Why I Haven't Returned to Teaching English

I really don't have time to be writing this, and I'm sure friends will just roll their eyes and say I'm using avoidance tactics again. And they probably wouldn't exactly be wrong.

But there's something that seems to really need to be said.

I apologize for the length of this, and for not doing the expository thing where I tell you up front and then tell you in detail, and then tell you again. If I approach it directly, most people's immediate reaction will be to argue with me.

Yes, I am a good teacher. Yes, I have the skills teach English, certain science fields (particularly computer science), and math, among other things.

Japan, just like the US, just like much of the rest of the world, needs good teachers -- I mean, really, really needs good teachers, in all subjects -- except the current most popular subjects. (Actually, that's, except the subjects that were most popular two-to-six years ago. There's a delay between demand and supply called getting the degrees.) 

Why? Where are the good teachers and why aren't they teaching?

There are three parts to answering that question, and I'll start with the easiest one first.

There are a lot of mediocre and bad teachers in the education industry. (Don't argue with me on this, education has become an industry.)

And when they see a good teacher at work, they become jealous, and fearful for their jobs. And they start resorting to defense tactics -- mostly subconsciously, I think. I hope.

What defense tactics?

• Reports and other paperwork are not inherently evil. But they can easily be overdone in volume and style, and other aspects. Overdoing such things eats away at preparation time and other important resources.
• Likewise, meetings and evaluations are not inherently evil. Likewise about volume, structure, and goals, and about eating resources.
  
• Inventing new approaches is a good thing. Trying to enforce them on everyone else is pure evil.
  
• Praise and critique are important and good. Faint/false praise and hidden sniping are evil.
  

For some reason, mediocre and bad teachers are very good at turning attempts to improve things into defense tactics.

And, truth be told, the mediocre and bad teachers could be good teachers if they would actually engage with their subject matter while engaging in defense tactics, and if they would actually dare to engage with their students in meaningful ways (and not just in discussing whatever the currently popular topics are and otherwise currying student favor and encouraging teacher's pets).

Why are so many teachers willing to undermine the education systems?

Here's where I really get into controversial stuff.

I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said it. I'm not sure. It was one of those guys who worked on the US Constitution and played an important part in the birth of the US of A.

Public education should be for children who don't have family who can pay for their private education, was part of the idea. And it should be limited to three years, just enough to get the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. From there, from about the age of nine, ten, or eleven, education should be primarily the responsibility of the individual, initially guided by parents or legal guardians -- individual students, individual children choosing their own courses through the school of life.

I may be remembering that wrong, as well, but I think that's the gist of it.

Education is a lifelong process, and there is nothing more suppressive to education than to force people to study what they have no preparation for and to delay them unreasonably from studying what they are already prepared for. Public education programs can't avoid both pushing students too far ahead and holding them too far back. It's simply in the nature of systems.

The education industry itself engages in defense tactics. Schools are by no means the only source of what they advertise as their main products -- knowledge and education. And I'm going to refrain from repeating myself in analyzing what the industry does, by means of those who run it. 

Wait. If it's true of public education, why isn't it true of private education?

In Japan, Juku has this problem in spades. The Ministry of Education has been trying to reform the entrance examination systems for several decades, but teaching for the tests is viewed as the lifeblood of the juku. 

Teachers who have not yet obtained tenure do not want to risk their safety net if the don't get re-hired next year, any more than those juku teachers who have not had public education experience. Nor do tenured teachers want to risk their post-retirement options.

Thus, teaching the tests has become entrenched in private education.

Teaching the tests is not education. Can't we finally get past that?

Tests are supposed to be opportunities for the students to stretch and evaluate their mental muscles, but they have primarily been perverted to gate-keeper roles where there should be no gate-keepers -- or, rather, where gate-keepers should be there to help, not prevent.

Tests are being used as tools of exclusion, which is in direct opposition to the only valid purpose of both private and public education.

In Japan, three years is not really enough to master reading and writing.

In the modern world, addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are no longer enough.

But we wouldn't be asking them to master anything at school. Mastering things would be done in real world. 

If we want to solve the teacher shortage, we need to integrate the education industry with the real world.

Anyway, since the bike-car accident I had about five years ago, I just don't have the energy to engage in the constant battles that go on between what should be and what is in the education industry.

Fortress against English

Recently, one of my private weekday students left this behind:

I forgot to clean it up, so the morning teachers had to take care of it the next day. (Sorry, guys. But thanks for the pic.)

