Kyoritsu

Changing subjects, a bit about Russ’s classes. Russ is teaching three classes at Kyoritsu Women’s University in Tokyo: American Arts and Culture, African-American History, and American Foreign Policy. The students are sophomores, juniors and seniors who are majoring in international studies. Many of them are interested in jobs that require English (e.g., several want to be flight attendants) or in traveling to America. (One wrote down that she is interested in an International marriage!)

College classes in Japan meet only once a week (for 90 minutes in this case), and students are required to attend 2/3 of the time. At the beginning of class, they all automatically fill out little slips of paper to turn in for attendance record-keeping.

Russ has it to be a good challenge since the students are a little shy about speaking in class. He’s found writing or drawing activities to be successful. For example, one thing that worked well was when he was teaching about Jacob Riis and he had the students draw pictures of rich and poor live in Japan now (to parallel How the Other Half Lives). “Rich” pictures illustrated scenes like people sitting in Rappongi Hills (an area of Tokyo) drinking wine, while “poor” pictures showed people sleeping in parks or streets.

Russ always has a Kyoritsu faculty member in with him to translate if needed, so that has been very helpful.

We will be leaving for Hong Kong and Macau on Friday, so we may not get to doing another post before then. Next week is Golden Week in Japan, which officially looks like a holiday-a work day-a work day-a holiday-a holiday-a holiday (more or less), but is essentially a week off. Since everything will be crowded and expensive here, we decided to take the opportunity to see some more of Asia.