11/11

In the last class of this semester, we saw Kein Robinson's TED talks about education. He put an emphasis on the importance of child's creatively.

He used the quotes from Picasso, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." This quotes remains me of my favorite Picasso's quote, "It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child." This shows how strong Picasso think the children's creativity important. I like Picasso and his words, because everything he paints and says are all unique and deep. I also like painting since I was a child, so his way of using colors influenced me a lot. I also remember my childhood from Robinson's video. When I was a child, I tried everything new without hesitation, and never cared about if I am wrong or right. However, as I grew up, I start caring what other people might think. This disturbs even myself. I have a lot of things that I want to try, but I always stop myself doing so by setting a limitation, like "I do not have enough physical strength" when I am thinking of trying new sports or activities. 

     We also submitted our eassy yesterday. I cannot believe that yesterday was the last class. Though from Rab's point of view, it seems that we have not learned anything. However, I got a lot of new things and had precious experience. When I first found out that our  ARW teacher for fall semester is going to be Rab and told senior students about that many students told me something like "Rab is very strict" or "Your ARW class will be tough one." So I was really scared and worried about how next ARW class is going to be. However, when I actually started taking Rab's class, because Rab's class was really different from other ELA teachers, I found it interesting. We did psychological tests and mash marshmallow's challenge at class, which I have not expected for ARW class. Anyway, thank you very much for telling a lot of new things and taking care of the laziest class.

11/7

            In yesterday’s class, each of us presented our essay in front of a group and others gave some critiques in order to sharpen our essay. Usually, we cannot realize own mistakes, so we need other people to check for them. When I presented my essay, which is about beauty pageant, Atsushi pointed out that some women might have anorexia because by looking at the skinny beauty queens, some women will start thinking that they have to lose weight in order to be like beauty queens. I expected this kind of opinion since I started writing my essay, because there are a lot of people such as feminists who are against beauty pageant. This means that my essay should be very convincing one in order to fight back those people’s idea. It will not be easy, but I will give a try to fight back against opinion. It was also interesting to know about the content of different groups’ essays. Since Rab gave us freedom to choose our essay topic, each of them is doing different topic of essay, although many people’s essays are really connected to racial problems. I am looking forward to reading their essay’s too.

11/5,6

                At yesterday’s class, we discussed a lot about our future problems, mostly about the aging society in Japan and immigrants in Japan. One of the solutions to the aging society in Japan is that to welcome a lot of people from other countries into Japan in order to maintain enough people to work for elderly people. The problem is that if a lot of people from other countries think that they want to live in Japan for a long term. Weather Japan can provide immigrants with the optimum circumstance or not is important issue for those who are thinking to move to Japan. There are still a lot of traditional systems to foreigner going on in Japan. They always have to carry their own ID cards with them no matter the people have Japan’s permanent VISA. There is no point in trying to welcome immigrants if Japan is not ready for them.

                Today’s class was one of the most interesting ELA classes I ever had. We did marshmallows’ challenge. From this challenge, we can measure our team working skill by looking at the height of the marshmallow. Our group made 60 cm tall of marshmallow at first, and 68 cm for second. It means that we made some improvement compared to previous one, but still we are not the best team. Though we could not be the best group, the process we made the marshmallow structure were quite interesting. We spend most of the time making and tried to make it higher as much as time allows. It was interesting to see the shape of our structure, which looks like a dinosaur. The best group’s marshmallow was about 90 cm heights, which is very close to the best score, 99 cm.

One of the important things that I learned today is to just try even though we do not know if it really works. It will waste time if we talk too much before putting into practice. Also, trying to utilize other teams’ idea is also important. It seems cheating at first, but actually it is not. There is no advantage for both of us if we keep hiding idea each other. It was surprising to know that the kindergarten children performed better than business school students. The creative idea that children come up and the ability to take action was one of the reasons for this result. Also, trying a lot of time and having feedbacks from others a lot will lead to success. The same thing can say to our ARW essay. Wasting a lot of time on planning and thinking is not efficient. To start writing and ask others for feedback is better.