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.