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30.7.10

Is This Right?



Take the next 5 minutes and 32 seconds to yourself. Put on headphones, get yourself to a quiet place, whatever. Put the above video on full screen and just watch. Don't put it on, and click back to it occasionally while also checking your facebook, IM'ing with your friend, doing whatever kind of multi-tasking that you do while you're reading my blog (it's okay, I click around a lot too, possibly more than you).

Today, though, I want you to be quiet and listen and watch and think and pray and cry and understand.

Victoria Rae, of UNICEF UK, says of the above video, "We want people to think about their own childhood and see what everyday life is like for so many children around the world. This film is a window into a different day-to-day world - it's a childhood where there is no school summer holidays because children don't go to school. These are children who are missing out their basic rights - to learn, to clean water, to be healthy, to be looked after and just to be a child. ... The question is simple - is this right?"

I think we all know the answer to that one.

Living in Japan, I have to be honest and admit that I've sort of lost a little steam in the movement against human trafficking, against child exploitation. Being caught up in moving to a new country, being unable to read labels and unable to ask questions about production, being surrounded by a concentration on style and fashion and a society that is so incredibly private that you can't even see gardens from the road...all this has distracted me from what I believe is my real purpose in this life - to help better the lives of those around me.

Flying into Japan, on the customs form and again at the airport, I had to declare that I was bringing no child pornography into the country. The exploitation of children for one's own benefit is a very real problem to the Japanese government, one they are slowly cracking down on. Granted, making people check yes or no on a customs form is probably one of the most ridiculous ways to enforce such a code, but it's a step in the right direction, even if it is just a baby step.

I'm going to see a lot more of this world in the coming years. I will be in South Korea in less than 5 weeks. I will be in Australia in February. I still plan on traveling to Taiwan, China, and possibly Cambodia/Thailand (the university chaplain here leads missions to Cambodia). I am sure I will see more of the suffering of this world, just as I saw in India. But I will also see a lot of the beauty, grace and mercy that we can offer to our fellow human beings.

Today, take a few minutes to realize your impact in the world. To realize how connected you are not only to those in your immediate neighborhood, but to the children of poverty in India, Cambodia, North Korea, Thailand, Cameroon, South Africa, Bangladesh...all over the world.

Ask yourself: Is this right?

23.7.10

moot points about free speech

-We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog to bring you these thoughts-

EDIT: This post is not going to make any sense to my older audience, at least not at first. Rest assured, I do get to a larger point about free speech later on.

I consider myself to be a pretty savvy internet user. I know where to find movies and TV shows streaming within hours of their airing, which is a huge benefit considering the free streaming sites in the US that are legal do not work outside the states (I would be using Hulu ALL THE TIME if this was the case). I am pretty familiar with internet memes, and know how to spot a RickRoll. I have a Facebook, a Twitter, a Tumblr, a blog, and am a regular presence on a message board and several other blogs. The double rainbow meme was already annoying me before it broke on the internet at large.

It sort of goes without saying - I know my way around.

It also goes without saying though that there are also several areas of the internet I know nothing of, and it's of one of these that I would like to spew some thoughts today.

I'm almost frightened to mention it, because the first two rules of this certain imageboard (a board created for posting jpegs and gifs) are, in classic Fight Club style, "Do not talk about /b/." and "You do NOT talk about /b/."

But today, I am going to talk about it. "/b/" (pronounced "bee") is the well known section of a certain notorious website known as 4chan. 4chan was developed in 2003 by a 15 year old kid, as an English copy of a Japanese web format. There's a whole lot more background than that, but for the sake of discussion, I'm going to skip to the important points.

The important things to know about 4chan is that it 1. Has 700,000 posts a day, and 2. Is almost completely anonymous. It's anonymity is part of the massive draw - you can say virtually anything, with almost no repercussions (though I must say there have been cases where someone threatening to blow up an airport or something as a joke was caught and prosecuted by the FBI, so there are some limits). /b/ is by far the more popular section of the site - it is the "random" board and the one where pretty much anything goes.

"Anything goes," in the internet age, translates to virulent racism, lots and lots of porn, and lots and lots of gore. "moot," the now 22 year old who founded the site, refers to this corner of the internet as "unbridled free speech," a last bastion of sorts in an era where everyone knows everything about everyone else. In the safety of 4chan's anonymity, you can spew angry thoughts about your coworkers or boss, rant about the gay/black/latino/pick your poison groups at your school, and, yes, caption cat pictures.

(Yes, that's right, 4chan invented the LOLcat).

