March 27, 2024
That's Edutainment!
"Is Japanese Television a Tool for Establishing Social Order?" asks Erik Luebs. Yes, but he mostly avoids the sort of academic navel-gazing you'd expect from a thesis question like that (until the last paragraph), and instead wonders aloud what can be read into the television habits of the average Japanese.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Japanese and Americans watch about the same amount of television. Except the slow penetration of cable in Japan means that for half of the population, their viewing choices are confined to a handful of networks. Japan's "Golden Age" of television hasn't ended, which makes those habit easier to generalize.
Luebs compares at the top-rated television shows in the United States and Japan for the week of May 4, 2015 (the article was published on June 11, 2015).
Despite the data being almost a decade old, NCIS is still on the air, and according to The Hollywood Reporter, as of December 2023, "only 44 percent of households in Japan have at least one subscription video service," compared to 86 percent in the United States. So I think the comparison is still relevant.
• NCIS (crime drama)
• The Big Bang Theory (sitcom)
• NCIS: New Orleans (crime drama)
• Dancing with the Stars (contest/dancing)
• The Voice (contest/singing)
• Mare (family drama about cooking),
• Shoten (sketch comedy)
• Pittan Kokan (variety/talk show)
• Jinsei ga Kawaru (variety/talk show)
• Himitsu no Kenmin (variety/talk show)
To clarify: Shoten resembles a haiku version of the original Whose Line Is It Anyway? The host sets up a scenario and feeds lines to the (seated) panelists, who improvise responses with an emphasis on verbal wordplay. It's a clever and entertaining show, and has been on the air since 1966.
Neither is the variety/talk show strictly analogous to its American counterpart. There are celebrity-of-the-day chat shows (NHK's Studio Park, for example), but these are not that. They are "talk" shows in that people talk, and "variety" shows in that a variety of topics are discussed. But the topics take precedence.
These celebrity panels chat and share anecdotes about various topics—tear-jerking stories about family reconciliation, first loves, travel, and maybe the most popular topic: food. Their chats are interspersed with short documentaries and dramatizations, in which the viewer can watch each celebrity's emotional reaction to the content through a "picture in picture" embedded at the side of the screen.
Despite the reputation Japanese reality shows have earned overseas for being weird, wacky, and dumb, these programs can get pretty brainy on the edutainment scale. I think Luebs is onto something when he observes that the reality television format popular in North America is far more fictional.
These [Hollywood productions] are not concerned with attempting to directly address the identities and concerns of the viewer. Rather, they are a playful engagement of thoughts and ideas in which we, the viewer, interact within a fictional world. They are a form of escapism.
The Hollywood version of reality television has been increasingly infiltrating the airwaves in Japan (thanks in no small part to Netflix), but the well-nigh ubiquitous home grown version still follows the formula described above, with experts educating the tarento, who function as stand-ins for the viewer.
A tarento ("talent") is a professional TV personality. To be sure, a tarento may be an actor or singer or Nobel laureate but is a tarento when acting as such. His job is to always have something witty or insightful to say, regardless of the subject. For the viewer, explains Luebs, they become real-life Walter Mittys:
Popular Japanese television looks inwards, into its own society. The variety TV show concept is based on the viewer personally relating to specific individuals who represent various tropes of Japanese-ness. Whether intentional or not, watching these celebrities chat with one another serves as an instructional guide for what is acceptable and unacceptable behavior in society. They give the viewer a clue into how to participate in any number of conversations, and how to react in any number of situations. These programs are just as much a form of entertainment as they are a framework for establishing social order.
My only caveat here is that I read "social order" in the most benign sense: lessons on how to play the game of life (specifically ordinary Japanese life).
Still, Luebs can't help slewing back to the comfortable confines of scholarly cant. No, he concludes, it's not "indoctrination," but "without the cultural synergy created by diversity, homogeneous cultural ideas are refined and concentrated, and the TV is the medium that projects these values onto the individual."
As if these cultural ideas didn't exist before television, and only sprang into being around 1950 in the smoke-filled room of a producer's office.
I think it more likely that this hallowed "diversity" in mass media instead reinforces our individual silos: with cable and streaming, we only have to watch what we want to see. But old-school Japanese broadcasters must attract the largest audience possible. They do that by giving the audience what it wants.
Or at least by not broadcasting what the audience doesn't want to see.
If anything is being projected onto the individual, well, the individual is holding up a mirror reflecting it right back at the set. This is readily apparent to somebody who prefers the Japanese approach to "reality" to the American brand.
An awful lot of travel shows on Japanese television focus on traveling in Japan. And then there are the travel shows about going to foreign countries in order to find a Japanese person living there, an ongoing attempt to address the mystery of why any Japanese would choose to live anywhere but in Japan.
But note that the host and audience are always impressed, even awed, by these daring explorers of the World Outside Japan. They serve as proxies for the audience, not cautionary tales. It's not that complicated. All you have to do is stipulate a more introverted and nerdier population and it all makes sense.
They're doing it so we don't have to. For that, I thank them very much.
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese culture, japanese tv, nhk, pop culture, social studies, television
June 29, 2017
Feeling (too good) about ourselves
The junk science that became the self-esteem movement, by which a bit of common sense was turned into a politically-funded cult, is an old story with a few new cast members. Over half a century ago, Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir observed that scientists (and politicians) can trick themselves into
Recently in the Guardian, Will Storr took a closer look at California's [self-esteem] task force that spawned the whole crazy fad. He reports that the credibility of the of the nascent movement
The actual language used to describe the "lie" is considerably harsher. But it didn't matter. At the height of the self-esteem movement, the task force had "five publicists working full time" telling politicians (and Oprah) what they wanted to hear.
Tackling the subject in greater depth, Jesse Singal concludes in his recent New York magazine article,
As far as that goes, the self-esteem movement is one fad that never made it to Asia. As Lenora Chu points out,
It's still common practice for Japanese high schools to rank students by test performance—and post the rankings in public. University entrance exam results are also posted in public, although using a numerical code known only to the student instead of a name.
In Japan, it all does come down to "grit," which has been at the core of Japanese education for a century. Known as gaman (noun, "patience, perseverance, self-denial") and ganbaru (verb, "to persist, to stand firm, to try one's best"), if you fail, it's because you didn't ganbaru enough.
As Singal notes, this sort of magical thinking can be just as problematic. But I think it is ultimately a lot more practical than the self-esteem approach. "Showing up (on time)" really is half the battle won.
false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions.
Recently in the Guardian, Will Storr took a closer look at California's [self-esteem] task force that spawned the whole crazy fad. He reports that the credibility of the of the nascent movement
turned largely on a single fact: that, in 1988, the esteemed professors of the University of California had analyzed the data and confirmed his hunch. The only problem was, they hadn't. When I tracked down one renegade task force member, he described what happened as "a lie."
The actual language used to describe the "lie" is considerably harsher. But it didn't matter. At the height of the self-esteem movement, the task force had "five publicists working full time" telling politicians (and Oprah) what they wanted to hear.
Tackling the subject in greater depth, Jesse Singal concludes in his recent New York magazine article,
Maybe the biggest problem here, whether one is discussing the waning self-esteem craze or the possibly burgeoning "grit" one, is the basic idea that some behavioral-science eureka moment will, on its own, do all or much of the work of solving big problems in education or the justice system or any other area rife with inequities.
As far as that goes, the self-esteem movement is one fad that never made it to Asia. As Lenora Chu points out,
"Self-esteem" doesn't exist in the Chinese lexicon, at least not in the way Americans use it. In China, a child's regard for herself is rarely as important as [are] stark evaluations of performance. Almost as if child-rearing were an Olympic sport, the Chinese rank children on everything from work ethic to Chinese character recognition and musical skill.
It's still common practice for Japanese high schools to rank students by test performance—and post the rankings in public. University entrance exam results are also posted in public, although using a numerical code known only to the student instead of a name.
