IrishOboe

Can you say "toy boat" quickly three times? I can't, so I included it in my list of tongue twisters my students could pick from for my Tongue Twister class. Well, one after the other said it flawlessly to my absolute shock. They had a great time watching me fail miserably at trying it. If that wasn't interesting enough, I shared this with friends at my English Free Zone and one boy (born and raised in Japan) could of course say it with no trouble. However, the boy who was born in Brazil (to Japanese parents) had the same trouble I did even though his Japanese is so good his friends didn't believe him when he said he was from Brazil. If I was getting my PhD I think I would pick this as my research topic. What makes a tongue twister hard? It's fascinating to think about. This shows that it can't simply be a matter of whether or not your tongue can get into that position or not. It appears that the lack of tongue flexibility helps the Japanese with that one. Fascinating.

I’ve been reading John Taylor Gatto’s Underground History of the American Education and it has me thinking deeply again about freedom. In contemplating issues of freedom I came across a few articles of Philip Yancy (Christianity Today) that pointed to how God views freedom. It gave me this thought:

If God, the ultimate authority, does not demand our obedience but lets us choose to disobey, how can I, a human in a temporary teaching position, demand the obedience of my students?

It’s a shocking question to the circle of teachers I know. Getting the kids to do what you say is what it is all about. Gatto is right. Schooling is about teaching obedience, not intellectual thought. There’s just enough accidental education to keep the wool over our eyes. By “our” I mean most students, teachers, administrators, and parents.

By the way, I still love my life here. I enjoy my job, the school, and most of all the students. They still have an amazing amount of life despite the fact that Japan is even better than America at demanding obedience from the masses.

I hope this doesn’t get me fired!