Happy 2014...Humans are Still Obtuse

Hello everyone...

On a happy note, a very happy new year to you.  I send you all groovy groovy vibes  of health and joy for 2014.

So it pains me to follow this up with a blog such as this, but I have to let you know that humans are still obtuse.

I have spent the past few days, when I've had time,  reading articles and watching videos that point to this undeniable fact.

And while being informed and open-minded and honest about my own obtuseness is great, it still must be acknowledged that KNOWING about obtuseness and WRITING about obtuseness is not ACTION.  And without action, nothing will change, so I am clearly a part of the obtuseness problem.


So this video came across my computer screen:    The Cove PSA

In it, a cavalcade of actors and celebrities poetically bemoan the horrible plight of how dolphins in Japan are rounded up into a dead-end death pit, either to be carted off to an aquarium or chopped up to be sold as plastic wrapped bits on a styrofoam tray.

This public service announcement was eloquent and gave me heartache and all the "feels".

I have no problem with celebrities doing public service announcements.

My problem was with the inevitable comments below the video.  Oh, you know the comments.


"Why can't these celebrities put their money where their mouths are and find a way to spend their way to saving the dolphins?"

"Why can't the rich and fabled 1% spend some of THEIR money to fix situations like this?"

"Why are we all choked up about dolphins when humans are all too willing to eat their aquatic neighbors, as well as their land-bound cow and pig brethren? Shouldn't we care about ALL animals?"

"Why should we be tossing attention and money towards dolphins when we should be spending our money helping poor, suffering humans?"


Are all these commenters correct?  In one sense, yes.

It would be nice if more celebrities and rich folks put their money to work for good causes, although to be fair there are plenty of celebrities and rich folks who do just this.

And yes, it is hypocritical for people to only want to save the cute smily anthropomorphic animals, but be willing to nibble on the less visually appealing ones (although I have always thought cows and pigs were cute).

But here we come to the crux of my gripe.

Just to clarify right away, I don't want anyone...ANYONE...to suffer.  I don't want starvation, or disease, or pain or war.   People are suffering, right now, and we should do everything we can to guide, help, encourage and save.

However...

Humans are not the only creatures on this planet.

Although we clearly are trying to be so.    In our efforts to tame, control, own and exploit this planet we have decimated habitats, brought some animals and plants  to the brink of extinction while tossing others right over the cliff into extinction.   What we aren't busy eating we are trying to domesticate, fiddling with DNA to create animals that can't breathe right (bulldogs) and plants that have lost their ability to reproduce themselves (bananas).

So whenever someone pokes at an effort to save a species of animal or type of plant by saying "But what about the suffering humans?", I get a bit prickly.  Not because the suffering humans don't need help, but because animals and plants need help too.

And really,  the fates of animals, plants and humans do not need to be mutually exclusive.  We can surely, with our big massive brains, comprehend that more entities on  his planet besides humans need help.

Just consider what would happen to the food chain--that interconnectedness of all life on this planet--if we lost some of the vital insect, plant and animal links that keep it working?

We're living in the middle of a field of wobbly dominoes, and I am increasingly convinced that it doesn't matter which domino gets pushed--bumblebees,  redwood trees,  dolphins or people--when one domino falls, the rest of us won't be far behind.

A cautionary tale from Christina for the new year?  That is for others to decide.

But a good start towards a good year might be for all of us to take a larger look at our planet, and realize that everything and everyone is a lot more interconnected than many would like to admit.

Sigh.

I'm stepping off my soapbox now....


Until next time.

Giddy-yup

Hello again.

It has recently come to my attention that 2014 will be the Year of the Horse.  As in the Chinese and Japanese Zodiac.

I am rather fond of Horse years, largely because I was born in 1966, which was also a Horse year.    This equine connection pleases me and puts me in the mind-set of upcoming good luck.  I'm not saying this has worked for me in the past, but hey, there is a first time for everything.

It should be noted here that my idealistic belief in good luck solely based on zodiac horses runs directly contrary to  tales in a number of Asian countries (Japan included)  of the usual fates of people, and most notably women born  in 1966.

