One week and a half left until the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. There are as many weekdays left as chapters in the grammar text book I’m using to prepare. I gotta cram a chapter a day into my head. So naturally I spent my time in the wisest way possible: writing poetry.
Good things come to those who wait
This, a thing a man once said.
That don’t mean procrastinate,
Rather you should plan accordingly, taking into account resources such as time, money, and mental capacity
In full disclosure, my grandfather was an amazing poet so I probably inherited some of his prose panache. Always practice prose with professionals. I’d really rather readers write responsibly.
As the end of another work day approaches, I would like to take some time and look back on how effectively I used my time. Surprisingly, the day was rather productive. I finished a test from yesterday’s chapter (missed 2 out of 22, so I’ll need to come back for review), helped middle school students with their conversations for this week’s presentation, and told two elementary school classes American knock-knock jokes. I’d like to look at the latter two for a moment because editing the conversations and the jokes has helped me realize something about what my goal as an English teacher is here.
DISCLAIMER: it may be best to skip the italicized text in parentheses in the following paragraph if you ≠ me
Possibly the most important thing to consider when communicating is how the audience will receive your message. As this is technically a personal journal, I don’t really care how you take this message (and now the reader has to be wondering, “Is he talking to me, or is he talking to himself?” to which the answer is “yes” because it’s a personal journal and therefore by “the reader” I of course also mean “me” which means I’m standing between two mirrors that are facing each other talking crap about the guy behind me to the guy I’m looking at as he does the same to the point where we all don’t want “you” reading this aside and wish “you” hadn’t written it in the first place, but this is probably a good indication what caffeine and an honest day’s work does to a person in “your” state), so what I write in it doesn’t really matter so much in terms of communication as it’s for record-keeping and not correspondence. The purpose of my middle school students’ presentations is to showcase their ability to use the grammar and vocabulary they’ve been taught in a conversation similar to those they have with their peers in their mother tongue. They will be giving this presentation in front of their classmates, but their primary audience is me because I will ultimately be assessing them. However, another audience is present; they’ll present in front of the class. Their classmates are their secondary audience. The students have employed a number of methods to produce their conversations, but many of them laid their foundation in their mother tongue and worked up from there. Let’s start with this and work up through two methods: direct translation and adaptation.
Students who directly translated their work from Japanese used their existing English vocabulary and electronic dictionaries or translation websites to supplement it. The more they used their dictionaries or websites, the more it showed in their conversations. When these particular conversations were performed during the initial presentation period, they were usually read directly from the paper with little emphasis or inflection.
I’d like to write more about this tomorrow. Even more students came during the hour before the end of work, so I’ve been up and down from my chair a lot and haven’t been able to write out all my thoughts. Though busy, days where students come ask for help improving their English are always good days.
stevemanly 