I am about to give up. After five weeks of teaching my new zemi, I'm lost as to what to do. Japanese students, at least at UMDS, are incredibly unmotivated. It is perhaps unfair to generalize, but it is equally easy to do so. It was once the generally accepted knowledge that entering a Japanese university was difficult, thanks to the horrendously anal entrance exams, but that graduating was easy. Today, however, at all but the very top schools entering has become almost as easy as getting out. Our Finance department has such a small enrollment rate that anyone taking the entrance exam (which costs ¥35,000 per go!) automatically passes.
It shows. Students do not seem to know why they are studying and what the advantages of studying may be.
I have five students in my zemi this year. Two of them entered on the second recruitment round and one on the third. I'd never met them before the first class (to which only three of them turned up!) and since then they have managed to avoid most of the things I've asked them to do. Today, after a third appeal for suggestions as to what they might find interesting and useful, again which was met with nothing but silence, we did goal setting. They have no goals. This isn't totally unusual or unexpected for second years, but they were also reluctant to think of any. Then, asking them to write out 30 goals (about 2 pages of notes) in the next five days, I was met with complaints about making them study too hard.
With only 5 students in the class it seems curlish to not just bulldoze various activities onto them, but they're basically uninterested. What will happen I've no idea. Of the five only one student show's any interest in actually learning, and, in other ways, he's probably the most immature of the lot, but at least he's keen. If the rest don't want to study, they need to understand that it is not a problem in the least because, as students, whether they study or not is up to them.
07/11/2005
Trying out Flock
This is just a little post to see what happens with Flock. There's been a lot (A LOT!) of criticism - or, more accurately, skepticism - surrounding Flock, but so far (after about 1-2 minutes of use) it looks rather good. Connecting to my Blogger account was easy-peasy, and getting settings from Safari took seconds (although, I haven't yet found my bookmarks and it certainly didn't copy across my vitally important Bookmark Bar).
So, so far, so good. Definitely worth a try, and if it gets me writing more on my blog, so much the better, eh?
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