In the Chinese zodiac (upon which leans the Japanese zodiac beliefs), in addition to the 12 cute animals dashing around the calendar, there are also elements (fire, wood, earth, water and metal).  Combined with the 12 animals, this means that each combination of element and animal repeats itself every 60 years.

And 1966 was the year of the Fire Horse.  Element, Fire.  Animal, Horse. In Japanese, this is called  hinoeuma.

Which especially  for a woman, evidently, is not a good thing.  In fact, I have perused a number of population graphs detailing births in 1966....and on each chart there is a sharp downward spike centered on 1966.

It seems that people just were a  wee bit afraid of having a Fire Horse child, and especially wary of that child being a daughter who would grow into a Fire Horse woman.

And considering the beliefs surrounding Fire Horse women, I can rather understand the hesitancy.  We Fire Horse women are supposed to be serious bad luck, capable of destroying finances, being utterly terrible mothers and driving the men in our lives to ruin and early deaths.

Before writing this, I spent quite a bit of time searching the Internet, skipping from site to site,  reading newspaper articles, astrology websites and blogs, looking at population graphs and a wide variety of graphics.  Predictably I found varying levels of belief in the terrors of Fire Horse folks.  

In the end, all I can really rely upon I suppose is how I live my own life.  And I am pleased to say that while we are not rich, our lack of millionaire status is not utterly my doing.  Likewise, Patrick and Aya are healthy, happy teenagers (well, as happy as teenagers can be I suppose).  As for the bad luck prediction, I'm not going to make any judgements on that for fear of jinxing myself.  However the evidence points to our periodic bouts of normal bad luck being less the fault of me being a Fire Horse, and more due to the ebb and flow of life itself.

So as I sit here in our icy kitchen, huddled in layers in front of a tiny space heater, I only have one lingering question about being a Fire Horse.....

if I'm a FIRE  Horse, why am I so darn cold?!  

Sheesh.

Until next time....

The Power of being ever so slightly uncomfortable

Hello all,

I think I approach the world in a very weird way.

Most people live their lives seeking comfort.  They want the money that will buy the lovely squishy sofas and the luxurious blankets, the bubbly bubbly hot tubs and the first class airplane seats that include sips of wine and elbow room.

I, of course, love all these things too.  I don't necessarily get all these things, but I love the idea of these things.   I too have bought into the whole concept of earning money earning money earning money towards my someday comfort.

But overall I don't approach the world with little dollar signs (or in my current situation, yen signs) dancing in my eyes.

I approach the world with a specific philosophy:   living with slight and steady discomfort is good for us.

I don't mean physical discomfort.  I don't choose to sit in a chair with sharp spikes on it rather than a regular chair.  I don't start my day walking over hot coals or drinking straight vinegar.  I don't go to sleep at night on a bed of ice cubes and hydrochloric acid.

I mean discomfort in a broader sense.  

In my humble opinion, we live in a world of complacency.  We get lulled into daily routines, monthly obligations, Monday through Friday zombie movements followed by weekends of either exhaustion or excess.  Or both exhaustion and excess, depending on the person.

And what is the remedy for complacency?  Discomfort.  Shaking things up a bit.  Going outside our comfort zone, in ways tiny and huge.

For example, this is our third time living in Japan.  At this point we have lived a significant portion of our lives in a state of slight discomfort.   By this time there are aspects to our lives in Japan that have taken on a whiff of that dreaded complacency.  Now that I'm teaching again, I get up at the same time every weekday morning.  I eat pretty much the same thing for breakfast (because I hate eating breakfast but need to do it, so I eat what seems palatable, even if it isn't logical).  I take the same bus. I walk the same streets.  Once in the classroom I maintain the same daily schedule because young students need their immediate future to be reliable and fairly predictable.

But there is a huge part of our lives that we cannot take for granted.  We cannot be complacent when it comes to navigating long train rides to new destinations.  We cannot take for granted that we necessarily will know how to navigate the Japanese tax system, or know what that besuited man at the door is trying to sell to us.