This particular student regularly builds forts which he hides in while I try to engage him in English-related activities. Two weeks ago, I managed to interest him in a book of funny sentences and pictures (Cheese and Tomato Spider, if you're curious.) before he got started on his fort, and then got him to sit through a set of Halloween flashcards.

I thought maybe the monsters had his interest, and they did. Last week he brought a library book of monsters to read. Japanese, not English.

He sat down, opened the book, and dug in while I prepared for the lesson. Pretty soon he looked up and said, in Japanese, "See! Frankenstein! And Dracula! and Arachne! And Mummy! And Zombie! Werewolf!"

I argued with him (playfully, in English) about whether the ghost flashcard I had was a zombie or a ghost, so he had to look up ghosts. The book had a ghost ship.

I'm not sure wheher his thesis was that all those monsters were Japanese or that he didn't need English to learn about them. Both, I think.

Eventually, I just pulled out the jobs flashcards, and he had the patience to listen and even try to repeat about half, then play a game with me where I set about six of them out, then said one and waited for him to pick it out, replacing as we went.

Was I surprised that he had patience?

Not really. He's a smart guy. He doesn't want to be made to do anything, and he doesn't want to be drawn into anything that is not obviously going to benefit him. But if it's new and makes him think, maybe he's okay with it.

Letting him say his piece about English and monsters, even if I disagreed with him, gave him enough satisfaction to be a little patient with me and with English. And the jobs flashcard were new enough to overcome enough of his resistance to put up with it.

Why should he have such a strong resistance to English?

Well, ...

1. It's different.
   
   • He's only in the 2nd grade in elementary. He's finally getting the hang of hiragana, katakana, and numbers.
   • He wants to understand the world, and he is absorbing Japanese vocabulary. (He's actually quite a bit ahead of the median in 2nd grade in his mother tongue.)
   • All of that takes energy and work. He's working hard, and English rules, vocabulary and pronunciation are different and distracting.
   • And they confilct with the rules he is working so hard to learn.
2. He had a bad experience with a previous teacher who lost patience with his approach to learning. He has been hurt by English, as he perceives it.
3. I'm probably the first teacher who knows enough Japanese for him to be able (he hopes) to successfully negotiate the rules system with. So he wants to negotiate.

He is not a bad kid. He's smart. He wants to learn. But he wants to learn in a meaningful way, and that has been denied him so far relative to English.

So he's going to make an English teacher (me) work really, really hard, before letting English (back) into his life.

Or something like that. I don't know everything about the guy, but this is what I've pieced together from our lessons and from what his mother and other teachers have told me.

Why doesn't it worry me? I've seen it before, many times. I've seen young students who fought English when I started with them change their minds. And I've seen a few students I couldn't reach.

It's not my decision. Ultimately it's the student's decision. My job is just to give him the best opportunity I can to make a decision that's good for him.

Shiny Things (and Teaching English)

Several weeks ago, some of my Saturday students got busy during break. When I went to call them back to the crafts project I had prepared, here's what I found:
数週間前に、サタデースクールの子供たちが休憩の間に、遊びに夢中になってた。受業に呼び戻そうとしたところ以下の様子を目にしました。

If you have watched certain daytime children's TV shows in Japan, you'll probably recognize what they were trying to do.
ある子供向けの日本のテレビ番組を見ているなら、その子供たちがなにを企んでいたかがお解りだと思います。

Even if you haven't, you can probably guess that the ball on the left is intended to be rolled into the track formed by the chairs, and maybe caught in the baby rocker on the right, or to bounce over it, depending on how fast it is rolled.
その番組を見ていなくても、左側にあるボールを置いている目的は、イスの間にできている迷路もどきに入って右へと転ばしたら、転ばされた速度によって揺れかごの上を飛び渡るかすっかりとその中に入り込むかと、多分推測できるでしょう。

Sometimes, the students build forts out of carboard boxes, tables, chairs, and other pieces of equipment in the school.
時には、子供たちが学校に置いているダンボール箱やテーブル、イスなどを使って基地を作ったりします。

I generally let them do so. Children are more engaged in learning activities when they are having fun.
楽しくやっていると教育活動に子供たちがもっと集中してくれるのですので、大概は作っているのを止めません。

As a strategy, I can usually play the monster attacking their fort, and then bring the flash cards when I attack and show them flash cards while playing the monster, drawing them back into English and into games which give them more direct exposure to English.
戦略として、鬼になって基地を攻撃して、またフラッシュカードを持って見せながら攻撃して英語に呼び戻すやり方があります。だいたいその戦略によって、もっと直接的に英語に触れるゲームに戻ってもらえるのです。