In Japan, it all does come down to "grit," which has been at the core of Japanese education for a century. Known as gaman (noun, "patience, perseverance, self-denial") and ganbaru (verb, "to persist, to stand firm, to try one's best"), if you fail, it's because you didn't ganbaru enough.
As Singal notes, this sort of magical thinking can be just as problematic. But I think it is ultimately a lot more practical than the self-esteem approach. "Showing up (on time)" really is half the battle won.
Related posts
Dragon Zakura
Perseverance makes perfect
Labels: education, japanese culture, science, social studies
March 02, 2017
Back to school
"All the world's a stage," wrote Shakespeare. And in anime, that stage is, more often than not, a high school
The simplest reason why is the target audience. Except most otaku have long left high school. And I suspect that a lot of them, like me, have no desire to go back. So the better reason is that Japan is just one big high school all of the time.
No need for nostalgia when you are still living the life.
Granted, there's a lot of overlap among those in Japan and the U.S. who are always looking forward to the next class reunion. But the nostalgia Japanese feel about high school is of a different sort. It defines the institutional waters in which they will swim for the rest of their lives.
They put the uniform on in junior high and never take it off. News reports involving teenagers often refer to them not by age but by year in school, using the shorthand: 中 (1/2/3) for junior high and 高 (1/2/3) for high school.
For example, I found this question on an education forum: 「15才だと中３、高１どっち？」 "If you are 15 years old, are you a junior high senior or a high school freshman?"
The answer is that if you are 「早生まれ」 (haya'umare, lit. "early birth," meaning born between 1/1 and 4/1) then you're a 「高1」. The school year in Japan begins in April.
Your school becomes your identity, even taking over responsibilities that in the U.S. would fall to law enforcement or social service. As Justin Sevakis explains,
The paternalistic expectations established in high school never end. For Japanese, to paraphrase Faulkner, "Your high school past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past."
All secondary schools, public and private, are essentially open enrollment and most require entrance exams. The fiscal year is the same as the school year. Corporations large and small hold recruiting drives and "matriculation" ceremonies that mirror those of high school.
The nostalgia Japanese feel for high school (reflected in anime) is directed at the first two or so years, before students start sweating blood preparing for their college entrance exams (it's expected that seniors will quit the sports teams after the summer tournaments to cram for the exams).
Up until the last half of the senior year, it's a "maximum structure, (relatively) minimum pressure" environment. And within that structure, Japanese kids often enjoy far more freedom than their American counterparts, for example, in planning their own activities and commuting to school.
This sense of "structure" in the U.S. has come to mean parents running every aspect of their children's lives. In Japan it means, "Here's the framework. You can't change the framework. But you can create whatever you want using it, and you have maximum freedom inside it."
College athletic scholarships do exist, but in far fewer numbers than the U.S. The equivalent of "March Madness" is the high school baseball tournament. As in Ace of the Diamond, high schools offer athletic scholarships too.
In Yawara, Yawara rejects a judo scholarship to a prestigious university because she's sick of judo and wants to be a "normal" teenager. But in Chihayafuru, Chihaya is delighted to learn that some schools offer karuta scholarships because she has little passion for schoolwork.
Interestingly, this nostalgia for high school is not nearly so intense about college, even though once having made it though the entrance exams gauntlet, university life in Japan is "minimum structure, minimum pressure." Until the senior year, that is, when the job hunt begins.
Maybe that 's because "real life" is looming there over the horizon. (Some high schools even ban their students from having part-time jobs.)
The simplest reason why is the target audience. Except most otaku have long left high school. And I suspect that a lot of them, like me, have no desire to go back. So the better reason is that Japan is just one big high school all of the time.
No need for nostalgia when you are still living the life.
Granted, there's a lot of overlap among those in Japan and the U.S. who are always looking forward to the next class reunion. But the nostalgia Japanese feel about high school is of a different sort. It defines the institutional waters in which they will swim for the rest of their lives.
They put the uniform on in junior high and never take it off. News reports involving teenagers often refer to them not by age but by year in school, using the shorthand: 中 (1/2/3) for junior high and 高 (1/2/3) for high school.
For example, I found this question on an education forum: 「15才だと中３、高１どっち？」 "If you are 15 years old, are you a junior high senior or a high school freshman?"
The answer is that if you are 「早生まれ」 (haya'umare, lit. "early birth," meaning born between 1/1 and 4/1) then you're a 「高1」. The school year in Japan begins in April.
Your school becomes your identity, even taking over responsibilities that in the U.S. would fall to law enforcement or social service. As Justin Sevakis explains,
Say, for example, a kid gets in trouble for shoplifting. In Japan, the police might get called, but after that the next call would be to the kid's school. The homeroom teacher would come to apologize on the kid's behalf. And then the school would call in the kid's parents for a conference.
The paternalistic expectations established in high school never end. For Japanese, to paraphrase Faulkner, "Your high school past is not dead. Actually, it's not even past."
All secondary schools, public and private, are essentially open enrollment and most require entrance exams. The fiscal year is the same as the school year. Corporations large and small hold recruiting drives and "matriculation" ceremonies that mirror those of high school.
The nostalgia Japanese feel for high school (reflected in anime) is directed at the first two or so years, before students start sweating blood preparing for their college entrance exams (it's expected that seniors will quit the sports teams after the summer tournaments to cram for the exams).
Up until the last half of the senior year, it's a "maximum structure, (relatively) minimum pressure" environment. And within that structure, Japanese kids often enjoy far more freedom than their American counterparts, for example, in planning their own activities and commuting to school.
This sense of "structure" in the U.S. has come to mean parents running every aspect of their children's lives. In Japan it means, "Here's the framework. You can't change the framework. But you can create whatever you want using it, and you have maximum freedom inside it."
College athletic scholarships do exist, but in far fewer numbers than the U.S. The equivalent of "March Madness" is the high school baseball tournament. As in Ace of the Diamond, high schools offer athletic scholarships too.
In Yawara, Yawara rejects a judo scholarship to a prestigious university because she's sick of judo and wants to be a "normal" teenager. But in Chihayafuru, Chihaya is delighted to learn that some schools offer karuta scholarships because she has little passion for schoolwork.
Interestingly, this nostalgia for high school is not nearly so intense about college, even though once having made it though the entrance exams gauntlet, university life in Japan is "minimum structure, minimum pressure." Until the senior year, that is, when the job hunt begins.
Maybe that 's because "real life" is looming there over the horizon. (Some high schools even ban their students from having part-time jobs.)
Labels: chihayafuru, education, japan, japanese culture, social studies
March 17, 2016
The national Japanese pastime
It's March, and that means it's time for--no, not basketball--the National High School Baseball Invitational Tournament, also known as Spring Koshien. Together with Summer Koshien, the bigger open tournament in August, it is the sporting event in Japan, a cultural (and television) institution.
The last twenty years of economic malaise took a lot of the air out of golf, though Japanese golf players have become competitive internationally. Soccer has recently rocketed past baseball in terms of sheer popularity. Sumo has the historical deepest roots (albeit now being dominated by Mongolians).
But baseball has truly become a Japan's "national pastime," occupying the same cultural and social space as football does in the U.S. (and particularly in states like Texas).
Baseball came to Japan in the mid-19th century with the opening of Japan and caught on quickly. Babe Ruth toured Japan with the American League All Stars in 1934. The first national high school championships were played in 1915, and moved to Hanshin Koshien Stadium in 1924.
The Koshien baseball tournaments equal the popularity of NCAA "March Madness" and the football bowl games. The summer tournament is open to every high school baseball team in the country, so at the beginning of every season, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of going to Koshien.
And with American baseball teams using Japan as a kind of super-minor league system, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of playing in the Majors as well.
 |
| Courtesy Japan Times. |
The last twenty years of economic malaise took a lot of the air out of golf, though Japanese golf players have become competitive internationally. Soccer has recently rocketed past baseball in terms of sheer popularity. Sumo has the historical deepest roots (albeit now being dominated by Mongolians).
But baseball has truly become a Japan's "national pastime," occupying the same cultural and social space as football does in the U.S. (and particularly in states like Texas).
