WANISAN

We all have a place we like or maybe that we hope to visit. For me I have several. I really enjoy warm weather places like Guam and Thailand. I especially like going there when it is winter here and I can have a chance to get out of the cold.

In the summer though I enjoy going to the river to play in the water with my family and friends and bbq. There are several good places for doing that not too far from Nagoya.

I also really enjoy my garden.

Yes.

My garden is one of my favorite places to be. It has a small grape arbor, trees, flowers, and a small goldfish pond. I can sit on my deck and enjoy the great atmosphere or I can fire up my grill and bbq either for just our family or for students or for our friends.

What about you?

What is your favorite place to visit?

In the comment section below, post a comment telling me where your favorite place to go is, describe it a little, and tell me why it is your favorite.

I look forward to reading all of the responses!

This week in my discussion class, we talked about the topic of success.

It’s always interesting to me to see what other people think about success: what it is, who has it, what they want or need to feel success in their own lives.

There’s a different answer for every student.

That is a great topic for a discussion class. Any time there is no really set, black and white, right or wrong explanation for your topic it can lead to some really healthy discussion.

We have covered a lot of ground in this class, and we have had some great discussions.

I thought this week’s class was great. Success is one of my own personal favorites as a topic, so it’s fun for me to get to share that with these students.

We started off with some quotes. There were quotes from Tony Robbins, Michael Jordan, and Bill Gates.

Each group had to decide what they thought was the meaning of the quote, come up with a story example to explain it, and to talk about whether they thought the quote was a true statement.

Luckily they all started off with agreeing with the quotes, and they had some good examples, too.

We followed that up with a general discussion on what was success to them, for them in their lives.

All in all, class was, well, a success 😉

Last week we had our 2nd annual skit performance contest at Chukyo University.

It’s a contest where all of the 2nd year students in the BACS Dept. Oral Communications VI classes get together and perform skits they wrote themselves. The performances take place in front of the combined 3 classes for each of the 3rd and 4th period groups.

Each class is divided into teams of from 3 to 5 members each and they choose a movie to dramatize in a summary fashion.

The students write scripts to tell the stories in their own words and actions. Since the players are limited, the stories have to be adapted to fit the available actors. Some actors have to play multiple parts with each performance lasting from 5 to 7 minutes.

The stories are told through dialog and action as much as possible with very little narration.

This usually makes for some very interesting takes on some well-known, and some not so well-known stories.

This year performances ranged from retellings of Toy Story to Gokusen to Heidi.

Students voted on the best performances and awards were given to the top 3 groups in each class period. Awards were also given to the top two individual performers from each time period as well.

Here are some photos of the winners:

Well, that time of year is here once again and we’re ready to kick things off.

I already had my classes at Chukyo University where there are many students who are away for the semester studying abroad and almost all of the others spent the summer abroad. It will be a very interesting, and I hope fun, semester.

On Wednesday I met my English Interaction 2 classes. There are a lot of new faces in those classes, too.

I feel sorry for the students who wanted to take the second semester of my class but were unable to do that. It seems all students were just put in classes by their numbers and the time slots and not by professor even when they chose that.

Also I met my new discussion classes. This class only meets during the second semester, so it’s not really a new class for me, but all of the students there are new. Most of them have been in some of my other classes before, so it’s good to get to see those students again. There are also plenty of new students who I am sure are wondering what lies ahead for them. I look forward to getting to know them and getting to know the others better.

That discussion class, and my advanced discussion class, are a lot of fun and very interesting for me, too.

Tomorrow it is time to kick off Web English class again.

It looks like there will be many, many new students, and well, many students. Enrollment is supposed to be capped at 25 or so, but I have 2 classes with 40 students. Sadly, again, several students from 1st semester tried to enroll and could not.

Anyway, I look forward to my classes and seeing my students from before and getting to know all of the new ones.

Let’s have a great semester!

You invite over some students and BBQ 😉

Last night was a lot of fun with some of my wife’s seminar students who came over for a little end of the semester get together.

The plan for a while was to BBQ and toast marshmallows, but these days the weather has been brutally hot with several deaths in the area even being related to the heat. So you can understand I was a little reluctant to build a fire and cook.

The other thing about BBQing at my house is that I am the one who usually spends all my time hunkered over the grill cooking and not getting to eat too much. Still, it wasn’t so bad yesterday, and Bynn and Ahn were a big help.

We didn’t break our previous record of 7 kilos of meat either, hehheh. Still, lots of good food, cake, watermelon, and fun.

Here are a few pictures: