Genius

I talked to my lovely sister-in-law today, mother of two young adrenaline junkies. The youngest boy is having a birthday next weekend, and she told me he'd wanted to go to some water park with all his friends, which would have been very expensive. He has been once before, and was particularly enamored of the water slide.

My brother's solution was to buy several cheap inflatable lilos, line them up into a slide (I'm supposing on planks or something similar), throw a big tarpaulin over the whole thing, and stick a hose at the top end. Apparently he's made it quite steep.

The boys have been using this contraption extensively in preparation for the birthday party. They have adapted it so that instead of landing in the grass, the aim is to go so fast they bounce off the fence. The party promises to be very, very messy, and possibly dangerous.

No wonder those kids think their dad is a genius!

Dizzy

Now and again a survey report is published in the newspaper that makes my head spin, particularly when I read it late at night and I'm trying to read fast. There was an excellent one a couple of days ago. It would probably make perfect sense if I read it slowly, but on my first, fast reading, it was gobbledegook. By the third paragraph my head was revolving slowly:

"While 61 percent of the elementary school teachers said they believed students understood more than 80 percent of the content covered in textbooks, only 18.6 percent of students said they picked up that much. The percentage of teachers who believed their students understood around 60 to 70 percent of what they were taught was close to that of students, at 36.3 percent and 34.6 percent respectively. Meanwhile, only 2.7 percent of teachers were under the impression that students had an understanding of approximately 40 to 50 percent of their textbooks, but 41.4 percent of students responded that that was how much they'd comprehended."

And the revolutions became a lot faster as I read the paragraph after that:

"Such gaps in the understanding of student comprehension were evident at the junior and senior high school level as well. While 64.8 percent of junior high school teachers trusted that students grasped about 60 to 70 percent of textbook content, only 34.5 percent of students said they'd understood that much, and while 16.1 percent of teachers said they believed students had around 40 to 50 percent comprehension of their textbooks, 36.5 percent of students said they did."

By the time I got to the end I was feeling quite dizzy.

Incidentally, on that same page there is a link to another story, which I'm sure is a tragedy, but it's a great headline. I probably shouldn't have laughed:

"Student drowns while testing concrete canoe."

That must have been one of the students who only understood 40 percent of his textbooks.

Ratbags

I went back to work today, reluctantly. My week off was lovely, even if I didn't get out. I was being a good sensei. The whole point of closing the schools and universities was to not spread the virus, and staying home is the best way to achieve that, so that's what I did. Many of my students did, too, or at least so they say. (And some of them didn't.)

They seemed happy to be back, which was kind of funny after their reactions when we heard we were having the week off last Monday. All my classes today were well-behaved and hard-working. Perhaps they got bored at home.

Classes were also enlivened by the continuation of the noise problem outside my classroom. This time it was a concrete mixer, a jack hammer, and a ... I don't know the name of it. What is that handheld machine that vibrates violently and packs down surfaces? It doesn't drill or cut, it tamps, and makes a terrific noise. What are those things called?

Anyway, we occasionally got one of those, and occasionally a jack hammer, and most of the day the concrete mixer. It wasn't as constantly, overwhelmingly loud as it was the last two times this happened, but it was still disruptive.

But what I found the most odd about this was that there had clearly been no work done on the area (I'm not sure what they're actually doing, still) during the week the university was closed because of swine flu. As far as I know, administrative staff still had to work, and construction companies did not close. Why, then, did they wait until classes started again to resume their work? Couldn't they have finished it last week?

Teachers have complained every time this happened. The second time, work actually paused for a few hours. I don't know why the complaints worked one time but not the other times.

Oh, well.

The good news today was that at least in one department we do not have to make up the classes. We have to ask the students to do extra homework instead. I suspect that is due to our gaijin boss in that department, who is a charming man and more sensible than most. I think he managed to persuade them that extra classes would be both an administrative nightmare and a waste of time, as students rarely bother to turn up. (Or can't, because of their part-time jobs.) One other department has insisted that teachers hold extra classes on Saturdays, but that is a department I do not work for. The two others I work for there have not made their demands known yet, but at least for four classes I do not have extra work, and that is a good thing. It means that if I have to work Saturdays, it will not be three Saturdays, only one and a half.

At my other university I have not yet had any news.