Baseball came to Japan in the mid-19th century with the opening of Japan and caught on quickly. Babe Ruth toured Japan with the American League All Stars in 1934. The first national high school championships were played in 1915, and moved to Hanshin Koshien Stadium in 1924.
The Koshien baseball tournaments equal the popularity of NCAA "March Madness" and the football bowl games. The summer tournament is open to every high school baseball team in the country, so at the beginning of every season, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of going to Koshien.
And with American baseball teams using Japan as a kind of super-minor league system, every baseball-loving Japanese kid can dream of playing in the Majors as well.
Labels: baseball, education, history, japanese culture, sports
June 25, 2015
The teen manga artist
Despite the manga market in Japan cooling off largely due to the inevitable demographic shifts, publishers are still actively recruiting new talent. This has produced a YA genre unique to Japan that centers around the teenage manga artist.
The genre falls into two general categories: 1) the amateur/self-published (dojinshi) manga artist, often a member of a high school or college manga club; 2) a teenager earning a living as a manga artist.
In the former category are Comic Party and Genshiken. In both cases, the goal is getting a booth at the Comiket comic fair (or its equivalent), the world's biggest dojinshi convention.
A few of the more talented club members may parlay this into a career in the future, but that's not the point of the story. As Kate points out, the setting has the important function of giving the characters something to do.
This is literally the case for the teenagers in the latter category. They often even live alone (second item). This isn't unusual in Japan, where a high school student can enroll in an "escalator school" away from home, or whose parents are working abroad.
In anime and manga about making manga, "the teenager as working artist" breaks down into several sub-categories:
Bakuman is the best series about growing up to become a manga artist. The story follows two ninth grade boys who are striving to break into the business, with Moritaka Mashiro as the artist and Akito Takagi as the writer.
Media Blasters had picked up the anime but subsequently abandoned the license. The manga series is published by VIZ Media.
Otherwise, the best of the rest is Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun. Nozaki Umetaro is a hunky high school student who, unbeknownst to most of his classmates, draws a popular romance manga for a girl's magazine.
Producing two chapters a month leaves him desperate for new material. And help. Established manga artists employ a small staff to help meet the always pressing deadlines. Nozaki resorts to roping his classmates into those chores, including Chiyo.
Because of an understandable misunderstanding, the first time he broaches the subject, she thinks he's asking her on a date. Instead she finds herself learning how to do beta (that means filling in designated areas with solid black).
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun confirms that "giving your characters something to do is always more interesting than letting them sit and around and get angsty." Nozaki has something to do, a place to be, and Chiyo a non-awkward reason for being there.
The monomaniacal Nozaki is the perfect straight man, navigating a sea of absurdity without straining belief. The series is good-natured, not too sit-com stupid (a trap Comic Party falls into at times), and honestly very funny.
The genre doesn't stop with high school. Yasuko and Kenji (a live-action comedy not available in the U.S.) has the leader of a biker gang abandoning his old life and becoming a manga artist to support his kid sister when their parents die.
Mangirl (an unfortunate-sounding portmanteau of "manga" and "girl") is about just that, a very silly and very short (less than five minutes per episode) but surprisingly smart show about four OLs launching a manga magazine.
The people making these anime are following the adage of writing what they know best, so the added bonus is that you will learn a good deal about the manga industry in the process (including dealing with odd editors and eccentric artists).
Incidentally, the best series about the anime industry right now (said by industry insiders to border on documentary accuracy) is Shirobako. It's also about working adults, though they started out in a high school anime club.
The genre falls into two general categories: 1) the amateur/self-published (dojinshi) manga artist, often a member of a high school or college manga club; 2) a teenager earning a living as a manga artist.
In the former category are Comic Party and Genshiken. In both cases, the goal is getting a booth at the Comiket comic fair (or its equivalent), the world's biggest dojinshi convention.
A few of the more talented club members may parlay this into a career in the future, but that's not the point of the story. As Kate points out, the setting has the important function of giving the characters something to do.
The problem of providing genre romantic characters with a difference can often be solved by simply giving the main characters jobs, and then remembering what those jobs are.
This is literally the case for the teenagers in the latter category. They often even live alone (second item). This isn't unusual in Japan, where a high school student can enroll in an "escalator school" away from home, or whose parents are working abroad.
In anime and manga about making manga, "the teenager as working artist" breaks down into several sub-categories:
- As in Ef–A Tale of Memories, being a manga artist is simply one aspect of a person's character and a source of conflict as such.
- Though more commonly, the main character being a manga artist comprises the whole plot device.
- As an added twist, a guy is writing a romance manga or a teen girl is writing for a sexually explicit imprint (like Cheese).
Bakuman is the best series about growing up to become a manga artist. The story follows two ninth grade boys who are striving to break into the business, with Moritaka Mashiro as the artist and Akito Takagi as the writer.
Media Blasters had picked up the anime but subsequently abandoned the license. The manga series is published by VIZ Media.
Otherwise, the best of the rest is Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun. Nozaki Umetaro is a hunky high school student who, unbeknownst to most of his classmates, draws a popular romance manga for a girl's magazine.
Producing two chapters a month leaves him desperate for new material. And help. Established manga artists employ a small staff to help meet the always pressing deadlines. Nozaki resorts to roping his classmates into those chores, including Chiyo.
Because of an understandable misunderstanding, the first time he broaches the subject, she thinks he's asking her on a date. Instead she finds herself learning how to do beta (that means filling in designated areas with solid black).
Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun confirms that "giving your characters something to do is always more interesting than letting them sit and around and get angsty." Nozaki has something to do, a place to be, and Chiyo a non-awkward reason for being there.
The monomaniacal Nozaki is the perfect straight man, navigating a sea of absurdity without straining belief. The series is good-natured, not too sit-com stupid (a trap Comic Party falls into at times), and honestly very funny.
The genre doesn't stop with high school. Yasuko and Kenji (a live-action comedy not available in the U.S.) has the leader of a biker gang abandoning his old life and becoming a manga artist to support his kid sister when their parents die.
Mangirl (an unfortunate-sounding portmanteau of "manga" and "girl") is about just that, a very silly and very short (less than five minutes per episode) but surprisingly smart show about four OLs launching a manga magazine.
The people making these anime are following the adage of writing what they know best, so the added bonus is that you will learn a good deal about the manga industry in the process (including dealing with odd editors and eccentric artists).
Incidentally, the best series about the anime industry right now (said by industry insiders to border on documentary accuracy) is Shirobako. It's also about working adults, though they started out in a high school anime club.
Related posts
Bakuman
Manga economics
Manga circulation in Japan
The manga development cycle
Labels: anime, economics, education, japan, japanese culture, japanese tv, manga, thinking about writing
April 20, 2015
Old Enough!
Megan McArdle recently wondered why parents have become so paranoid of late, freaking out at the sight "children walking down the street alone." Alarmed enough to call out the cops to "rescue" kids from—nothing, actually.
"Why," McArdle asks, "has America gone lunatic on the subject of unattended children?"
Because the 24-hour news cycle fools us into treating national totals of rare events as the numerator in calculations of risk. Human beings are really bad at statistics, and when the denominator is a third of a billion, we discard it and substitute in Dunbar's number.
In other words, the maximum number of people we're honestly capable of caring about, between 100 and 250. Populations larger than that become abstractions. So a single commercial plane crash is a national tragedy while 32,719 (in 2013) auto fatalities earns a shrug.
Stalin summed up the paradox when he observed that "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Plus a much greater investment in fewer children that boosts their marginal value to infinity. Hence the impulse to lock them away in padded rooms until age thirty or so.
But not necessarily. Although even fewer kids are being born in Japan, they start walking to school by themselves in elementary school. If the school is too far away to walk, they'll have bus and train passes. This is reflected in popular culture, like Non Non Biyori.
It's true that the crime rate is lower in Japan, but the American parents who worry the most live in middle-class suburban communities that have about the same crime rate as Japan.
