Can you guess which President of the United States is in this picture? Go to this article to find the answer.
Clothing for children in the US has changed a lot in the last 150 years. Pink was thought to be a strong color, and blue a softer color. All children wore dresses until age six or so. It wasn’t until the early 1900s that things changed, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that our current thinking about children’s clothing colors became popular.
I was a kid in the 1950’s and they still used white for both boys and girls. Here is a picture of my grandmother holding me. I still have those white boots!
What about Japan or other countries? What colors are “normal” for kids and when did that start?
kevinryan.com blog will return to personal musings of Kevin Ryan in Tokyo (aka tokyokevin). The audience I will now aim at is more specific in one way, and more general in another.
I have a lot of students who wonder what is going on in the world. And the language learning world. And their world, but through English.
So from now on I will be posting about interesting things I find on the web, and for language learners. I will write in simpler English to make it easier for non-native speakers to understand.
My model here is either kottke.org, where Mr. Kottke has been posting interesting things for 25 years, or NextDraft, a daily newsletter of 5 interesting things in the news. Dave Pell makes it interesting by making the titles of his news with lots of puns.
I’m going to invite my students to read (not require, mind you), and comment on these posts. I hope to bring a lot of stuff I usually post in Facebook here.
I plan to follow Cory Doctorow’s practice of post once (in one place) and then add links in messages to all different social media. (What’s the term for this? I can’t find it.
Looking forward to posting more here. Also, see my other blog about technology in language teaching at EdgeOfCALL.net.
List of states in USA that require a 3-day stay in a hotel (Japan pays) upon arrival. Note that there are restrictions for other countries mixed in here, and yet other countries have restrictions for 6 days and 10 days, and still others are banned completely.
Ministry of Foreign Affairs source. Blacklisted states are in yellow. Delisted states in green. Note: Kanas was delisted, then listed again later.
Some odd things about this list. Once the state is on it, it is hard to get off. But no sign of states like Florida, Georgia, or Alabama. This has me curious as to how this list is compiled. If anybody know, please share it.
After 4 hours at the airport, and a 45-minute bus ride, we were presented with another set of handouts before we could get our keys and crash from exhaustion.
It’s 5:09 AM and I have been up for 3 hours in a tiny business hotel (APA) next to the Sumo Exhibition Hall (Ryogoku Kokugikan) in Tokyo. Here is a quick timeline on how I got here.
A 30-minute check-in after a 45-minute bus ride from Haneda, after 4 hours of paperwork, spit tests, waiting, immigration, and baggage. All were observed carefully by at least 200 employees, mostly young women, and through about 20 stops, or stations to cover six steps for the entry process. Because I was visiting Colorado, I won a 3-day paid holiday at this hotel with a daily spit test, and 3 box lunches a day.
All this was preceded by a 10-hour Delta flight (ironic, the name) with about 20 people on board. Before that, a 3-hour layover in Seattle with a little northwest clam chowder. My 3-hour flight to Seattle from Denver started with an hour Uber ride from my brother’s house at 4 AM. So all that totals to close to a full 24-hour sojourn. All masked, and continually enforced, especially in the airplane, even though all the passengers had negative covid tests.
I just ordered some snacks from Amazon because my stomach is not on the box lunch schedule. They should arrive later today, and will be checked before being delivered to me. No alcohol, no tobacco, no pizza, or fried chicken lest I have some fun or set the room on fire (how do you do that with pizza? The grease?)
The blizzard of paperwork started before my trip (July 23) after I had finished my vaccination here in Japan. Regardless, the US required a Covid test, which meant $250 and two trips to a clinic. Arrival in the US was pretty much the same as pre-covid (again with only about 20 people in the flight on the first day of the Olympics), with a cursory glance at the test at immigration.
Preparing for the return, I found a nice family clinic with travel covid tests. It seems these tests are free for most people, but I had to get the official test results on a paper form from some Ministry here in Japan, so it cost me $50. I made a new friend, the doctor, a Russian Japanophile, who went the extra mile to do all the checkmarks and signatures and stamps the document required. She may visit when Japan opens up. She may reconsider after reading this post.