I won't lie to you.   Living on the edge of comprehension is not for everyone.  And there are many MANY times when we find it exceedingly tiresome and annoying and downright discouraging.  But hey, at least we can't be complacent.....which is my point.

I think it is important for us to choose to do things, to see things, to explore things that make us slightly uncomfortable.    Feeling unsettled, needing to take the time to explore our own feelings and beliefs, challenging ourselves keeps us humble and helps us stay open to the diversity of the world.

So when I hear about a news commentator, or a politician or anyone spouting off what essentially amounts to hatred, I just think "Well, there's a person who is way, way too comfortable."

Ain't it the truth.....

Mini-Jig: Somewhere between 18 and 78

Hello there,

Yesterday in Japan (still today in the U.S.) was my birthday.  And of course, if one is a teacher, especially a teacher of small children, the first question asked once the tots get wind of a teacher's birthday is "How old are you?"

To which teachers everywhere answer "How old do you THINK I am?"

Because we want to encourage critical thinking and inquiry, you know.  

So yesterday I was asked the question "How old are you?"

And I responded, as required with "How old do you think I am?"

Let the fun begin.

One of my students yelled out "18!".  

I said "I love you.  However I am older than 18." (disclaimer:  I tell my students I love them and love being with them multiple times each day.  So no one went away thinking that I only bestow my love upon one child.  But come on...I mean, they guessed 18.)

Another student hollered "75!  My grandpa is 75!"

Before my eyes could finish rolling back in their sockets another student said "No way, Ms. Christina has no gray hair.  She can't be 75.  She's 62."

The first student scowled and said "Maybe she paints her hair.  Ms. Christina, do you paint your hair?"

I let the question pass and  said "I am younger than 62.  Guess lower."

The room filled with the numerical joy of 5 and 6 year old voices.

"21!"

"One hundred thousand hundred million!"

"29!"

"41!"

I   cut in "41 is getting close. Guess higher."

Everyone seesawed between one hundred thousand hundred million and 41 for awhile until one of the students intoned, with utter solemnity "Ms. Christina is 47."

I gave her a thumbs up as everyone began trying out that number:  "She's 47."  "47" and from our class mini-mathematician, "Forty plus seven is 47. Forty two plus five is 47.  Forty six plus one is 47....."(he continued on in this manner for  awhile, as is his habit when confronted with numbers.)

But the madness did not finish there....because for the next fewminutes everyone switched their number guessing fervor for frantic comparisons of how much older or younger I am than their parents.

"My dad is 45."

"My mom is 42.  Ms. Christina is older than my mom."

and my personal favorite

"Ms. Christina is the same age as my dad, but my dad looks  way better."

By the time the yelling faded away and the students had drifted off to other pursuits, I decided that I would file this most recent episode of Kindergarten madness under "Math".  Of course. 

Now excuse me while I take my one hundred thousand hundred million year old self off to the grocery store....

Until next time.

The Hidden Joys of a Small School

Hello all,

For today's check in, I'd like to share some of the hidden beauties of teaching at, and attending a small school.

While I might have started my teaching career with classrooms filled with anywhere from 25-35 students, over the years it seems I have  niched myself into teaching for smaller private schools ranging from Montessori schools to accelerated schools to International schools.  And I have no regrets whatsoever.

Right now I am teaching at Kyoto International School.  We teach children ranging from our 2 year old program to Middle School.  And I, of course, teach Kindergarten.

I have 6 students.

6.

KIS an IB World School, and in my program, the PYP program, we follow an inquiry-based curriculum that uses play and independent thematic  exploration as the cornerstones for learning.

So for a teacher like me, with  a background in Montessori and a love of messy hands-on art and science as well as a passion for words in all forms, it is a dream-come-true for teaching.

Because for 5 and 6 year old children, play is their work, and work is their play and the two should be, and are, intertwined.  Which means I can bring in my experiments and wacky materials and set them up in a center and step back and see what happens.

And what happens?
Magic happens.
And like thirsty sponges, they soak it all up.
And they learn.
Effortlessly.
Words and reading, writing and numbers. Social skills and self-care skills.

I set up the classroom environment (hello there Montessori), I give the initial push, and off they go.