Crime isn't the real risk anyway. Japanese kids are more likely to get killed in freak traffic accidents (streets outside city centers in Japan often have no shoulders or sidewalks). But with a denominator of 120 million, they're as rare as school shootings in the U.S.
And they trigger calls for better traffic enforcement. And sidewalks. Maybe Japanese are better at math. They don't panic at the sight of small children walking someplace by themselves.
A good illustration of this comes from the NTV reality show, Old Enough! (「はじめてのおつかい！」), literally "My First Task."
In the show, children aged six and younger are given a task to accomplish and set out on their own. To be sure, there's a camera crew and a producer no more than a couple of feet away, and we don't see the kids who get lost along the way.
I'm sure there's helpful hinting and herding and location scouting going on too. But it's pretty impressive that they're allowed to tackle these tasks at all.
We're talking about walking to the store, picking the right item off the shelf, standing in line, and paying for it. Or taking a train to another stop and walking several blocks to find daddy's office. And then making it back home. By themselves.
The real payoff is the reaction of some of these kids when they realize what they've done. One little girl, upon finding the right item on a supermarket shelf, jumped up and screamed, "Yatta!" We did it! Like she'd just won the gold medal at the Olympics.
That's the pure delight that comes from accomplishing something concrete on your own.
George W. Bush was onto something with that "the soft bigotry of low expectations" line. I don't mean the "tiger mom" stuff, but getting to try (and fail) at the simple things, the increasingly rare privilege of not being treated like a Fabergé egg in everyday life.
Here's an excerpt from an original broadccast of Old Enough! It's pretty self-explanatory (and usually the camera crew does a better job staying out of sight; in recent episodes the cameras are all but invisible).
The show has been airing since 1991. Netflix has two seasons of more recent episodes edited down to fifteen minute segments.
"Why," McArdle asks, "has America gone lunatic on the subject of unattended children?"
Because the 24-hour news cycle fools us into treating national totals of rare events as the numerator in calculations of risk. Human beings are really bad at statistics, and when the denominator is a third of a billion, we discard it and substitute in Dunbar's number.
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.
In other words, the maximum number of people we're honestly capable of caring about, between 100 and 250. Populations larger than that become abstractions. So a single commercial plane crash is a national tragedy while 32,719 (in 2013) auto fatalities earns a shrug.
Stalin summed up the paradox when he observed that "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic."
Plus a much greater investment in fewer children that boosts their marginal value to infinity. Hence the impulse to lock them away in padded rooms until age thirty or so.
But not necessarily. Although even fewer kids are being born in Japan, they start walking to school by themselves in elementary school. If the school is too far away to walk, they'll have bus and train passes. This is reflected in popular culture, like Non Non Biyori.
It's true that the crime rate is lower in Japan, but the American parents who worry the most live in middle-class suburban communities that have about the same crime rate as Japan.
Crime isn't the real risk anyway. Japanese kids are more likely to get killed in freak traffic accidents (streets outside city centers in Japan often have no shoulders or sidewalks). But with a denominator of 120 million, they're as rare as school shootings in the U.S.
And they trigger calls for better traffic enforcement. And sidewalks. Maybe Japanese are better at math. They don't panic at the sight of small children walking someplace by themselves.
A good illustration of this comes from the NTV reality show, Old Enough! (「はじめてのおつかい！」), literally "My First Task."
In the show, children aged six and younger are given a task to accomplish and set out on their own. To be sure, there's a camera crew and a producer no more than a couple of feet away, and we don't see the kids who get lost along the way.
I'm sure there's helpful hinting and herding and location scouting going on too. But it's pretty impressive that they're allowed to tackle these tasks at all.
We're talking about walking to the store, picking the right item off the shelf, standing in line, and paying for it. Or taking a train to another stop and walking several blocks to find daddy's office. And then making it back home. By themselves.
The real payoff is the reaction of some of these kids when they realize what they've done. One little girl, upon finding the right item on a supermarket shelf, jumped up and screamed, "Yatta!" We did it! Like she'd just won the gold medal at the Olympics.
That's the pure delight that comes from accomplishing something concrete on your own.
George W. Bush was onto something with that "the soft bigotry of low expectations" line. I don't mean the "tiger mom" stuff, but getting to try (and fail) at the simple things, the increasingly rare privilege of not being treated like a Fabergé egg in everyday life.
Here's an excerpt from an original broadccast of Old Enough! It's pretty self-explanatory (and usually the camera crew does a better job staying out of sight; in recent episodes the cameras are all but invisible).
The show has been airing since 1991. Netflix has two seasons of more recent episodes edited down to fifteen minute segments.
Related posts
Land of the paranoid
Free-range kids
Free-range kids (1940's edition)
L.M. Montgomery's free-range kids
Labels: anime, education, free-range kids, japanese culture, politics, social studies
April 15, 2013
Teaching to the TOEFL
Here's an educational reform I approve of:
In terms of evaluating real-world communication, the TOEFL makes for a much better yardstick than the esoteric nonsense that worms its way into the entrance exams required by Japan's universities. A connection to the real world is sadly lacking when it comes to English instruction in Japan.
It's a curious paradox in a country so infatuated with American and British culture and the English language. But the sad fact is that in 2011, Japanese students taking the TOEFL ranked third from the bottom out of 33 Asian countries and came in dead last on the speaking section.
Of course, to have any effect, such reforms would have to permeate the entire educational establishment. I'd bet on that happening never than anytime in the foreseeable future. In any case, the rest of the article is worth perusing if only for this politically incorrect nugget:
It's nice to see that somewhere in the world there is an educational apparatchik not beholding to the cant of "equal outcomes." Japan never stopped believing in the bell curve, it's just that they've always explained it as the sole product of strenuous effort.
Keep on scrolling down to the bottom for this juicy tidbit:
Ever notice how advocates for government managed healthcare like to cite lower spending/better results when comparing other countries to the U.S., but not when it comes to public education spending?
(Though I doubt the numbers for Japan take into account the huge fees parents have to cough up for "free" public education in Japan, true of healthcare spending too.)
The successful implementation these reforms aside, they'll give a much-needed boost to Japan's ESL industry, floundering since the economy went off the rails in the 1990s, precipitating the catastrophic bankruptcy of industry-leader Nova (along with the school I worked at in Osaka).
Hmm, maybe if Social Security goes bust, I'll retire to Japan and pretend to teach English to students pretending to learn (let's be honest: that's what most English instruction in Japan boils down to).
Plus, a rekindled interest in Eikaiwa (English conversation) could give all those Mormon missionaries in Japan something productive to do with their time. It was certainly the most productive thing I did with mine.
The TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) will be required both to enter public universities and to graduate from them if the policy recommendations adopted Monday by the ruling Liberal Democratic Party's education reform panel are formalized.
In terms of evaluating real-world communication, the TOEFL makes for a much better yardstick than the esoteric nonsense that worms its way into the entrance exams required by Japan's universities. A connection to the real world is sadly lacking when it comes to English instruction in Japan.
It's a curious paradox in a country so infatuated with American and British culture and the English language. But the sad fact is that in 2011, Japanese students taking the TOEFL ranked third from the bottom out of 33 Asian countries and came in dead last on the speaking section.
Of course, to have any effect, such reforms would have to permeate the entire educational establishment. I'd bet on that happening never than anytime in the foreseeable future. In any case, the rest of the article is worth perusing if only for this politically incorrect nugget:
The proposals, including introduction of the TOEFL, are also designed to correct the "excessive egalitarianism" at schools and to nurture the abilities of top-level students, Endo said. "Japanese education has sought for equality in (student academic achievements). Because of this, it has failed to offer education that capitalizes on (their individual) characteristics," Endo told reporters.
It's nice to see that somewhere in the world there is an educational apparatchik not beholding to the cant of "equal outcomes." Japan never stopped believing in the bell curve, it's just that they've always explained it as the sole product of strenuous effort.
Keep on scrolling down to the bottom for this juicy tidbit:
Japan spends 3.6 percent of its gross domestic product on public education, while the United States spends 5.3 percent.
