Dragons and God's Sovereignty

It's Holy Week. If you are thinking, like many are this week, about God's role in human actions, here is a nice analogy I just came across. It's called Dragon's and God's Sovereignty. Enjoy.

Climbing Mount Kuratake

On Saturday, a couple friends from church, T and I climbed Mount Kuratake in Yanamashi. This is one of my favorite hikes because it offers great views of several ranges and Mount Fuji; it's easily accessible by train (no bus ride!) on the Chuo line; and there aren't many other hikers. This was T's biggest hike by far and he was like a mountain goat up there, sometimes even telling us big guys to hurry up. It's great to be able to share a hobby with my son.

Here's a map. Not sure if it's zoomable.Oops. Never mind. Just click this link if you want to see a map.

And some photos.

If anyone has ideas for other good hikes around Tokyo or would like to join sometime, let me know.

Tips on Raising Bilingual Children

I just read a good article called "Raising a Bilingual Child" (it's a pdf) by Julia Gariel and Jo Bristow. It gives good, common-sense tips, many of which we follow with our own children and those at the preschool.

Here's an excerpt.

For language learning to be successful it is essential that all exposure provides positive experience. There is no room for destructive criticism or negative comments. What the child needs is praise for effort, celebration of success, joy and laughter. Don't worry if he makes mistakes in grammar or pronunciation. Try to avoid correcting negatively. Just repeat the sentence back to him accurately, model it for him. In time he will automatically use the right structure which the language-learning area of his brain will have stored away for future use. For example:

Child: "Want go now park."

Adult Solution A:
"That's not the right way to ask. If you want to go to the park learn to ask properly. Say it like this . . . No, like this . . . ."

Result A:
Child feels wrong, gets bored repeating words, loses interest in going to the park, loses confidence in his ability to make his needs known. A learning opportunity is lost.

Adult Solution B:
"You want to go to the park now? I want to go to the park now, too. We'll go when we're ready."

Result B:
Child hears his sentence modeled correctly and stores it away. His needs are acknowledged, he feels good about the communication. Further language learning opportunities will take place in the park.

There are several other articles too. Check them out here.

Parking Lot Game

Here's an online game I just stumbled across. The higher levels will make your brain hurt. Make sure you have several minutes to kill before starting.

link

Or if you want to play without looking at a screen, you can get the atoms not bits version at amazon.

[Edited to add the link to amazon]

Fun Food

We made a couple different kinds of bread in the preschool last week and I found out that tortillas are really easy to make. Mexican food is something I miss in Japan so I took my newfound tortilla-making skills and made fresh tacos for the family last night. They were muy rico!

Tomomi had to fix the dough for me after I made it way too sticky by using a mix of metric and "normal" measuring devices.


And here is a picture of the chocolate gorilla I got for Valentine's Day from a student last month. Everyone gets chocolate gorillas, right?

I didn't think to take a picture until I had eaten the foot.

Team Hoyt

I'm not usually one for tear-jerker, human interest stories, but as a runner and a father, this video had me blubbering.


If you want to read more about them, here is their web site and a wikipedia article.

C. S. Lewis quotes

Here are a couple C. S. Lewis quotes from an essay called "The Seeing Eye" in a collection called Christian Reflections. The first is advice on how to avoid God.

Avoid silence, avoid solitude, avoid any train of thought that leads off the beaten track. Concentrate on money, sex, status, health and (above all) on your own grievances. Keep the radio on [were he writing today I'm sure he would replace radio with TV]. Live in a crowd. Use plenty of sedation. if you must read books, select them very carefully. But you'd be safer to stick to the papers [and even better, the internet]. You'll find the advertisements helpful; especially those with a sexy or snobbish appeal.

And here's one that made me chuckle. Remember that the British Lewis wrote this in 1963.

[I am not] much concerned about the "space race" between America and Russia. The more money, time, skill and zeal they both spend on that rivalry, the less, we may hope, they will have to spend on armaments. Great powers might be more usefully, but are seldom less dangerously, employed than in fabricating costly objects and flinging them, as you might say, overboard. Good luck to it! It is an excellent way of letting off steam.

Snow!

It has snowed a few times recently. I wonder how children can play happily in the snow for so long with their hands red and chapped.

View from our living room window (photo by T)


Snowman and Sunday School friends


Blurry but fun

Beware New Clothes

In this season of New Year's resolutions, I came across a timely quote from Thoreau's Walden.

I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? If you have any enterprise before you, try it in your old clothes. All men want, not something to do with, but something to do, or rather something to be. Perhaps we should never procure a new suit, however ragged or dirty the old, until we have so conducted, so enterprised or sailed in some way, that we feel like new men in the old, and that to retain it would be like keeping new wine in old bottles. Our moulting season, like that of the fowls, must be a crisis in our lives. (via 43 Folders)

My "new clothes" tend to be organization systems: software, gadgets, and even paper calenders and such. This year is the first time in quite a while that I sticking with the same system, a pocket calendar/notebook for personal things and an online calendar/task list for work. Maybe I'll spend less time "getting organized" and more time doing real stuff. Here's hoping anyway.

What kind of "new clothes" lure you?

"The Mother Tongue"

I just finished reading "The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson (thanks Molly!). He writes knowledgeably and hilariously about the history of the language from the Indo-European roots to Cockney rhyming slang and everything in between. As a teacher in Japan, I was particularly interested in the passages that explain why English is so tough to pick up as a second language. He writes of how "no other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced so differently," giving the following list of paired words as an example. Phonics can only take a student so far.

heard--beard
road--broad
five--give
fillet--skillet
early--dearly
beau--beauty
steak--streak
ache--mustache
low--how
doll--droll
scour--four
four--tour
grieve--sieve
paid--said
break--speak

Here's another list that illustrates the difficulty of English spelling. "See if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled."

supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
irresistable
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheria
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
grafitti

Click the comments link below to check your answer.

And here's a list of British and American synonyms. Cover the column of the country you are most familiar with and see how many words you know. (The list was designed for Americans so British will probably have an easier time of it. And sorry if the table looks weird; I can't get it to look quite right.)

British	American
Cot	Baby’s crib
Cotton (for sewing)	Thread (for sewing)
Courgette	Zucchini
To skive	To loaf
Candy floss	Cotton candy
Full stop (punctuation)	Period (punctuation)
Inverted commas	Quotation marks
Berk	Idiot, boor
Joiner	Skilled carpenter
Knackered	Worn out
Number plate	License plate
Old Bill	Policeman
Scarper	Run away
To chivvy	To hurry along
Subway	Pedestrian underpass
Pantechnicon	Furniture removal truck
Flyover	Vehicle overpass
Leading article	Newspaper editorial
Fruit machine	One-armed bandit
Smalls	Ladies’ underwear
Coach	Long-distance bus
Spiv	Petty thief
To grizzle	To whine
To hump	To carry a heavy load

Despite having a degree in English literature and having worked with British colleagues for several years, I only knew eight of the British words.

Just to show how Bryson combines scholarship and humor, here is what he writes near the end of a section about how the 60-million-word Oxford English dictionary came into being:

But perhaps the most notable of all the OED's minor quirks is its inistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling "is perh. Shakespeare." (To which we might add, it cert. is.)

If you're interested in this book, check it out on amazon with this link. And don't forget to check the comments below to see how many of those words were spelled incorrectly.