But I wonder about starting schools and universities back so soon. The spread of swine flu victims has slowed, and that is probably because schools and universities closed. Will starting them again after a week mean the spread speeds up again? Only time will tell, but I suspect it will. I cannot see any reason why it wouldn't. It is not as if we have become suddenly immune to swine flu. But the backlash in the media has started. It is being considered 'mild,' and treated as 'normal seasonal flu.'

But it isn't normal seasonal flu. Nobody has immunity. There is no vaccine, yet. Nobody knows what will happen next. It is early days.

I do not envy public health officials. If they make the right decision, and the severity of a potential pandemic is lessened, then they 'overreacted,' because look! Nothing happened! If they did not take measures, however, and the worst happened, then they would be blamed for that, too. How can they win? It is the ultimate thankless job.

I downloaded the CDC Pandemic Severity Index slides (the first of the results on that page), and printed them for other teachers to use in the classroom if they wished. I left it in the teachers' room. At lunchtime we talked about it, and everybody wanted to know where I'd found it. It is very informative, and useful for classroom discussion. I will probably use it next week.

I wanted to take it to my other university tomorrow, too, but after my last class when I went to get it to make another copy I found that someone had nicked it.

It's not only students who can be ratbags. I'll have to print out another copy.

You are being followed...

By . . . an elevator?



I don't know why this sign made me do a double-take, and turn around. The English is perfect. There really was an elevator behind me. But the elevator was not looming and chuckling evilly over my shoulder, about to swallow me up and take me deep down underground somewhere to some mysterious and terrible place where ... why am I even thinking like this?

Given that it was a perfectly accurate sign, why did it make the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up?


In other news, I have been sent home. Classes are cancelled all this week because of the swine 'flu outbreak. Students were unflatteringly ecstatic. The Osaka governor, on the other hand, wants to curtail my unexpected holiday.

Shingata flu

Oh dear oh dear oh dear...

Kobe has its first two swine 'flu cases (or rather, "new-type 'flu" - shingata influenza), which means that most likely next week I will not be working on Tuesday, my Kobe day. I say 'most likely' because although schools have been told to close for a week in the area, universities have only been 'requested' to close, so it depends on the university.

In that news story they say the second test results are not in yet, but like most English news about Japan it is a little behind. The second test was positive. Also, there were TWO kids at the same school who tested positive, and one other who has already tested positive for influenza type A and is being tested for swine flu. Another ten or so (in a school of about 1000 students) have reported symptoms, and will be tested. This is the first swine flu reported in Japan not connected with travel (at least no connection has been found, yet) so it looks like it is spreading in the community.

I have mixed feelings about this. Having time off is lovely. On the other hand, the last I heard we would have to make up the classes missed by doing extra classes at the end of semester. This means that I hope this outbreak is either contained, so that we only have to make up one week, or gets out of control, so there are so many classes to make up they give up on the stupid requirement that students MUST HAVE EXACTLY 15 WEEKS OF CLASSES NO MATTER WHAT. This recent emphasis on time spent in class is ludicrous at the best of times. Do they REALLY think that quantity equals quality when it comes to education? That more time spent sitting in class ignoring the teacher gives students a better education?

But mainly, I REALLY don't want to have to work all through the summer.

Soaked but unhurt

I thought for a moment I was reading The Onion.

But I wasn't.

Two men who allegedly dumped water on pedestrians from the 11th floor of an apartment building have been arrested and their bucket confiscated, police said.

Famous, nearly

Yesterday The Man and I came out of the supermarket, and when we started to walk to our (illegally parked) bicycles we noticed a man in a suit was standing in front of them. He was just standing there on the road, looking unnatural. Nobody else was wearing a suit. Also, he was foreign.

Then I noticed the camera crew. The Man and I both hesitated. We wanted our bicycles, but the man in the suit was standing so close to them it seemed rude to just take them away. Our bicycles were providing local colour. (Orange, with great big baskets.)

He saw us hesitating, and gestured that it was all right for us to walk past.

"Er, no, we want our bicycles," said The Man, and pointed.

The man in the suit laughed. "These?" he asked. Was that an incredulous laugh? I wasn't sure. Our bicycles are ordinary. I couldn't see any reason for incredulity.

It turned out that he was from the BBC. The BBC! Filming at our local station! Why?

We didn't ask what kind of program it was, but the suited man told us we could see it if we watched BBC cable at 8am on Friday and Saturday.