Ever notice how advocates for government managed healthcare like to cite lower spending/better results when comparing other countries to the U.S., but not when it comes to public education spending?
(Though I doubt the numbers for Japan take into account the huge fees parents have to cough up for "free" public education in Japan, true of healthcare spending too.)
The successful implementation these reforms aside, they'll give a much-needed boost to Japan's ESL industry, floundering since the economy went off the rails in the 1990s, precipitating the catastrophic bankruptcy of industry-leader Nova (along with the school I worked at in Osaka).
Hmm, maybe if Social Security goes bust, I'll retire to Japan and pretend to teach English to students pretending to learn (let's be honest: that's what most English instruction in Japan boils down to).
Plus, a rekindled interest in Eikaiwa (English conversation) could give all those Mormon missionaries in Japan something productive to do with their time. It was certainly the most productive thing I did with mine.
December 03, 2012
Perseverance makes perfect
This NPR story highlighting the differences between Eastern (Asia) and Western (U.S.) approaches to classroom learning accurately sums up the prevailing attitudes in Japan, where it is
It's an ethos and a state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru, often expressed in the volitional form: ganbarou! (がんばろう！), meaning to persist, to hang on, to stick it out. But there are limits to what sheer effort can accomplish, and dangers in not acknowledging them.
Until they saw the wisdom of the "American style" of training, Japanese baseball coaches regularly burned out pitchers and exhausted players in the mistaken belief that perseverance alone made perfect. As described in this New York Times story, Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda
To be sure, the hand-wringing in Japanese educational circles over the stubborn persistence of ganbaru-based pedagogies and the dearth of more "creative" options is real too, but nothing compared to the industrial-scale educational angst on this side of the Pacific.
A big part of the problem in the U.S. are conflicting ideologies that ricochet back and forth between assertions of inborn genius and the child's mind as a blank slate, the Panglossian belief that given the right pedagogical touchstone, kids can be programmed like computers.
The more realistic Asian approach has recently found pop-science acceptance in the "10,000 hour rule." However equalitarian it may appear, though, at the end of the day, how perfect practice makes you will correlate to inborn talent or IQ or whatever gifts God blessed you with.
10,000 hours of practice can make most people competent at a skill. Only a few will become truly excellent. Yes, Mozart practiced a whole lot, but chain the average child to a piano bench and he'd chew his arm off before getting anywhere close to the 10,000 hour mark.
There will come a point of diminishing returns when you have to decide how much more work is going to make the difference. In most cases, you're going to hit a plateau that is fine for a hobby but short of professional grade. (Not that there's anything wrong with hobbies.)
Giving up at what you thought you wanted to do with your life is often a prerequisite to discovering what you're actually good at, what is actually worth spending your time and effort on. The art and talent of cutting your losses and quitting deserves a lot more respect.
No matter how hard they study, no matter how many cram schools they attend, no matter how often they retake the entrance exams, most Japanese kids aren't going to make it into an elite university. A system that encourages them to waste their time trying is seriously flawed.
Except that in Japan, the blame is placed almost entirely on the kid who fails, not on the system. He just didn't ganbaru enough.
The NPR story misses this huge irony. A ganbarou! culture ultimately consigns responsibility to the individual. Americans see educational failings as institutional, while the Japanese portray them as personal. Maybe it's those attitudes we need to swap most of all.
assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle.
It's an ethos and a state of mind summed up in the verb ganbaru, often expressed in the volitional form: ganbarou! (がんばろう！), meaning to persist, to hang on, to stick it out. But there are limits to what sheer effort can accomplish, and dangers in not acknowledging them.
Until they saw the wisdom of the "American style" of training, Japanese baseball coaches regularly burned out pitchers and exhausted players in the mistaken belief that perseverance alone made perfect. As described in this New York Times story, Yankees pitcher Hiroki Kuroda
is one of the last of a cohort of Japanese players who grew up in a culture in which staggeringly long work days and severe punishment were normal, and in which older players could haze younger ones with impunity.
To be sure, the hand-wringing in Japanese educational circles over the stubborn persistence of ganbaru-based pedagogies and the dearth of more "creative" options is real too, but nothing compared to the industrial-scale educational angst on this side of the Pacific.
A big part of the problem in the U.S. are conflicting ideologies that ricochet back and forth between assertions of inborn genius and the child's mind as a blank slate, the Panglossian belief that given the right pedagogical touchstone, kids can be programmed like computers.
The more realistic Asian approach has recently found pop-science acceptance in the "10,000 hour rule." However equalitarian it may appear, though, at the end of the day, how perfect practice makes you will correlate to inborn talent or IQ or whatever gifts God blessed you with.
10,000 hours of practice can make most people competent at a skill. Only a few will become truly excellent. Yes, Mozart practiced a whole lot, but chain the average child to a piano bench and he'd chew his arm off before getting anywhere close to the 10,000 hour mark.
There will come a point of diminishing returns when you have to decide how much more work is going to make the difference. In most cases, you're going to hit a plateau that is fine for a hobby but short of professional grade. (Not that there's anything wrong with hobbies.)
Giving up at what you thought you wanted to do with your life is often a prerequisite to discovering what you're actually good at, what is actually worth spending your time and effort on. The art and talent of cutting your losses and quitting deserves a lot more respect.
No matter how hard they study, no matter how many cram schools they attend, no matter how often they retake the entrance exams, most Japanese kids aren't going to make it into an elite university. A system that encourages them to waste their time trying is seriously flawed.
Except that in Japan, the blame is placed almost entirely on the kid who fails, not on the system. He just didn't ganbaru enough.
The NPR story misses this huge irony. A ganbarou! culture ultimately consigns responsibility to the individual. Americans see educational failings as institutional, while the Japanese portray them as personal. Maybe it's those attitudes we need to swap most of all.
Related posts
Dragon Zakura
Ganbarou! Japan
Feeling (too good) about ourselves
Labels: baseball, education, japanese culture, pedagogy
March 15, 2012
Let's you and her fight
Throughout the Warring States and Edo periods, women of samurai lineage were specifically trained in the naginata. Demonstration matches pitting a naginata against a shinai (bamboo sword) are commonly held at meets.
The wives of medieval warlords often donned samurai armor, took up the defense of a besieged castle, and occasionally engaged the enemy on the battlefield. Documented examples include Lady Hangaku and Tomoe Gozen.
Judô, archery, and kendô remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes. The Ministry of Education recently made Japanese martial arts a required subject in junior high school.
However, concerns have been raised in particular about the judô requirement, due to a lack of qualified coaches, and students suffering the kind of head and neck injuries often associated with American football.
The wives of medieval warlords often donned samurai armor, took up the defense of a besieged castle, and occasionally engaged the enemy on the battlefield. Documented examples include Lady Hangaku and Tomoe Gozen.
Judô, archery, and kendô remain staples of the Japanese high school physical education curriculum for both sexes. The Ministry of Education recently made Japanese martial arts a required subject in junior high school.
However, concerns have been raised in particular about the judô requirement, due to a lack of qualified coaches, and students suffering the kind of head and neck injuries often associated with American football.
Labels: education, history, japanese culture, serpent notes, serpent of time, sports
January 30, 2012
Starting in the fall
In Japan, the fiscal and school years, public and private, corporate and government, have traditionally all begun in April. But over the next five years, Tokyo University (Tôdai) plans to shift the start of its school year from April to September.
Although Tôdai is the Harvard, Yale and MIT of Japan, it receives only a middling ranking in world-wide comparisons.
Tôdai believes that facilitating the exchange of students and faculty will raise its status. Giuseppe Pezzotti, a materials scientist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, analogizes what Tôdai is after, a ruby made beautiful by a few parts per million of chromium:
Incidentally, demographically speaking, the "parts per million" part of the metaphor is apt. Japanese in general definitely do not embrace immigration as a "cure" for its birth dearth. But the less elegant reasons are probably the more important ones.
First of all, Tôdai is creating is a back door around Japan's punishing entrance exam system. Similar regimes used throughout northeast Asia are little more than draconian filters that sift students by raw IQ (with an emphasize on memorization skills).
