With these simple understandings at the heart of any family or any curriculum we can create the kind of world that we want. It really is simple.
Month: December 2016
Graduate level laughter
Knowing how to and feeling free to respond to people as individuals first, students of a particular field second, seems to me to be the essence of a holistic approach to education.
“A lump of shit floating down the river”
This blog is gaining momentum, but at a pace that belies the flood of memories and creative ideas that the pleasure of self-expression in this medium has unleashed.… Read more ““A lump of shit floating down the river””
Patience and the ladder to perfection
There are seven rungs on the ladder to perfection. The first is called Patience. Once you have mastered this one you will find out what the second rung is.
The kind of workplace we want, the kind of world we want…
Choosing to banish the excuses and prejudices that prevent us from achieving the kind of workplace that we want is the most powerful and empowering education that we can provide for students at this most dramatic time in human history.
Japanese Learner English: put on & wear
Japanese learners don’t seem to be able to get out of the habit of using “put on” when they should be using “wear,” as in “Do you see that guy who is putting on a hat?” Correction doesn’t seem to help.
I don’t know why I never thought of this before, but it seems to work. All you have to do is ask learners what they spend most of the time doing, “putting on” or “wearing” clothes. Of course the answer is “wearing.”
Most of the time, in daily use, we use “wear.” And most of the time, when learners confuse these verbs, they are using “put on” instead of “wear,” so remembering what they themselves spend the most time doing — wearing — is a useful technique for remembering.
Reading and a feeling of guilt
George J.N. Whitfield, nicknamed “George” by all the boys at Hampton Grammar School, was a no-nonsense authoritarian educator — a real establishment character who inspired fear and… Read more “Reading and a feeling of guilt”
Wh- words for expressing emotion
Looking carefully at language used by relatively advanced or even advanced learners of English, often through study of a learner corpus, can suggest ways of ordering instruction in early stages that can help to avoid later fossilization of inappropriate usage. This post offers an example that illustrates this point.
The good-hearted majority
I stumbled across an email I wrote to a friend in Oxford following the big earthquake of 2011. She, like many other friends overseas, was anxious to know how things were for us in Tokyo.
Children of War and Peace
There are many of us who, with fathers and grandfathers who fought in the war, share a sense of mission to ensure that peace prevails over the anger that leads to war. Many of us also feel that Japan, with its unique history of war, natural disaster and more recently nuclear contamination, has the potential to be a leading voice for peace in the world.