When I use these kinds of techniques, things will usually click in the lessons, and (perhaps as their monster) I can speak English and get them to respond in English in their games of imagination. Role playing is a wonderful tool in teaching a foreign language.
こういう技術をレッスンの中に取り入れると、大概ですけど、レッスン中子供に閃きつき、たとえ鬼の英語としてでも、英語を耳にすることを我慢してもらって、その想像の遊びの中でも英語で反応してもらうことができます。模擬というものは外国言語を教えることに素晴らしい道具です。

Cardboard boxes.
ダンボル箱やな。

If you are a parent, you probably know the frustration of buying some shiny new present for your child and watching her happily pull it out of the box, play with it for maybe ten minutes, then spend the rest of the day playing with the box instead.
親として理解していただけると思います。何かの新しいものをプレゼントを買ってあげて、子供が嬉しく箱から取り出すのを、およそ１０分ぐらい遊んだら、その一日ののこりをプレゼントではなく箱で遊ぶのを見守ることがよくあります。

Why is that?
どうしてでしょう？

Easy. A carboard box is an invitation to dream.
かんちん。ダンボル箱は夢見る誘いです。

Dreams are shinier than plastic, metal, and glass.
夢なんてプラスッチックやら金属やらガラスなどよりもずっと輝くですから。

(There is a converse argument to this way of thinking, and the argument is not without value. I'll have to post that argument sometime.
こういう考え方に反論があって、その反論には価値がないとは言えないのがあります。というのでその反論を説明する投稿もしないと行けないでしょう。)

---

[1 December 2018:]

When I originally posted this, back in October, I was still struggling to get this approach to work at that school. Other teachers (not native English speakers) did not seem to know how to deal with it. And they would say things to the kids that, well, just didn't help.
１０月、これを元々投稿した時、その学校でこういう技術を適用としても効き目がさほどなかったのです。他の先生（英語を母国語とする先生ではなかったけど）私のやり方について納得してもらうことができなかったようです。子供にレッスンの（言っちゃて悪いかな？）応援にはならないことを言ってしまう傾向が多かったのです。

Posting this seems to have precipitated my being released from my contract at that school. これの投稿がその学校の契約から降ろされるきっかけになったようです。

Funny thing, during my last month at that school, the students settled down and the lessons started working better.
皮肉に思うかな。その学校の最後の一ヶ月の間、生徒たちの落ち着きが良くなって、レッスンがもっと巧く行くようにもなりました。

Learning a Foreign Language 外国言語を学ぶには

I had a chat about teaching foreign languages with a potential employer recently. Regretfully, it was not very productive.

Her idea of teaching foreign languages consists of subjecting students to two classes of activity:

Input and output.

At the risk of being rude, this sort of approach treats the student as a machine.

I guess the theory is that you shove a lot of input in, and the human machine (in self defense, maybe?) naturally begins trying to make sense of it. The sense it makes of the information you input would be the first step.

Then you give the human machine a chance to output what it has learned, and you give the machine feedback. The machine supposedly uses the feedback to correct what it has learned.

I'll admit that this is a partially valid view of part of the process. But it's fatally flawed because it is incomplete.

Many humans do not naturally try to make sense of all information they are given. Information that is not deemed important tends to get filtered out. You cannot overcome this filter by sheer charismatic force, and, when you try to do so, you end up creating learning blocks instead of learning.

Teaching is a communication process. It is not one-way, it is two-way.

There are four essential elements of learning a foreign language.

1: Courage, determination, perseverence, and desire;

2: Willingness to make mistakes;

3:  Developing learning strategies;

4: And acquisition of the target language itself.

The first element is obvious not something you can force on a student. If the student sees the teacher mindlessly repeating (for example) a set of flash cards, she might believe there is a reason, or she might believe the teacher is crazy.

Babies have to assume the people around them are doing something meaningful, but they usually don't see people mindlessly rifling through a set of flash cards. They usually see see older children and adults communicating, and the communication they observe is rich with clues.

Students learning a second language are no longer in the do-or-die mode (hopefully). But they still need to see people doing things that make sense in the target language. Mindless repetition is, by definition, not going to be an activity rich in meaning.

There is a theory that assumes immersing the student in a target-language environment. In the extreme implementation, there is no mother tongue help at all. Such help is considered a hindrance to the object of forcing the student to acquire acquisition skills.

It does produce results. Children learn patterned responses, but they don't, except for a few who start out with language acquisition skills, acquire real meaning with the patterns. Without the meaning, the language lessons quickly become little more than a pattern game, like those Simon Says electronic toys: beep-beep-beep gets beep-beep-beep.