Now this kind of learning isn't just for small classes.  I could do the same with a larger class.
And this kind of learning isn't just for International schools in Japan, because I could do the same anywhere, including back at home in the United States.

Except that it seems that so many schools back at home  have forgotten, or maybe choose to deny, or maybe have never learned the secret to inspire joyful, independent education.

Time.
The secret is time.

At KIS especially, but in other schools I have taught at as well, I was given the gift of time.
At some schools the time I was given was shorter, because the school had a curriculum that needed to be addressed, deadlines that needed to be met and tests that needed to be taken.  Sometimes, like now, the time I am given is longer, allowing students to stretch their imaginations, hone their skills, work at the play that is so vital to real learning for young children.

But the benefits of a small school don't just rest in the individual classrooms.

I'll give you an example.

Just this week my Kindergarten class (6 students)  and our Middle School class (4 students) went on a field trip to visit our sister school that is located some distance  away up in the mountains.  Every year on Halloween students from our sister school visit us for Halloween fun, and in turn we are invited to their school for their Winter festival and mochi pounding (pounding cooked rice in massive stone bowls with wooden mallets until it becomes a delicious glutinous mass, which is then cooked and eagerly devoured).

10 students, 2 teachers.

That was it.

Now, in a larger school, the first difference would be that Middle School wouldn't even be a part of the elementary program, but would be separated into it's own school, maybe across town.

And even in a larger school that did go from Kindergarten to Middle School, the likelihood of them going together on a field trip would be small, since to take a large group with such an age spread would be challenging, to say the least.

But not here.

The four Middle School students willingly accepted being paired off, each middle school student with either 1 or 2 kindergarteners.

And those pre teens and teens stayed with their Kindergarten buddies all day.  On the subway.  In the stations.  On the train.  On the bus.  Through all the activities at our sister school  and all the way back on the trains back to KIS.

Now, I have 2 teenage kids myself, and I know without a doubt that this situation was perhaps not a teenager's idea of a great time, to be paired up with a 5 or 6 year old all day.  But, just as when Aya and Patrick volunteer with KIS during various events, each of the middle school students put aside what they'd perhaps rather do (just hang out together and chat or doze on the trains), and helped watch over wiggly, giggly Kindergarteners.

And here is where we can see what a small school does best:  it takes 50 or 80 or 100 kids from a wide spread of ages and cultures and backgrounds and experiences, and forges them into a family.

Like a family, they argue and get into scrapes sometimes.  But like a family they also look out for each other, help each other.  And when the students become a family, so too do the teachers.

This is an incredible gift anywhere, but perhaps especially here, in Japan, where so many of our own  families and long-time friends are thousands of miles away.

And as with so many of the wonderful, small schools I have been lucky enough to have taught with, going to work each day is like stepping into the warm embrace of home.

I wish everyone could be so lucky.


Until next time....

A Supersized Halloween

Hello all,

Yes, I am back.  And for all of our sakes I'm not going to even try to justify my blog absence.  You get busy.  I get busy.  Life grabs us and drags us off to work or family responsibilities.   The story is always the same, with just the pieces moved around.  So I'll just get into it.

Halloween back in California is usually a nighttime event that rarely goes very far beyond Halloween night.  If one is a child or a teacher, Halloween might extend into the daytime hours in school events, but since school celebrations of most kinds back at home  are slowly being swept out the proverbial classroom door, Halloween is mostly being narrowed down into an evening event.

Which means costume parties for teens and adults, macabre house decorations and trick or treating, either conventionally door to door,  or for safety's sake, car trunk to car trunk or booth to booth.

Here in Japan Halloween is slowly being adopted as an event.   Halloween decorations, costumes and candy appear in stores in early October  and many neighborhoods put together costume parades for the kids, with local businesses handing out treats.

Trick or treating, however, is mostly a big head-scratcher here.

But if the KIS Halloween celebrations this year are any indication, things may not necessarily stay that way.

This year I am teaching Kinderarten, which means that this year Halloween is once again a THING in my life.