As far as most employers are concerned, a student who can get into Tôdai has already proven he's got the right kind of raw clay. Job done. Time to party.
At the same time, the number of all Japanese exchange students has fallen drastically over the past quarter century, something about which Nobel Laureate Eiichi Negishi (who did most of his work at Purdue) has voiced concern.
I wouldn't dismiss a reemergence of nascent isolationism left over from the Edo Period at the heart of this. But the bigger problem is that Japanese corporations march in lockstep and do their hiring only in April. Missing that window can doom a career.
If Tôdai can start to shatter some of these deeply ingrained (and deeply stupid) bureaucratic conventions, the value of this transition to Japanese society will greatly outweigh feel-good pronouncements about "internationalism" and "diversity."
Although Tôdai is the Harvard, Yale and MIT of Japan, it receives only a middling ranking in world-wide comparisons.
Tôdai believes that facilitating the exchange of students and faculty will raise its status. Giuseppe Pezzotti, a materials scientist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology, analogizes what Tôdai is after, a ruby made beautiful by a few parts per million of chromium:
Without this impurity the [aluminum oxide] would simply be white, while the chromium itself would be featureless. We foreign residents can similarly be regarded as intentionally inserted elements, or dopants, which make the society more beautiful.
Incidentally, demographically speaking, the "parts per million" part of the metaphor is apt. Japanese in general definitely do not embrace immigration as a "cure" for its birth dearth. But the less elegant reasons are probably the more important ones.
First of all, Tôdai is creating is a back door around Japan's punishing entrance exam system. Similar regimes used throughout northeast Asia are little more than draconian filters that sift students by raw IQ (with an emphasize on memorization skills).
As far as most employers are concerned, a student who can get into Tôdai has already proven he's got the right kind of raw clay. Job done. Time to party.
At the same time, the number of all Japanese exchange students has fallen drastically over the past quarter century, something about which Nobel Laureate Eiichi Negishi (who did most of his work at Purdue) has voiced concern.
I wouldn't dismiss a reemergence of nascent isolationism left over from the Edo Period at the heart of this. But the bigger problem is that Japanese corporations march in lockstep and do their hiring only in April. Missing that window can doom a career.
If Tôdai can start to shatter some of these deeply ingrained (and deeply stupid) bureaucratic conventions, the value of this transition to Japanese society will greatly outweigh feel-good pronouncements about "internationalism" and "diversity."
September 08, 2011
Back to the digital future
In this blast from the past, John Dvorak goes back twenty-five years and discovers how resistant to change smart people can be (smart enough to run an Ivy League school), digging up this quote by Harvard University president Derek Bok:
BYU had completely digitized its card catalog system by 1985. When I started graduate school the next year, an IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM showed up in the second floor reference section (I can still visualize where it was).
Talk about a breath of fresh air! The BC (before computer) system required pawing though two dozen telephone book-sized indexes (plus the quarterly supplements) year by year for every topic you wanted to research, again and again and again.
And then searching the stacks and praying that the journal was there (if the library even had it), hadn't been lost, misshelved, damaged, or checked out (permanently) by a professor. Enough of this nostalgia for the moldy smell of paper.
That was also when I bought my first PC, a used Kaypro II (2.5 MHz Z80, 64KB RAM). It cost me about a grand. Twenty years later, I paid the same amount (adjusted for inflation) for an IBM ThinkPad (1.7 GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM).
By the way, let's also can the hand-wringing over format obsolescence. I still have every file originally saved to those single-sided, 5.25 inch floppies. All of the papers physically typed on real paper and stored away in the BC years? Long gone.
In another sign of those ancient times, I was actually allowed to board airplanes with that Kaypro as a carry on! It had a practically bullet-proof aluminum case and weighed thirty pounds! Back then, though, any portable computer was exotic.
Harvard is not [emphasis added] committed to digitizing its library system or establishing a computer network between students and professors.
BYU had completely digitized its card catalog system by 1985. When I started graduate school the next year, an IBM XT loaded with the ERIC index on CD-ROM showed up in the second floor reference section (I can still visualize where it was).
Talk about a breath of fresh air! The BC (before computer) system required pawing though two dozen telephone book-sized indexes (plus the quarterly supplements) year by year for every topic you wanted to research, again and again and again.
And then searching the stacks and praying that the journal was there (if the library even had it), hadn't been lost, misshelved, damaged, or checked out (permanently) by a professor. Enough of this nostalgia for the moldy smell of paper.
That was also when I bought my first PC, a used Kaypro II (2.5 MHz Z80, 64KB RAM). It cost me about a grand. Twenty years later, I paid the same amount (adjusted for inflation) for an IBM ThinkPad (1.7 GHz Pentium-M, 1GB RAM).
By the way, let's also can the hand-wringing over format obsolescence. I still have every file originally saved to those single-sided, 5.25 inch floppies. All of the papers physically typed on real paper and stored away in the BC years? Long gone.
In another sign of those ancient times, I was actually allowed to board airplanes with that Kaypro as a carry on! It had a practically bullet-proof aluminum case and weighed thirty pounds! Back then, though, any portable computer was exotic.
Labels: BYU, computers, education, publishing, tech history
July 25, 2011
Death to high school English
A new genre of academic essay has emerged of late, in which college professors grumble that their students "don't understand commas, far less how to write an essay." Complains Kim Brooks:
The genre strikes me as a way of criticizing the teacher's unions without coming right out and saying so, because then people might assume you're in league with Scott Walker or Chris Christie or other fiends from the bowels of hell.
Though in this case, I wouldn't blame the unions. The problem begins in the universities and their "schools of education," where professors, believing that their students are blank slates, convince their students in turn that teenagers are blank slates, empty vessels into which they can pour "culture."
Even if they could, it ends up being all the same culture. All the same liberal arts education monoculture. The most important question Brooks asks is: "[Is] it really so essential that [high school] students read Faulkner?"
The whole problem is encapsulated right there. I got good at composing those essays, and yet can't remember a book "taught" in high school English that I cared about. Most I loathed. The one thing that high school English classes do very well is make students hate reading, especially writing about reading.
Could there be a more useless real-world skill for everybody that isn't a humanities student (practically the entire population)? Or even those who are? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton offers for our consideration the prototypical hard-striving daughter of middle-class parents who
As Car Talk's Tom Magliozzi (he graduated from MIT) says about high school math courses: "The purpose of learning math, which most of us will never use, is only to prepare us for further math courses, which we will use even less frequently than never."
The goal of math should be to add, subtract, multiply and divide. And balance a checkbook. Geometry would consist of identifying a radius, diameter, right angle and hypotenuse. Work in somewhere a simple primer on statistics.
"English" would consist of reading books the students would read if they weren't stuck in a high school English class. Want to learn about Shakespeare? Watch a movie. The goal of composition would be a one page, three paragraph essay.
That's it. Make everything else an elective.
For years now, teaching composition at state universities and liberal arts colleges and community colleges as well, I've puzzled over these high-school graduates and their shocking deficits. I've sat at my desk, a stack of their two-to-three-page papers before me, and felt overwhelmed to the point of physical paralysis by all the things they don't know how to do when it comes to written communication in the English language, all the basic skills that surely they will need to master if they are to have a chance at succeeding in any post-secondary course of study.
The genre strikes me as a way of criticizing the teacher's unions without coming right out and saying so, because then people might assume you're in league with Scott Walker or Chris Christie or other fiends from the bowels of hell.
Though in this case, I wouldn't blame the unions. The problem begins in the universities and their "schools of education," where professors, believing that their students are blank slates, convince their students in turn that teenagers are blank slates, empty vessels into which they can pour "culture."
Even if they could, it ends up being all the same culture. All the same liberal arts education monoculture. The most important question Brooks asks is: "[Is] it really so essential that [high school] students read Faulkner?"