But that's in the best case. In the worst case, the students just get discouraged, frustrated, angry, and finally lose whatever motivation they might have had.

What determines whether the students start learning the pattern game or just lose motivation? Nothing more or less than personal chemistry with the teacher.

However, in the language immersion environment, even a little bit of the mother tongue can help untangle this web of de-motivation. And it can also help break through the pattern game.

(Really, any extreme idealism in education can't be good.)

More important than the clues, appropriate use of the mother tongue can be used to encourage the students.

The second element is a purely personal thing, but without it no student is going anywhere very fast.

No one starts with perfect understanding, so everyone makes mistakes. The learning environment has to be somewhat forgiving of mistakes. Not too forgiving, because students need feedback, but somewhat forgiving. Otherwise, mistakes pile up and get in the way of learning. (And when they pile up too much, students get stressed out and maybe even commit suicide.)

Learning strategies, the third element are far more important than teaching strategies. If you ask why, I'll remind you. Learning takes place within the student, not the teacher.

How does a teacher teach learning strategies?

Every teaching strategy you use demonstrates a learning strategy to the student. So you want to use lots of different teaching strategies.

But, even better, letting the students see the teacher in the process of learning something demonstrates learning strategy directly.

What is teaching?

It's one half of a process where information is passed from one person to another. Together with learning, education is simply one form of communication.

Or, rather, communication and education are basically the same thing, with a slightly different emphasis.

The most important teaching strategy and the most important learning strategy are both communication.

When you communicate with the student, you are teaching. When you do not communicate, you are not teaching.

Finally, we get to acquisition.

And if you are paying attention, you will see that I have said something Terrible. Awful. Horrible.

A teacher who does not know the target language, but is willing to learn with the students, can, in fact, lead a clsss in learning the target language.

Scary!

That pile of 500 flash cards is just another tool, a potentially useful secondary tool.

That list of three thousand key vocabulary words is just another tool, a potentially useful secondary tool.

That book of eighty grammar principles is just another tool, a potentially useful secondary tool.

Tests are just another tool, a potentially useful secondary tool.

One of the primary tools are books in the target language, and a teacher willing to read with the students. Note that I say, "with" more than "to".

Another primary tool is a teacher willing to communicate, even if he or she has to give in and use the student's mother tongue sometimes to do so.

Other useful secondary tools?

Games!

Hangman or draw-the-flower, and other spelling games;

Word Bingo and other games that allow students to speak and listen to vocabulary;

AGO and Go Fish and other games that allow students to speak and listen to phrases and sentences;

Etc.

Role-playing, pair practice, and skits (including English Rakugo) can also help, especially if they are made fun.

Why fun? Because things that are fun have meaning, and things that have no meaning are not fun. It helps bring meaning to lessons, and it is the meaning in the lesson that helps students learn.

Along with the flash cards, writing practice, vocabulary matching, pair practice, etc., use games. They aren't just sugar to help the medicine go down.

powerful programming languages -- php5 and suhosin

PHP5 is pretty powerful.

Powerful languages have a problem. They allow things to happen that the language designer hasn't even imagined. Some of those things sometimes allow mean-spirited sorts of people to attack servers, steal credit card numbers, and make general malicious mischief.

So PHP version 5.3 needed a band-aid, to help the naive web programmer avoid blowing him/herself away with good intentions poorly implemented. The band-aid was called "suhosin".

Unfortunately, the three German engineers who developed suhosin seem to have gotten busy doing other things, according to this post at Arch Linux. And the current suhosin doesn't match the current version of php5. [update: If you fail to follow all of the links Pierre provides, at least look at this mailing list post from one of suhosin's developers.]

I had been thinking about brushing up my php skills, so I had installed php. With the upgrade to 5.4 in Debian wheezy, suhosin doesn't load. Instead, it fills my error log files with complaints of incompatibility.

So I checked, and nothing else gets removed when I remove php5. So I removed it.

When I really need it again, I'll install it again. Maybe by that time the guys who run php will have folded all of the functionality of suhosin into the language itself.

But this is not a solution, it's a knee-jerk reaction. More first-aid fixes that don't really do the full job.

This highlights one of the problems in software architecture: The power of a powerful language is in its expressiveness. To the more expressive a language is, the fewer limits there are to the things which can be expressed in it. But security in current practice requires setting limits. We need to give the programmer power, but we need to take power away from the end user.