Here's the problem, if you haven't spotted it already: the issue with completely "unbridled free speech" is that it only functions positively when it happens among mature adults who realize that what they say has consequences. The anonymity and lack of policing on /b/, combined with a massive amount of teenagers who lie about their age to get around the board's supposed 18+ restriction results, often, in actions being taken too far, in harassing people and shutting down whole websites. Part of the reason I was afraid to post my thoughts about /b/ was the idea of a 4chan member picking up on it and running with it.

When we encourage free speech and anonymity at the same time, we get this weird, non-real world vortex where what you say has no consequence, and you can spew whatever. Most of the time that's pretty harmless, and I'd be willing to bet most people on /b/ are pretty normal people with a weird sense of humor. But, anonymity and an overly emphasized concern for my "free speech" is what results in riots, is what results in hate speech and hate crimes, is something that is a dangerous combination.

Free speech only really works if you understand what it means to say something and have it mean something. The anonymity and lack of consequences on 4chan also is a double edged sword: while it has led to some awesome expression and some pretty damn hilarious stuff, it also means that what you say never means anything real. When it comes down to it, you're an anonymous person in his mom's basement trolling an 11 year old girl. Those who hide behind the veil of both free speech and anonymity are cowards unable to face the consequences for their actions.

Is that really what we want to use free speech for?

Blog inspired by this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_1UEAGCo30

-back to your regularly scheduled blog now-
I admit it: For the first few weeks here, I thought the Japanese for "excuse me," which is sumimasen (sue-me-ma-sen) was actually "sushimasen," which I think would mean something along the lines of "I am sushi" (Do not quote me on that; I know very little of Japanese sentence structure at the moment).

I admit that I actually used "sushimasen" a few times before realizing my mistake.

And I admit that I was very embarrassed that I did so in crowded areas, getting some very strange looks from the Japanese around me.

And I am telling you this because I think one thing that anyone, not just those living in foreign countries, not just those traveling outside of their home - anyone and everyone - has to be willing to do is make mistakes. You have to be willing to step out there and make a foible, to make a fool of yourself, to be on the receiving end of some strange looks, if you want to get anywhere.

And it's one of the hardest damn things to do.

One thing that is terrifying for any new teacher is making mistakes. Because you are entrusted with these students' education, you have the inexorably heavy burden of making sure you don't screw them up permanently. That is, if you choose to think about it like that. If you choose to think of teaching as passing on this medicine ball burden of knowledge and how to do things correctly, you're going to collapse by the end of the second week.

But, if you choose to look on it as a learning curve - not everyone is going to be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, and not everyone should be. One thing that I've learned, especially through my time here in Japan (a mere seven weeks at this point), is that if you're afraid to make mistakes in your teaching, then you will end up not passing on knowledge, but rather solidifying in the kids' minds that school is boring, routine, and not worth spending time on.

And sometimes that means a day wasted in the classroom because a lesson plan didn't pan out. That might mean having to repeat yourself. That might mean being willing to try out a different approach, and failing.

The point is: You never know until you try.

You never know if you can fly if you don't try to jump every once in a while.

Tired, cliche, and probably confusing post finished.

Sumimasen. Arigato.

16.7.10

hangman

As I'm teaching here, I'm having to try out new techniques to get the students interested in the lessons and learning. I decided this week to try out a new method of teaching vocabulary: Playing games. The week before, playing a game from the book proved to be pretty helpful on the review for the test, I figured playing a game this week couldn't hurt.

The game I chose is one familiar to many American schoolchildren - Hangman. You put blanks up on the board for letters, and the students have to guess the letters, and if they don't guess correctly, you fill in the figure of a little stick man on a cartoon gallows.

As I explained the concept, I saw comprehension dawn on my students' faces, followed by horror. The look said it all: "You mean, if we lose, that guys...dies!?"

I hadn't realized it before, but I guess the game is pretty grim. But then again, so are a lot of Western games - cowboys and indians, ring around the rosie (it's about the plague), cops and robbers, Risk, Red Rover. A lot of our games are violent and frankly a bit scary when you step back and think about it.

I was going to do a whole post comparing Japanese and Western attitudes toward violence, but I frankly don't know enough about Japanese culture yet to make an informed decision. All I have is the reaction of my students in the class, and a funny story. I wish I could have captured their faces on camera, because it was hilarious and embarrassing at the same time.

Once the game got underway, however, the students were learning and participating. When I offered them the chance to be "the hangman" - ie, the one writing on the board - the student who had been most horrified was one of the first to volunteer.

It's amazing how we can adjust to anything.