My school, Kyoto International School (or KIS) traditionally invites our sister school down from the mountains to join us for a day of Halloween costume fashion shows, games, pumpkin carving and treats.  In return they perform a dance for us, and then later in the winter invite us to their school to join them for their Winter Festival.

This year's Halloween started out much the same.  Patrick and Aya volunteered this year as helpers, and spent the day hopping from classroom to classroom to gym to field, helping out whatever class needed  an extra hand.  Excited kids put on  costumes, played games, ate way too many treats and generally had a great time.

However this year was different.  This year KIS is in a temporary new school while our usual school building is being renovated.  Our "new" school had been, until this past March when it closed, the heart of the neighborhood and the local school since 1869.  

So we came up with a plan to help ease our way into the neighborhood--invite the former students of our school site to join us for Halloween.  But since all of them now attend different schools, any event we invited them to had to be in the early evening

And thus it was.

So after a day of Halloween hilarity, our students stayed at school, ate Parent Association sponsored pizza for dinner, and then slipped back on their costumes for an evening of trick or treating.

Yes, trick or treating.

Around 10 or 12 neighborhood businesses offered to give out treats (which our parent association collected in truly mind-boggling amounts).     All of our teachers, most of our parents, our Middle school students  and Patrick and Aya stationed themselves along the streets with flashlights to make sure all the kids stayed safe.

Lo and behold, it was trick or treating.  And it didn't feel like pretend trick or treating, as it could all too easily fall into.  Everyone was really into the scene--from the business owners to the kids to the parents to the neighbors who popped out of their houses to watch the spectacle of nearly 70 kids marching down the street in costume lugging overloaded bags of treats.

It was noisy and silly and chaotic and exhausting....and fantastic.

I'm not saying that Japan needs to adopt trick or treating, or Halloween, or really any of the holidays that seem to make their way into the stores and pop culture here. It's not my place to dictate what foreign holidays Japan adopts or doesn't adopt.

 But there was something touching and lovely about seeing so many people just enjoying being a part of the unbridled joy that kids feel on Halloween.

Because beneath the costumes, the candy, the spooks both hilarious  and terrifying, Halloween is simply about letting ourselves be silly and have fun.  And I tend to believe that sharing in some simple silly fun is a great way to make new friends.



Until next time,
Christina

Triumphantly Tired thanks to TEDxKyoto

Hello all,

Oh yes, I did warn you, didn't I?  That my blog would be the first thing to suffer my return to teaching and my wild plunge into curating for TEDxKyoto?  

Yes, I did warn you.  So you really can't look at me like that.

For the past 3 days or so I have been trying to reassemble my brain and life after having it run amok thanks to my foray into being Head Curator for TEDxKyoto 2013.

The event was last Sunday, the 29th.  I arrived at the venue at 7:45am and I fell out of the taxi onto my front step somewhere around 9:30pm.

And not to brag, but it was FANTASTIC.   The speakers and performers were wonderful and rose to the challenge of getting on that stage in front of nearly 700 people.  All of the  volunteer teams (somewhere around 150-200 people) worked their tailfeathers off.   And the after party was a great success, with plenty of food and drink, and plenty of happy people.

So if you ask me if this past year was worth it, I'd have to say absolutely.  Putting this event together involved a LOT of late nights, both in meetings and on the computer.  It involved stretching my skills into areas I had never explored before--not just as a writer and editor, but negotiating speeches and travel plans, hotel reservations and transportation issues, endless graphs, charts and tables as I organized reams of information, speaker data and event schedules.  It involved working back and forth between Japanese and English with the switches between the languages often stumbling over each other.

However during the after party, when I was fielding a baffling number of audience members congratulating me, I couldn't in all good conscience accept the kind words.

Because I didn't--and never could have--done it alone.  I may have been Head Curator, but an event like this takes a team.  In this case a team of nearly 200 volunteers.

Come to think of it, most things in life require a team to make them work.  And perhaps those things that we always assume are best done alone, might be the very things that would benefit the most from being backed up by a great team.

The overused saying is best folks:  no one is an island.

Although after the past year...and especially after Sunday, I sure would like to be on an island somewhere, basking on the beach.

Until next time...