There is an inherent conflict here. I mean, sure, we could go the direction taken with Java, using execution policies to tune the expressiveness available in the end-user's context, but that has its own set of traps --

• Will some of the programmers remember to set up the policies?
• Do the programmers understand how the policies are used to secure the system?
• Does the policy end up preventing the end user from doing important things?

It is interesting that there are parallel issues in law, regulation, and government policy.

• Do legislators understand the interaction with law and regulation and the potentials for abusing the laws and regulations?
• How does the government protect the people's security without inducing more chances for treacherous abuse?
• And how can a government make the people secure without excessively limiting their freedoms? 

Systems have complicated interactions. The more complicated the systems are, the more loopholes (ergo, vulnerabilities) they have. This is a known problem with systems, and it applies as much to computer systems as it does to bureaucracies.

The answer of the US Constitution was "Use checks and balances and keep it simple." Both of these principles have been long ago set aside as legislators and special interest groups press for responsive government.

Is there something wrong here?

Can we as general members of society learn enough about systems to pare back the legal kruft that is currently overburdening (and overly burdening) society (and is a primary cause of budget problems, not to mention the bureaucratic abuses that show every sign of continuing to increase)?

Can these principles be applied to computer systems? If they can, how?

I think they can, but I'm not sure anyone reading this would understand. (I'm not intending to insult. No one has time to study every necessary subject, and this particular subject has been advertised by certain special interest groups as unnecessary.)

And it seems no surprise to me that the current trends in systems design seem to be going towards increasing complexity in the provided systems, which parallels the political atmosphere, and is exactly not the solution. Precisely what we should not be doing.

We put power in the end users' hands (quite literally with the new crop of portable information devices that match the supercomputers of a few years ago). We spend a lot of money, time, and effort putting power in the end users' hands. Then we spend a lot of money, time, and effort trying to limit that power to some definition of "right" uses. We are

• Not trying to teach the end user how to use the power wisely. 
• Not trying to show the end user how to get around the traps.
• Not trying to give the end user more power to do right things.
• Not really trying to give the user solutions, just things that we can sell as if they were solutions

We (that is, the primary movers of the industry) don't want to teach the end user anything that would allow him or her to practice the intellectual property that the system designers' (investors and accountants) think should be making profits for the providers.

We can't understand everything the end user wants to do, and we can't predict what would be "safe" or "dangerous" beyond making crude and overly broad walls. (We, as an industry, try to make straitjackets, really, but we fortunately tend to fail to get the user into the straitjackets -- Fortunately, indeed, since success would make us unable to even consider band-aids like suhosin.)

And we (the primary movers of the industry) don't want to believe that end users could really want to use our systems, any more than we want to believe that the end user could understand new and appropriate ways to use our systems.

We don't want to believe that the end users might be smarter than the system designers about what the end user wants to do with the systems.

And yet, it is the only the smart end user that can safely use the system.

Uhm, no, I don't have a happy solution to the problems yet, at least no quick, straightforward patches. The only real solution I can see is not going to be quick, not going to contribute immediately to anyone's bottom line of monetary profit, not going to be considered acceptable to any of the current crop of investors, managers, and accountants.

social freedoms and the semantics of machines

A boy I know and his parents have arguments over how much time he spends playing video games. The funny thing (one odd thing) is that the parents claim to support social freedoms.

The son, for his part, is in a high-pressure high school over his head. Not so much over his head, but the school is a science/math focus school and his interests are in the people sciences, history, maybe biology, definitely sociology, etc. The games are not just his way of letting off steam. They help him loosen his conscious grip on his understanding enough to let the principles soak in.

He gets the principles, just not fast enough to keep up with the pace of his homework, or the tests. He's always a step or two behind.

So his grades are in the sink.

But when he understands, he understands, as opposed to the average above-average student who mechanically copies the rotework and never really grasps what is going on.

Playing video games at three or four in the morning is a little extreme. Japanese high schools, the ones everyone fights to get into, are not conducive to education.

If the parents recognize that people in generally must be free, why can't they let their own child choose how he attempts to implement his goals?

Actually, more than one family I know is in this vicious cycle.


No time to write this out in small steps:

If there is a reason for people to be different from each other, they have to be free.

If people have to be free, children have to be free to find their own way, even to extremes like playing video games at three and four in the morning.

If they don't have freedom, how do they find the meaning in the things they do?

If they don't find meaning in what they do, what makes them any different from the machines we build?

(This argument appears to contain some logical leaps and some incomplete implications, but tightening up the logic runs into axioms that some people like to quibble excessively over. And I'm out of time.)

Of course, the warning voice of the parents is one of the context elements that helps children find meaning, but parents really need to be conscious of what meanings they help their children find.