I'm sure I'll do a more coherent blog post later this weekend. Thanks for reading.

11.7.10

a moment, a love, a dream aloud

Music for today: "Sweet Disposition" by the Temper Trap
----------

I took the bus by myself yesterday.

I spent 45 minutes waiting at the wrong bus stop before I figured it out and walked over to the right one.

I got on the wrong bus coming back, and ended up having to walk fifteen minutes in the rain.

But y'know what?

It was still a good day.

I did something.

One of the hardest things I've discovered about living in a foreign country, especially one where you don't speak the language, is to get out of your comfort zone. For the past month, it's been very comfortable for me to stay in my apartment, watch Doctor Who, Modern Family, Community, or one of the many television shows I enjoy. That is the comfortable thing.

It also would have been comfortable for me to just stay in the United States, find a simple job back in Sioux Falls or somewhere else, and stayed doing that. It also would have been more comfortable for me to just stay in education as a student and go on to a PhD program somewhere.

Instead, I left all that behind. I left. I went somewhere that doesn't even speak my language, to teach students raised in an educational system far different than the one I'm used to, and to live by myself.

I'd be lying if I said I absolutely loved this 100%. I often long for my own car again, a city that I know well, and especially when I'm not feeling well, food that I'm used to. It is so easy to go back to those comfortable things. It is so much easier to stay within our comfort zone.

But I would also stagnate if I did that.

A few months ago, I had a discussion with Mom about moving back to Sioux Falls. In the midst of a job hunt, I told Mom I was looking at jobs in Seattle, San Fransisco, Washington, D.C., and Houston. Originally, I had thought of moving back to Sioux Falls after I did my Master's, because I knew I could easily get a job there, and frankly, I missed it.

But as I got used to living in Waco, to living so far from home, I realized that moving back home would be the entirely wrong move. It would, as Mom and I discussed, kill my soul. It would be a decision focused solely on getting money to pay back student loans, a decision that I knew I would regret. While paying back student loans is important (and something I fully intend to do), making a job decision based on money is not a good idea (I have more to say on the student loan debt crisis in America and why it hurts us, but that's another blog post for another day). Making decisions based on money is not necessarily a good idea.

I was reading today about how you become a writer - essentially advice put out by established writers of whom I am a fan. Basically, "write what you know," doesn't cover everything. It doesn't help if what you know is only the inside of a classroom for the first 24 years of your life. (By the way, I calculated the other day, and I have spent 20 years of my life as a student). You not only should write what you know, but you should KNOW THINGS. You should major in something other than writing. You should travel the world. You should have conversations about religion, education, and the world around you. You should LIVE. If you want to write about life, you need to have a life.

Newly inspired, I take new heart in my decision to move 9,000 miles away from everything I know, to live in a country I had never considered visiting, much less moving to. Who knows? All of this may be fodder for a book some day. Or not.

And if not, this does not make the experience worth any less.

Either way, I am living. I am getting on the wrong bus. I am walking in the rain. I am taking about the sizes of baby kimonos with a lady who only knows a few words in English. I am miming holding a newborn to tell the saleslady about my niece. I am experiencing the humility that comes with not being able to read the labels on the food you're eating. And I am learning how to leave my comfort zone and create new ones.

I expanded my horizons yesterday by taking a bus trip. What have you done to step outside your comfort zone today?

8.7.10

the drums of war.

I am at war.

Yes, war.

Not in a metaphor, metaphysical, metanarrative sense - "I am at war with myself, roar."

No, I am at literal, "I want to bomb the crap out of this and defeat you entirely," war.

With the school copier.

Oh, excuse me, "risograph."

My officemate and I joke frequently about how long it takes to do copies at school because they always take so long. Granted, the copier at Baylor was no picnic either, but at least I knew what to do with that thing. With a Risograph, I don't have the slightest clue what to do when something goes wrong.

And something will, inevitably, go wrong. Every. Single. Time.

Two days ago, I had to copy a test for my students. The machine paused when I was attempting to make a sample copy of page two (of a three page test). The machine jammed, so I opened it up where it told me and removed the papers. I pushed it shut again (no easy task, mind!), only to discover the display still blinking at me and pointing at a certain part. So I opened it up again, saw no papers, checked inside, underneath, everywhere. And so no papers.

After about 5 minutes of staring at it and wondering what the heck was wrong, I went and got someone from the office to help me out. Apparently, risographs have this big roll of inked paper in them rather than just toner, and that needed to be replaced. It's a fairly simple process, but one I had never seen before.

