A new conceptual framework enables us to treat diverse educational phenomena in a unified way.
A set of constraints and a set of procedures; they go hands in hands. That is a culture.
A conceptual framework of social science and a conceptual framework of cognitive science; they will go hands in hands. That is the theory of human development.
The interview season starts today, on a break of the rainy season. That also means the door-to-door selling to junior high schools has also started. Parents and junior high school teachers utter concordances. By configurating the concordances, we may be able to extract certain truth.
Some concordances suggest that we are bound down to certain constraints. Biases speed up our cognitions, while constraints stick them.
What stance should I take to meet the possibility of the privatization of the knowledge teachers have. The knowledge acquired by a teacher will be probably considered as his/her property. Transferring it to another teacher will be considered to be selling a good. Its cost should be covered either by the purchasing teacher himself or by the educational body for which the purchaser is working.
Some of our students have a culture in which they do their best to escape from the pressure of entrance examinations.
Efforts to try not to do their best is a key to understand many of today's youths. They are hardworking so as not to work hard. Are they hard workers, or not?

"Writing for Social Scientists"

Howard S. Becker, "Writing for Social Scientisits", 1986, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago
「All the tired metaphors once lived. As metaphors age, they lose their force from sheer repetition, so that they take up space but contribute less than a plain, nonmetaphorical statement.」(p.87)「Later I decided that the stories were more important than the theories.」(p.106)「you learn to write from the world around you, both from what it forces on you and from what it makes available.」(p.107)→I am forced to write, and enabled to write by the world around me. Even the hardship on me has made my writing more fertile.「The world does push and sometimes it hurts to resist. But my story, I think, for all its historical and personal peculiarities, shows that the opposite is truer than most people think.」(p.107)→「The world does push and sometimes it hurts to resist.」(p.107)「intelectual life is a dialogue among people interested in the same topic.」(p.124)→I wish we could have "intelectual life" in school. I wonder if I could have been able to have such a life at any high school I have ever worked for.「It (=scholarly world: Kakuta) needs new ideas. But the old formats make it hard for a different idea to get a breath.」(p.130)「The more time you invest, the greater your return.」(p.131)「an organizational function of the classics: to symbolize solidarity among people in a field.」(p.137)「there is no sense trying to find the One Right Way to write what you have to say. Copying well-done work (especially its organization or format), however, is a wonderful way to find possible right ways.」(p.138)「The dialectic of constraint and opportunity that naive artists illustrate affects all of us as we write our dissertations, papers, and books. That dialectic suggests two questions: how we can use the literature effectively? How does the literature get in our way and prevent us from doing our best work?」(p.141)→「The dialectic of constraint and opportunity ... affects all of us as we write .... That dialectic suggests two questions: how we can use the literature effectively? How does the literature get in our way and prevent us from doing our best work?」(p.141) Constraint enables us to perform more swiftly and more effectively. Yet, it also hinders us from creating and organizing new ideas.「I didn't need to invent the concept; he had invented for me.」(p.143)→A beautiful statement: someone has invented some idea FOR ME.「I am always collecting such prefabricated parts for use in future argumants. Much of my reading is governed by a search for such useful modules.」(p.144)→This is the way I read.「I didn't know I needed the next module until I found it; then I couldn't do without it.」(p.145)「I also collect modules I have no present use for, when my intuition tells me I will eventually find the use.」(p.145)「I may not use these ideas in their original form. I may transform them in ways their parents wouldn't recognize or approve of, and interpret them in ways students of these thinkers will find incorrect. I will probably use them in contexts quite different from those in which they were first proposed, and fail to give due weight to theoretical exegeses which strive to discover the core meanings their inventors intended.」(p.145)「It cannot look its best playing opponent's game.」(p.147)→You play tennis? If you do, you know what he means. And he means it!「I had blundered onto, and then proceeded to ignore, a much larger and more interesting question: how do people difine all sorts of internal experiences?」(p.148)「I don't know how people can tell when they are letting the literature deform their argument. It is the classic dilemma of being trapped in the categories of your time and place. What you can do is recognize the dominant ideology (as I did at the time with respect to drug use), look for tis ideological component, and try to find a more neutral scientific stance toward the problem. You know you are on the right track when people tell you you are on the wrong track.」(p.149)「a serious scholar ought routinely to inspect competing ways of talking about the same subject matter. The feeling that you can't say what you mean in the language you are using will warn you that the literature is crowding you. It may take a long time to find out that this has happened to you, if you find out at all.」(p.149)「Use the literature, don't let it use you.」(p.149)

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

May, 2007

In Kiyomizu-dera Temple, its renewed red gate was showing shining contrast against newly blooming green leaves and shoots. Vivid reds and light greens are the typical beauty in May. Every tree has its own smell; every tree has its own story. The Golden Week has come to its end.
The world is rapidly changing; maybe too rapidly changing to keep up with. However, as long as to live on in the world I have no way but to keep up with the change. The main aspect of the change is the individualization of the society. The society has been so much individualized that the society might well be described to be melting down.
Not only the society is melting down, but its sub structures are also melting down; families, schools, and such. How could we cope with their aftermath? Each society has its limited span of its time. More than fifty years is a significant enough number for any. The effort or struggle to make one survive may be not only useless but harmful.
Developing proper school culture is important to have the school prosper. What IHS needs is a super school culture that organize different kinds of sub school cultures. The school has attracted various types of students, or, in other words, has been supported by locals who have sent some elite students in spite of its poor performance.
The system's ending might have different patterns of scenarios. Who will decide which scenario will be chosen? Or does one scenario reveal itself?
I wonder why some teachers do not face the reality. Instead, they see experiences of their own past or of other schools. It is important, though I admit, to learn from the experiences of other schools, but it is also clear that we can hardly free from our own reality. Our thoughts should be based on our realities.
I will have finished reading "The Learning Brain" within a couple of days. On Friday, Prof. Takeuchi from Kandai talked about cognitive power and English learning. The cognitive power the learners are expected to have includes cognitive strategy, cognitive skills, and cognitive emotionality and/or sociality.
The development of the cognitive science has been making it possible to let teachers and/or students enjoy more efficient ways in English teaching and/or learning. How far, however, the development has spread among teachers and/or students is another question.
The shrinkage of cognition is an agenda. The question is whether it is the cognition that shrinks or the perseverance in performing cognitive processes that shrinks. Another agenda is which is more important either to develop students' cognition, or to support their perseverance.
"To pull down building blocks" used to be a popular phrase in Japan once. When a block house is shaken loose, you had better pull it down and build it again from the base. The question is whether anybody has enough energy to do that. Nobody does. The next question is whether all the players have the patience to see things go. I doubt if they does.
To manage the knowledge is to make it explicit; to publicize the information is to make it conspicuous. Then, what is it to organize both the processes?