randomwisdom.com

I thought briefly about posting the events of last weekend here, but this venue is much too public for what I want to say.  Therefore, I'm going to post behind a "friends only" wall on livejournal.  Those of you who don't have access to that can send me an email and I'll tell you what happened.

I actually had an interesting weekend for a change.

Friday, I attended the "Miyagi October Meeting" for JETs, which was a complete and utter waste of a Friday. I did get the chance to go to my favorite sandwich shop in Sendai, so it wasn't a total writeoff. Like most teacher meetings, it consisted of "how to plan activities" and other things which would be useful if I were actually planning lessons or activities. I let out a hearty guffaw every time I heard the phrase "when you plan your lessons", though perhaps I should have made a drinking game out of it. Activities? Departure from the textbook? What planet are you guys from? Sorry guys, but if you want to change things you're barking up the wrong tree. Stop preaching to the choir and go train the people that actually run the classes, because I can only do my job if they do theirs.

So after that fantastic charade I wandered a bit with a couple of the other guys, and found my way into the Yodobashi Camera store, where I debated whether or not to buy a DS Lite. Probably many of you who read this don't know what it is, but the DS is Nintendo's latest handheld system, which has two screens and a pen. It makes for a lot of interesting possibilities, like study games or trivia; the system is really popular with kids and adults, and I've even seen grandmothers playing Brain Age while waiting for the bus. The real kicker was a kanji test game that the local Chris showed me while we were bumming around at Starbucks. It requires you to write both kanji and their readings, and is presented in a way that starts you from the most basic characters without assuming you know any kanji. I think that game by itself is probably worth the cost of the system.

The monthly Sendai "talking party" was supposed to be in the AER building next to the station, but it was moved at the last minute with a mass email. Thankfully, AER has a place where you can use the Internet for free, so I was able to find out the new location with little fuss, and met up with my buddy Ken just on the way out the door. I spent most of the time talking to the 6th grader with better English than most adults I've met, and then Ken and I picked up three girls before we left. (No, I didn't pick up the 6th grader. She had to go home.) The 5 of us met up with George back at the station, and chatted over at the same Starbucks until they closed the store, and I exchanged numbers with one who was a Chem Eng student at Tohoku.
I woke up the next morning and remembered that a girl I had met way back in February had invited me to her "international cafe" at her school's culture festival. No, my memory isn't THAT good; she reminded me at a previous talking party. So I emailed her to find out where the festival was, did some map searching on my phone, and hopped on my bike on the way to Miyagi Gakuin University.

Which, as it turns out, is a women's university. It's a Japanese college girl convention. I've died and gone to heaven.

So I stroll in there, leather jacket over my shoulder, smiling at every cute girl I see (and believe me, there's no shortage), and I could have sworn that conversations stopped mid-breath. The girls selling popcorn to raise money for their club were all smiles and giggles as I bought some popcorn from them and stopped to chat for awhile. Then I went up to the "English Cafe" where I became the most popular guy in a room full of girls. At one point I had a group of 5 chatting it up with me; two kept asking about all my travels, two just gazed into my eyes with something approximating lust, and one couldn't stop commenting about how blue my eyes were. But by far the most interesting was a girl who was part of the English Cafe staff, who had fantastic English and a disarming crooked smile. Of course, I got her number.

That evening, I got a phone call from a girl that Yassan had introduced me to; she works at a preschool. She asked me in a rather confusing fashion if she could share my email address with another one of her friends. I assumed she was talking about one of the two friends sitting with her the first time we met, but instead I got an email from a fourth girl who also works at the preschool. The next day I received another email, with a question about where I was from. When I responded, she sent another question. Each time I responded, she sent another email, and finally last night I asked her out for coffee, just to meet in person so I didn't have to struggle to write repeated emails on the phone. I guess that means she won?

I came up with a new game today for elementary kids in order to exercise my inner mathematician.  The game is simply called "Trading Game" and it takes a few minutes to explain.

My school has groups of sturdy professionally printed flashcards for different types of objects; some examples are food, animals, things, and actions.  The cards have an illustration and an English word, and are blank on the back.  Most decks have just 2 or 4 of each word, maybe with 8 words in a deck.  But the foods category has 20 different words, and the deck contains 8 of each card, making it ideal for card games.

Here's how the trading game works.  First, I make a "deck" containing one of every word.  Then I remove some of the words so that I don't have too many cards.  I pass out 4 cards to each student, and ideally have a few cards left over, say around ten.  Make sure that no student has 3 or more of the same card.  The object of the game is to score points by trading cards with other students.  The cards have different values depending on how rare each one is; I use the leftover cards to decide which cards are worth what.  If I have one of a certain card left over after passing out 4 to each student, it's worth 2 points, if I have two left the card is worth 3 points, and so on.  The rest are worth 1 point.

Obviously, you want to trade for the higher cards, but there's a catch.  If you have 3 of the same card, the value of your hand doubles.  If you have 4 of a kind, the value quadruples.  A pair adds no bonus (so there's no point in having 2 pairs).  So, for example, if I hold 4 different cards worth 3 points each, I have 12 points.  But I can get the same score of 12 with a single 3 point card and three of the same 1 point card, and if I have 4 of the same card each worth only 1 point, my score is 16 points.

Students walk around the room, trying to trade cards with other players.  For a trade to take place, both parties have to agree.  Students can trade as many cards as they want, but no player can have more or less than 4 cards when the trading is done.  It's important to tell the students when trading will end, and to give the point values before trading starts.  (Enterprising CS students will recognize this as being similar to the "stable marriage" algorithm, with a few twists. I've found that students tend to not trade unless they both see an immediate benefit, and only the older students trade with card point values in mind; the rest just try to accumulate 4 of the same card.  It would be interesting to find out what an optimal strategy is, given a certain number of trading iterations.)