Or did he say Friday OR Saturday? I'm not sure. Nor is The Man, so we'll have to watch both days, to find out what has been happening in our neighborhood. SOMETHING exciting must have happened, surely, to attract the attention of the BBC. We can't imagine what it could be, though.

And no, it's not our bicycles. We rode off on them, and they missed their chance to be famous.

Trauma

The headline of this story grabbed my attention. You don't expect to see 'Winnie the Pooh' and 'cunning' in the same sentence.

Now I'm wondering whether the victim was offered counseling. It must be fairly traumatizing to be mugged by Winnie the Pooh. The responses from workmates and friends to your story wouldn't help either, I imagine.

I wonder who the 'other characters' were. Eeyore? Roo? Tigger?

Addendum: Here is the story again, with a little more detail. The other characters were a mouse and a panther, and they "donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes."

Oh. That clears EVERYTHING up.

Challenge

Can you read this story without yawning?

Bad housekeeping

This is what happens when you do not clean out your closets often enough.

A Japanese man who was mystified when food kept disappearing from his kitchen, set up a hidden camera and found an unknown woman living secretly in his closet, Japanese media said on Friday.

You have been warned.

Question

Why do very religious people so often have such filthy minds? You could dress a girl in a tent and they would still find it unbearably provocative. Doesn't it ever occur to them that the problem might be theirs, not the girls?

(You can see the full range of Malaysian school uniforms here, and judge for yourself.)

Email prevents ulcers

Today I read this story about Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea being cut, and the trouble this has caused in various places. Also today, I have been reading The Egyptologist, by Arthur Phillips. Large parts of the novel are in the form of letters, and some of these letters were written in the 1920s.

One of the things that I started thinking about, as I was reading these letters, was the long time lag between their writing and reading. A man and woman exchange letters. She is in the U.S.A.; he is in Egypt. There are several weeks between dispatch and receipt. (Telegrams got through quickly, of course, but were saved for important, brief, news flashes.)

But if you go back a few decades before that then there would have been no telegraph either, and I tried to imagine how it would have felt for a fiancée (or fiancé, or spouse, or relative) writing long, detailed letters to someone who – who knows? – might not exist any more. Imagine the people who emigrated from the U.K. to the U.S., or New Zealand, or Australia. Imagine writing a letter to your son or daughter across the world, and knowing that whatever you write will be totally outdated by the time it arrives. Imagine writing across the distance of space and time and culture like that. It must have felt very different from the way it feels now.

Imagine how carefully you would write.

We have come a long way in a century, from being grateful for mail that arrives six weeks after it is sent across the world, to expecting our LOLs to arrive instantaneously.

A long time ago, after I split up with a boyfriend, we used to write to each other. I had moved to another town. Neither of us had much money, so we used mail rather than telephone to keep in touch.

One day he phoned me. He sounded really worried, and asked me how I was.

"I'm fine," I said, somewhat puzzled.

"Are you sure?" he asked. "I'm really worried about you."

"Yes, I'm fine!" I said, a little irritated at his concern. I was not a child, but he was behaving like an anxious parent. "Why were you worried?"

"Your letter!" he said. "I thought you were going to commit suicide!"

I had completely forgotten writing that letter. I'd had a bad few days and told him all about it in a long letter, which I then sealed and posted right away. Then I felt much better, probably because I'd written the whole thing (whatever it was) out of my system.

Then I forgot I'd even sent it, until he called to make sure I was still alive.

It's just as well I live in the age of instantaneous communication. Imagine if that letter had taken six weeks to get there, and the reply had taken six weeks to get back, and my apologetic reply had taken another six weeks to reassure.

The way I write, everybody I communicated with who actually cared about me would have ended up with ulcers.

Did they think she was a grape?

This story was open in one of my tabs just now, and I scrolled down to see if I could remember why I opened it. I couldn't. I guess I must have clicked a link by mistake.

But one sentence in the third to last paragraph caught my eye, and will probably give me nightmares:

Three people were arrested and an elderly lady trampled by police.

(Australia just got crossed off my list of possible places to retire in.)

What makes them so sure it was accidental?

2 deer accidentally open door, visit Pennsylvania retirement home

NEW OXFORD, Pennsylvania -- A pair of deer took a quick tour of a retirement home after one accidentally triggered an automatic door.

The animals were wandering near the home Wednesday when one stepped on a mat that triggered a clear sliding door, according to staff members and surveillance tapes.