Today, it jammed on me again while I was making more copies. Ooh, fun. This time it was a different part of the machine. So I opened it up and saw a sheet of paper hopelessly trapped in the bowels of the copier. After several failed attempts to pulled it out (during which course I got ink all over my hands - evidence in picture), a fellow teacher came over and pushed a button. WHOOSH. Out came the paper.

But then, was my problem fixed? Nope! Evidently, when a roll of ink is being used up, it gets wrapped up around a rod on the other side of the machine, which needs to be cleaned off periodically. After another few minutes of trying to figure it out, the same teacher from before came over and showed me what to do. I thanked him profusely, and finished my printing without a problem.

These machines are incredibly frustrating simply because of what appears to be a highly inefficient design. As someone so used to copiers that give warnings - "Out of paper," "Toner Low," etc - a machine that simply jams when there's a problem just doesn't make sense. But that seems to be the standard operating procedure - jam up, and then tell the user about the problem. It's highly inefficient, especially since several sheets of paper get destroyed in the process.

Maybe I'm just doing things wrong. Maybe I'm just not giving it the grace it needs, or talking to it nicely enough. "Goldarnit you stupid machine!" is probably not the kindest thing to exclaim when it jams on me for the third time in 10 pages.

All I know is that this machine makes me want to beat my head against a wall, and that's never good.



________

That said, I have exciting news. I received a letter (or rather, my parents received a letter addressed to me) from the estate of one JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series. I had sent her publishers a bound copy of my thesis, which they evidently passed on to her. The letter is from her personal assistant, Fiddy Henderson, thanking me for sending along the bound copy, and saying that Ms Rowling wanted to pass along her appreciation. It's a form letter of sorts, but it does not preclude further communication from the woman herself, and it means that my MA thesis actually made it to JKR's vicinity. Exciting news indeed!!!

4.7.10

On Freedom

A few weeks ago, I read this speech by David Foster Wallace, and I felt today (the fourth of July, in the states - it's almost the fifth here) an appropriate time for a repost.

But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship... ... And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

2.7.10

everything's gonna be fine fine fine

The most common question I have heard from friends back home since being here (a month already!) is "How's the language barrier?" I've been here a month, and I've adjusted to some things, but I still can't understand 99% of what is said in Japanese, and I still can't (and probably won't ever) read much Kanji. I do know the symbol for "shaved ice" though.

Living in a culture where you don't know the language is an immensely humbling experience. I have to have help with everything I was able to do independently at home - the first time I withdrew money from the ATM, I had to get one of the Japanese people in the office to help me with the buttons because I couldn't read them. Even if I wanted to drive a car here, I probably wouldn't be able to because I cannot read half the road signs. Getting dinner is often a guessing game, and I am beyond grateful for picture menus. Several conversations have devolved into purely miming what I needed, which is slightly embarrassing.

I love the English language, but I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a linguist. I have a decent grasp on German, so it's not like I can't learn other languages...I'm just not very good at it. It takes a lot of work for me to get a grasp on basic sayings in a language and get them to stick in my head - I have to be told multiple times how to say something before I will actually be able to say it.

Today I walked down the hall to class practicing how to say "Good morning" in Japanese. Part of my hesitation in learning a new language is the fear that I'll bumble it and come out sounding like some sort of caveman: "Me go to mosquito Kokura?" Or that I'll say something completely unknown to them.

I've had the reverse happen several times in class already - if a student doesn't know how to pronounce a word in English, he'll do his best to say it, but often it comes out sounding nothing like the actual English word. Frequently this happens with English words that are pronounced in ways vastly different from their spelling. I imagine similar things will happen in Japanese, and it is hard to humble yourself to knowingly go into a situation where you don't know all the answers, where you've got a 99.9% possibility of screwing things up, into a culture where no means no and yes also means no (something strange with the way they structure their questions, a bit like the "do you mind" construction in English).

I have to rethink how I teach some things. In debate class today, I could tell in the middle of the lesson that I'd lost them entirely. I had to backpedal and go to a lesson from two weeks ago in order to catch them back up to speed. This was simply because I had talked too fast in English, and now had to explain myself over again. I have to be extremely patient, and extremely forgiving, and realize certain limitations. As much fun as it might be to discuss the Big Issues with my students, it's a little hard if they still don't know the word "corner" or "wrench."

I get to see a different part of the teaching spectrum, and it's one that is interesting, humbling, and I think will ultimately make me a better teacher. And a better learner - willing to take risks, to make a fool of myself on the bus, and to get lost a couple of times. After all, isn't that what adventure is made of?