As for the students who did make it to more accelerated English courses, their recollections are a little less disheartening, but only a little. They read Shakespeare, they tell me, usually Romeo and Juliet, sometimes Macbeth. They read Catcher in the Rye or Huck Finn, The Sound and the Fury, a little Melville or Hardy. They read these works and then they talked about them in class discussions or small groups, and then they composed an essay on the subject, received a grade, and moved on to the next masterpiece.
The whole problem is encapsulated right there. I got good at composing those essays, and yet can't remember a book "taught" in high school English that I cared about. Most I loathed. The one thing that high school English classes do very well is make students hate reading, especially writing about reading.
Could there be a more useless real-world skill for everybody that isn't a humanities student (practically the entire population)? Or even those who are? In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Thomas Benton offers for our consideration the prototypical hard-striving daughter of middle-class parents who
goes to graduate school, earns a doctorate in comparative literature from an Ivy League university, everyone is proud of her, and then they are shocked when she struggles for years to earn more than the minimum wage. (Meanwhile, her brother--who was never very good at school--makes a decent living fixing HVAC systems with a six-month certificate from a for-profit school near the Interstate.)
As Car Talk's Tom Magliozzi (he graduated from MIT) says about high school math courses: "The purpose of learning math, which most of us will never use, is only to prepare us for further math courses, which we will use even less frequently than never."
The goal of math should be to add, subtract, multiply and divide. And balance a checkbook. Geometry would consist of identifying a radius, diameter, right angle and hypotenuse. Work in somewhere a simple primer on statistics.
"English" would consist of reading books the students would read if they weren't stuck in a high school English class. Want to learn about Shakespeare? Watch a movie. The goal of composition would be a one page, three paragraph essay.
That's it. Make everything else an elective.
Labels: education, english, pedagogy, thinking about writing
May 26, 2011
Scarcely believable
A Japanese friend asked about the meaning of a sentence in the sample test questions from a Japanese university entrance exam.
The meanings of both "scarcely" and "gone" are ambiguous. The literal meaning of the latter is b, which could imply c or d.
However, "was gone" can also mean "left." Here's an example from Frankenstein (published in 1818):
This meaning implies g, though most people would say h:
That was when my brain blue-screened. What sadist would put such a sentence in a test of English as a second language? Of course, questions like this have nothing to do with testing English competency, and everything to do the ability of the student to rote memorize huge chunks of information and regurgitate them on demand.
Consequently, the more obscure the material the better.
It's crap like this that gives me an dim view of test-heavy educational "improvement" efforts like NCLB. As bad as it is, the fuzzy-wuzzy approach is better. It produces enough performance randomness to compromise the efficacy the cram school approach. Feel-good, right-brain thinking and political correctness turns out to be good for something.
In Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China) where getting into the college of your choice is based solely on entrance exam scores, students spend more and more time cramming for tests that elite universities make more and more difficult in order to maintain their standard deviation rank on the distribution curve, resulting in mind-boggling overkill.
It also means that these universities don't really have to be good at anything. They just have to be highly selective. It's a chicken and egg dilemma no elite institution can escape. I mean, if Harvard really was such a great educational institution, it could randomly matriculate students regardless of test scores and turn them all into geniuses. Right?
I'm reminded of the Darwinian dance of death between the poisonous dart frog and the liophis snake. Over time, the frog has become more and more toxic and the snake more resistant to the toxins, to the point that a small frog could kill an adult human. Yet the snakes still eat the frogs, even though the physiological effect is the same as going on a weekend bender.
Which pretty much describes the brain of a Japanese high school student who's made it into an top-tier university. They need to spend four years consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol just to wash it out of their systems.
a. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was gone.
The meanings of both "scarcely" and "gone" are ambiguous. The literal meaning of the latter is b, which could imply c or d.
b. I had scarcely spoken to him when he was no longer there.
c. I had just started speaking to him when he died.
d. I had rarely spoken to him when he died.
However, "was gone" can also mean "left." Here's an example from Frankenstein (published in 1818):
e. He was scarcely gone, when I hastened to my room to write to you.
f. Soon after he left, I hastened to my room to write to you.
This meaning implies g, though most people would say h:
g. I had scarcely spoken to him when he left.
h. I had just started speaking to him when he had to leave.
That was when my brain blue-screened. What sadist would put such a sentence in a test of English as a second language? Of course, questions like this have nothing to do with testing English competency, and everything to do the ability of the student to rote memorize huge chunks of information and regurgitate them on demand.
Consequently, the more obscure the material the better.
It's crap like this that gives me an dim view of test-heavy educational "improvement" efforts like NCLB. As bad as it is, the fuzzy-wuzzy approach is better. It produces enough performance randomness to compromise the efficacy the cram school approach. Feel-good, right-brain thinking and political correctness turns out to be good for something.
In Asian countries (Japan, South Korea, China) where getting into the college of your choice is based solely on entrance exam scores, students spend more and more time cramming for tests that elite universities make more and more difficult in order to maintain their standard deviation rank on the distribution curve, resulting in mind-boggling overkill.
It also means that these universities don't really have to be good at anything. They just have to be highly selective. It's a chicken and egg dilemma no elite institution can escape. I mean, if Harvard really was such a great educational institution, it could randomly matriculate students regardless of test scores and turn them all into geniuses. Right?
I'm reminded of the Darwinian dance of death between the poisonous dart frog and the liophis snake. Over time, the frog has become more and more toxic and the snake more resistant to the toxins, to the point that a small frog could kill an adult human. Yet the snakes still eat the frogs, even though the physiological effect is the same as going on a weekend bender.
Which pretty much describes the brain of a Japanese high school student who's made it into an top-tier university. They need to spend four years consuming unhealthy amounts of alcohol just to wash it out of their systems.
May 23, 2011
Tameshite Gatten
I'm a big fan of slick NOVA and Nature productions, but there's a lot to be said for the laid-back simplicity of NHK's Tameshite Gatten approach. Roughly translated as "put it to the test and understand," it takes the more mundane aspects of everyday life and geeks out on them.
The closest examples that come to mind are Mythbusters and Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. I really miss the latter, in which Alda stood in for the viewer as the smart everyman who could digest scientific explanations that weren't overly dumbed down.
David Pogue's Making Stuff series had the right idea, but I felt like he was trying too hard to be hip and, hey, you're hip too for hanging out with a hip guy like me doing all this cool stuff! Ain't science neat? Neato cool. Watch me doing all the cool stuff you wish you were doing!
Neil deGrasse Tyson is better, but Nova Science Now still spends too much time and effort selling the concept and grooving up the presentations, while assuring you that you're not a nerd for tuning in.
Tameshite Gatten hosts Shinosuke Tatekawa and Fuemi Ono (like Alda, smart professional entertainers, not scientists or wannabees) are confident enough about what they are doing to dare being totally uncool and unhip--to the point of outright corniness--and yet very educational.
They make it work by turning the show into the equivalent of a Lisa Simpson science fair project, explaining the topic of the week to a panel of three B-list celebrities. The result is a surprisingly demanding Socratic dialogue. (The celebrities do have to be reasonably bright.)
The presentations have a deceptively low-tech gloss. They must have a dedicated staff slaving away all week with sewing machines and cardboard boxes and Elmer's glue, creating oversized models and goofy costumes. Not to mention the staff members deployed as guinea pigs.
(When the producer announces to the crew that next week's show is about colonoscopies, who exactly volunteers? I suspect it's one of those jobs given to the "new guy.")
At the same time, they don't shrink from the hard stuff, the physics and biochemistry, while focusing like a laser on relevancy. And at the end of the show, an expert in the field will come out to sum everything up. Or conduct a short cooking class.
The shows are about 40 percent health and medical topics, 40 percent food and cooking, and 20 percent "home economics." With the first, I have to wonder if there's a "Tameshite Gatten syndrome," people flooding the doctor's office with the symptoms covered in that week's show.
On the other hand, though I rarely watch cooking shows on PBS (I will channel surf over to Kitchen Nightmares, a show more about running a small business), Tameshite Gatten takes a very left-brained approach and makes cooking look geekily interesting.
