| Food Experiment: Double Sweet Potato Pie |
[Nov. 22nd, 2009|09:19 pm] |
I like so many vegetables oh so much. Picking one as a favorite would be an exercise in lying. But if pressed to choose, I guess I'd have to say sweet potatoes, as they're probably the closest. Sweet or savory, baked boiled or fried, it might be their versatility that appeals to me so much - that and their taste of course. Living with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) babydo3ll in senior year of college, we tried more sweet potato based experiments than any other (pancakes, curry, tempura, croquettes, shepherds pie, remember!?) I'm still always thinking of new ways to use'em.
It was a bit disappointing moving to Japan to find that the sweet potatoes I loved so much in America didn't exist here, but only until I realized that Japan has its own unique and equally delicious varieties. Most notably there are the yellow satsuma-imo and purple murasaki-imo. They both have different flavors from the orange ones we know in America, but still handle the same cooking styles well. In potato season last year I experimented a satsuma-imo based casserole. This year I tried a pie. Details to follow.
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| Study study study... |
[Nov. 12th, 2009|10:43 pm] |
Hi lj. As anticipated, I haven't been able to update you so frequently since coming to Tokyo. It's not because I have nothing to say. Work continues to be happy, great and stimulating. There are about five to six teaching related entries currently floating around the nether regions of my brain. In Miyagi I'd have popped them all out last month, but recently my writing energy has been devoted to homework. So while I'm on top of all that at the moment, why don't I take this chance tell you a bit about the program?
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| Self-imposed Academic Glass Ceilings |
[Oct. 27th, 2009|01:09 am] |
I had a theory back in Miyagi that I've developed since coming to Tokyo. While there are some kids who are limited as students purely by their academic ability, I think the majority limit themselves consciously by how much they are willing to work. Let's call these limits Self-imposed Academic Glass Ceilings (SAGCs). A, B and C students, all of them put in just enough effort to maintain the grades they consider satisfactory as determined by their SAGC before going off to play video games at their friend's house. Maybe some of this seems obvious, but it wasn't to any of the English teachers I worked with in Miyagi.
Much of our job involved dumbing down the already weak textbook to the students' level, limiting their progress even further. Though I tried my best to raise bars wherever possible, I tended to see this as a necessary evil given the students' generally low performance on nationally standardized tests and the like. Then in the past few months, I've been surprised by the relatively high level of the SAGCs of my new students in Tokyo. They much more readily try to understand difficult concepts, and don't give up even when the content is complicated. This probably has some to do with the nature of English conversation schools and the type of students they attract, but I suspect the culture of the big city plays a bigger role.
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| Private Tutors |
[Oct. 13th, 2009|01:01 pm] |
Maybe when you were a kid you had some guy come to your house once a week to teach you something. In my case it was piano. He was a nice dude, very patient with my lack of music ability. But he always seemed a little uncomfortable, harboring an iwakan when he came for lessons. I frequently tried to imagine his life outside of those 30 minutes intervals -- presumably much less wholesome than my family's home.
Recently things have come full circle, and I've become one of those guys who briefly disturb people's lovely houses to teach, in this case, English. So now I know exactly what their lives are like. They sleep until noon and bake excessive amounts of bread in their underwear while listening to KPop all day, and then shower and put on a collared shirt 20 minutes before the lessons begin. Mystery solved!
Actually I still only have one tutoring job at the moment, but luckily it's a lot more open than my piano lessons were since I'd already known the mother of the student beforehand. The pay is low, but the kid is brilliantly easy to teach and it's only a five minute bike ride from my place, so who's complaining? One of the most interesting parts of the experience is remembering when I was in his shoes and trying to guess the pieces of the puzzle of my life he's managing to put together. Hopefully not too much ^_^; |
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| Ivy Heights |
[Sep. 28th, 2009|07:51 pm] |
Now that I'm approaching my two month anniversary of moving to Tokyo, perhaps it's about time I post on where I live, Ivy Heights. Name-wise it's a step down from the Sugar House, but as an apartment I feel it suits me much better.
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