Timing is very important on these tests. The results have to be within 72 hours of your flight. Beware of weekends, if you have to return. Some send you pdfs by email to hasten the process, and generic reports are OK for US entrance, and I think Japan would accept a generic test. I had time, so did the fill Ministry-approved form, which was checked carefully by at least 3 of the stations at Haneda.
Boarding in Seattle, I was given a 10-page handout with instructions, but no link to an electronic version. I filled out 4 forms there, and prepared to deplane. This became a bureaucrat’s wet dream. Every form had to be re-entered electronically, at different stations. At one point I got another 20-page handout that the bored staff tried to get me though, even though half the time there was no time to actually read the stuff. About halfway through, I got a green card to put on my wrist when they learned I had been in Colorado. Some states are like that. A woman I had recommended the clam chowder to was from Japan and she suffered the same 3-day incarceration, as did another woman from Kansas. The list of locations seems to be getting longer as I had not noted Kansas, but did note that neither Alabama or Florida were on it when I checked about 10 days ago.
I did a spit test and waited for the results, called to the podium by announcement. I wondered whether they chose the staff by because her numbers, in both Japanese and English, were practically unintelligible. As we proceeded through the process, the trend was away from bilingual announcements to Japanese only. I guess they figured were all either natives or long-term transplants here.
I was instructed to download 2 apps to my phone. You must have a phone and it has to be in working order. The apps check your location when they call at random times during the day (and night?). The other app allows them to see your face to make sure it is you. The guy wanted to download and set up the apps for me, but when he reached for my phone, I resisted. He walked me through the process with an eagle eye and jabbing fingers. Reading the terms and conditions was out of the question. The next lady checked to see if everything was working with test messages.
This will last 14 days.
After my 3 days at the hotel, I will return to Haneda, where my daughter will pick me up in our car. Some people rent cars or get very expensive limousine services. No public transport allowed, not even taxies. Then 11 more days at home with the electronic ball and chain.
Your vaccination status is never considered or brought up. It is irrelevant. I’ve read about some kind of vaccine passport, but nobody had one in our group.
After a few days “off” getting up to speed on my new semester here, back to a serious third reading, adding ideas for leading the upcoming course. No more bedtime perusing, but morning attacks. Adding layers and points to the plan, allowing for accordion-like flexibility.
Let’s be honest, a lot of research is a little dry. A straightforward grad-school seminar class format is not what I am looking for. To knit the research together, we can look for layers, build in layers, and then add points.
This will change, but the layers I am considering right now include, but are not limited to:
1) Dimensions Matrix. See the previous post about ASQ: Agreed/Surprising/Questionable, in 3 levels, Task/Language/Science.
2) Connected to what? How does each chapter of TBLT connect with vocabulary acquisition, the Dogme approach, textbooks, teacher training?
3) Task of the Week (research): We pick out a representative task that we drill down on. Maybe even start a star-graph evaluation system.
4) Task of the Week (teaching): We pick out a task, probably from the Activities for TBLT by Anderson and McCutcheon. (Listen to Neil’s interview on oxfordlp.org) to take a close look at.
5) Developing experts: My high school lit teacher appointed me the Vonnegut expert. Another got to be the humor expert, and so on. Here, we cast about for expertise in experimental design, statistics, application, and teacher training.
6) If this study were a movie (or an animal): Taking a look at one particular study and trying to draw as many metaphors out from it.
7) Author of the week: See who shines in each chapter. Look at their other work, how they got there, and where have have gone since. (Scroll back to a previous post about The Rewatchables podcast, where they look a the star and see what part of their career they were in the movie: aka Apex Mountain).
8) I used to do that: Tales about encountering different forms of TBLT in our careers.
I am going to hold off with a few more until these settle down. See you soon.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