One program was about the perfect onigiri (flavored rice balls). Along with CAT-scanning onigiri, they selected a panel of best and worst onigiri makers, had them wear pressure-sensitive gloves wired to a computer, and then analyzed the results. That's my idea of cooking.
The closest examples that come to mind are Mythbusters and Scientific American Frontiers with Alan Alda. I really miss the latter, in which Alda stood in for the viewer as the smart everyman who could digest scientific explanations that weren't overly dumbed down.
David Pogue's Making Stuff series had the right idea, but I felt like he was trying too hard to be hip and, hey, you're hip too for hanging out with a hip guy like me doing all this cool stuff! Ain't science neat? Neato cool. Watch me doing all the cool stuff you wish you were doing!
Neil deGrasse Tyson is better, but Nova Science Now still spends too much time and effort selling the concept and grooving up the presentations, while assuring you that you're not a nerd for tuning in.
Tameshite Gatten hosts Shinosuke Tatekawa and Fuemi Ono (like Alda, smart professional entertainers, not scientists or wannabees) are confident enough about what they are doing to dare being totally uncool and unhip--to the point of outright corniness--and yet very educational.
They make it work by turning the show into the equivalent of a Lisa Simpson science fair project, explaining the topic of the week to a panel of three B-list celebrities. The result is a surprisingly demanding Socratic dialogue. (The celebrities do have to be reasonably bright.)
The presentations have a deceptively low-tech gloss. They must have a dedicated staff slaving away all week with sewing machines and cardboard boxes and Elmer's glue, creating oversized models and goofy costumes. Not to mention the staff members deployed as guinea pigs.
(When the producer announces to the crew that next week's show is about colonoscopies, who exactly volunteers? I suspect it's one of those jobs given to the "new guy.")
At the same time, they don't shrink from the hard stuff, the physics and biochemistry, while focusing like a laser on relevancy. And at the end of the show, an expert in the field will come out to sum everything up. Or conduct a short cooking class.
The shows are about 40 percent health and medical topics, 40 percent food and cooking, and 20 percent "home economics." With the first, I have to wonder if there's a "Tameshite Gatten syndrome," people flooding the doctor's office with the symptoms covered in that week's show.
On the other hand, though I rarely watch cooking shows on PBS (I will channel surf over to Kitchen Nightmares, a show more about running a small business), Tameshite Gatten takes a very left-brained approach and makes cooking look geekily interesting.
One program was about the perfect onigiri (flavored rice balls). Along with CAT-scanning onigiri, they selected a panel of best and worst onigiri makers, had them wear pressure-sensitive gloves wired to a computer, and then analyzed the results. That's my idea of cooking.
Related posts
My kind of fanaticism
Labels: cooking shows, education, food, japanese tv, pop culture, science, technology, television
May 13, 2011
Being THAT GUY again
As Kate puts it, in making Star Wars I, II, and III, George Lucas
John Polkinghorne, a renowned professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, resigned to become an Anglican priest. In the Q&A after the lecture, he explains (starting at 37:00) that by his mid-forties, he knew he couldn't be THAT GUY again--the brilliant scientist--and didn't want to stay beyond his "sell-by" date.
Polkinghorne also illustrates what's good about term limits and bad about tenure. He did return to Cambridge and became president of Queen's College, but after pursuing a completely different occupation in the real world. The feudal inclination to perpetual self-entitlement reveals itself most powerfully in politics and academia and must be disciplined.
wasn't just trying to compete against directors like Ridley Scott and James Cameron (although he was doing that too), and he wasn't just trying to be rich and famous because he already was. He was trying to be THAT GUY again, the guy who came out of nowhere with a picture that wowed the world.
John Polkinghorne, a renowned professor of mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Cambridge, resigned to become an Anglican priest. In the Q&A after the lecture, he explains (starting at 37:00) that by his mid-forties, he knew he couldn't be THAT GUY again--the brilliant scientist--and didn't want to stay beyond his "sell-by" date.
Polkinghorne also illustrates what's good about term limits and bad about tenure. He did return to Cambridge and became president of Queen's College, but after pursuing a completely different occupation in the real world. The feudal inclination to perpetual self-entitlement reveals itself most powerfully in politics and academia and must be disciplined.
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A thought about Lucas
More thoughts about "That Guy"
Labels: education, kate, movies, religion, science, social studies
July 16, 2010
He says "bucket loads"
This pitch-perfect parody raises the question of what to call a parody of a parody when the former makes a more serious point than the latter (in this case, a hilarious series of Old Spice body wash commercials mocking body wash commercials).
And if you didn't think he said what I thought he said before the closing shot (a bit of a jolt, that!) and seeing it was produced by the BYU Lee Library, then your soul is purer than mine (though that'd be funny too--hey, material for another parody).
UPDATE: CNN misheard it too and bleeped it. It's a lot clearer in the "making of" segment.
And if you didn't think he said what I thought he said before the closing shot (a bit of a jolt, that!) and seeing it was produced by the BYU Lee Library, then your soul is purer than mine (though that'd be funny too--hey, material for another parody).
UPDATE: CNN misheard it too and bleeped it. It's a lot clearer in the "making of" segment.
Labels: BYU, education, parody, television
May 30, 2007
Dragon Zakura
At first glance, the TBS television series Dragon Zakura compares well with the movie Stand and Deliver. In the latter, maverick math teacher Jaime Escalante's goal is to teach and motivate his students at a failing inner-city high school to pass the AP calculus exam.In Dragon Zakura, Kenji Sakuragi is an ex-motorcycle gang member who pulled himself up by his bootstraps and became a lawyer (which is excruciatingly difficult in Japan). Now he's looking to do the same at a baka gakkou, a bottom-ranked Tokyo high school.
High schools in Japan are ranked by entrance exams the same way colleges in the U.S. can be ranked by SAT scores. Compulsory education in Japan ends with junior high and you have to pass an entrance exam to get into a good public high school.
His goal for his students: pass the Tôdai (Tokyo University) entrance exams, perhaps the toughest in the world (ironically, in terms of actual academic performance, Tôdai is pretty middling by world standards; once all those fried brains make it in, they're not particularly eager to set the world on fire).
Dragon Zakura, like Stand and Deliver, is "based on a true story." But while Stand and Deliver is a fairly accurate bio-pic, Dragon Zakura is far more fanciful. For example, the "master teachers" Kenji Sakuragi recruits to teach his hard-luck cases. The physics professor looks just like Einstein, the literature professor looks like Natsume Soseki, that kind of thing.
The knowledge they impart, though, is spot on. The pedagogical approach presented for the English portion of the exam (a subject I am somewhat qualified to address) should be made part and parcel of the curriculum in every Japanese high school. Though even here, Sakuragi is teaching to the test and nothing else.
Despite its uplifting conclusion, however, Dragon Zakura is a depressing indictment of the Japanese education system. While the "soft bigotry of low expectations" can be defeated by the right combination of innovative teaching techniques, the tagline: "Anybody can make it into Tôdai" is profoundly different than the tagline: "Anybody can pass the AP calculus exam."
Because everybody can't make it into Tôdai. For every student who makes it in, another student won't. This zero-sum game has turned the Tôdai exam into little more than a tortuous test of IQ and memorization skills. A high school student trying to get into Tôdai basically succeeds by proving that he's capable of graduating from Tôdai.
It'd be like having to ace the GMAT, MCAT, GRE and LSAT just to get admitted to the freshman class. But if you could pass those exams in the first place, why bother going to school?
The entire planet, on the other hand, could take the AP calculus exam if they were so inclined. And those credits would be treated the same at any institution, from the local community college to Harvard.
Moveover, in the U.S., those of Sakuragi's students who didn't make it into Tôdai on the first try certainly wouldn't waste a year of their lives as rounin treading the same water all over again. Anybody who could "almost" make it into Harvard could easily sail into a dozen other world-leading, top-tier schools that wouldn't hurt their future prospects in the slightest.
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Gang rule
Perseverance makes perfect
Labels: criticism, education, japan, japanese tv reviews, television reviews