I teach them the phrases "I want ~~" and the responses "OK" (if they agree) and "No, thanks" (if they don't want to give up that card) and also "I don't have ~~" (if they want to trade but don't have what the other player wants).  When the game is over, everyone counts up their points.

For a variation, you can group the students into teams, and tally up the scores that way.  Or you could try it with more cards, maybe 5 or 6, and adjust the multipliers accordingly, though you need to make sure that a student who gets all of the lowest denomination will beat a student who just gets one of each high card.  The game doesn't work with just 3 cards, as the system becomes stable after just 2 or 3 trades (in other words, the kids get the cards they want and stop trading) and also there's a very high probability that many students will start with a pair, meaning they only have to have one successful trade to finish.

And here I was thinking that "Radioactive Snails" would be a great name for a band.

There's a coffeeshop in many small towns in Japan, even though coffee is insanely expensive and most people drink tea on a regular basis. Why? Well, a coffeeshop is a great place to get away from the claustrophobic air of most apartments, it's a convenient neutral ground to meet friends in off hours, and it's one of the few places you can get decent spaghetti.

My town's coffeeshop is called "Liverté", with the little mark on top. A cup of joe will run you almost 4 bucks, but you can choose from a small list of premium arabica, so I think it's worth it. Rather than using an espresso machine or standard drip coffeemaker, there is a gas range and an array of glass flasks. I had never seen this type of setup before, but apparently it's called vacuum pot brewing and it's been around for a long time. The woman behind the counter fills the flask about 2/3 with water, heats it over a gas flame, and then wedges in a funnel-like device with a rubber seal once the water heats up a bit; this funnel contains the coffee grinds. The water is forced up into the funnel when it gets hot enough, and when enough water has forced its way up she turns off the gas. The cooling flask sucks the brewed coffee out of the grinds. It makes for a fun show, and a delicious cup of coffee.

And here is the not-so-good photo from my phone, emailed to myself and posted manually.  See the depths to which I've sunk?  I really really need that camera.

I had just gotten my rear brake pads changed out, and a new chain, and then it decided to rain and blow nasty wind on Saturday and Sunday. Luckily for me, yesterday was a vacation day, so I seized the day and went touring on the bike.

First stop was Ishinomaki. Although Mike and Sherry went back home in August, before they left they showed me a fantastic ramen restaurant by the station. I had miso butter ramen (with corn, quite good) and planned out the next leg of my journey. I expected to take route 45 north, following a large river and avoiding the coastline. But I kinda missed the turnoff to one of the minor roads. Imagine my surprise when I caught the whiff of an ocean breeze. Hmm, that's not quite right, I thought to myself. Need to find a place to stop and get my bearings.

A sign read (in Japanese, of course):
Cafe-G
coffee, tea, toast
2 seconds

Two seconds? Oh, that means now! A quick brake and turn brought me into a seaside coffeeshop built into a cliffside. Rather than the normal warm cafe interior I was used to seeing in Japan, this place had an old motorcycle just inside the front door. Hmm, that's a good sign. Endless rows of CD cases and a pool table gave the place a laid back atmosphere. Finally, large pane glass windows overlooked the rocky bay, its oyster beds propped up by rows of buoys.  Someone clever propped up a fishing pole with some sort of empty seashell dangling off the end, its iridescent surface catching the eye as it blew in the wind. A few stray islands popped up here and there, with tufts of evergreens growing on them.  (A sidenote: it's hard to say at a given moment exactly how many islands there are in Japan, precisely because of tiny little islands like these.  Because of the tides, some islands disappear at high tide, while others become joined together at low tide.  To further complicate things, a few also erode each year.)
I sat in a small couch facing the windows, and watched the seagulls as I sipped my cafe au lait in a tall conical glass. What a fantastically unexpected diversion.  I'm rather glad I got lost that day, as I think part of me wanted to see the ocean in spite of my plans.  Maybe it's a bit unfortunate that we have GPS and car navigation systems, because I think one of the best parts about touring is being surprised by little places like this.

Today at elementary school, I taught a few classes, as usual.  But I also got to participate in two really cool activities.

First was watching the 6th grade students do calligraphy.  (I grabbed a brush, pointed it out the window, and shouted "expecto patronum!"  They thought that was pretty funny.)  Of course, everyone learns to write with pens and pencils these days, so using a brush to write out characters is quite challenging.  If you have too much ink or too little ink, it causes problems.  If you press the brush down too hard, the strokes are too thick; if you don't press hard enough, they're too thin.  For some strokes you need to stop before lifting the brush, and for others you need to lift the brush while it's still in motion.  Finally, if the motion isn't smooth, the end result doesn't look very good.  I was impressed with a few of the students practicing kanji in the margins of the practice sheets.

Then just now, at the end of the day, I got to play taiko with the 5th grade students in the gymnasium.  The teacher put me in front of one of those big drums, and handed me a couple sticks, and then had the students show me how it was done.  First, make a Y with your legs, and bend your knees a bit to get your waist at the right level.  Grab the taiko sticks with your thumb and index finger in a ring, and let the other fingers just rest on it.  If you grab the drumstick too tightly, the stick won't bounce off right and it will sound off.  Finally, unlike drum line in band, you have to put all your energy into it; make dramatic motions with your arms, start with your arm all the way in the air, and then come down with a SMACK.  The students taught me a couple rhythms, and then we played as a group for awhile.  The students rotated out and changed positions while playing.  It was pretty tiring, but I had a blast.