Mr Ferguson’s Classroom

In this part of Japan, the sakura (cherry blossoms) have gone from pink to green this week, losing their flowers to wind and rain and growing new leaves. Most cities have cherry blossoms planted everywhere- in parks, medians, train stations- so when they are in bloom even the view during your daily commute is transformed. 

Hikari nursery school has the largest sakura in the area on their playground, so last week they held a hanami, picnic under the flowers, just for the grandparents of the children. 

Midori nursery school held a hanami at night for the teachers. Spotlights were placed under the tree; sometimes a hanami is more a party than picnic that can go into the night. We ate obento’s together, which are carefully arranged dinner boxes of traditional Japanese foods. I contributed Girl Scout cookies to the dessert, thanks to my parents who carried a supply to me last month. 

On the weekend, I ventured out to a nearby temple famous for its sakura. Hundreds of people shared the same idea, and hiked up a mountain to Senkoji temple to picnic and drink under the trees. I wandered around, bought some local oranges and honey, and took lots of pictures. 

Even without a planned event, it felt like everyone took any excuse to be outside, be it a walk around town, drinking sake under a tree, or even just taking a longer recess at school, all of which in their own way shared a reverence for the new season. 

In the classroom, I started a couple new lessons, one with some of my recent graduates from Midori. It started as four girls sent to me full of pent-up energy after sitting at school all day, but now has increased to five. The other is with two brothers who graduated a few years ago from Hikari. One of them is apparently the top Karate student in the Hiroshima prefecture for his age. I’m not sure which lesson makes me more nervous (just kidding; it’s the girls). 

At Futaba nursery school, we’re preparing for an upcoming open school. As of yesterday, we’re considering performing 5 Little Monkies for the parents. 

 

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More soon!

Long time no blog. Spring has come and with it new projects, vacation, baseball season, the new school year, and the blooming of the sakura, or cherry blossoms. Every year when this happens, people gather wherever there are trees and eat and drink. I would be doing this today if it wasn’t raining, so instead I’ll try to catch up on what’s been happening. 

In Japan, the school year begins in April, with little break between it and the end of last year. So during March, I wrapped up English lessons with my 5 year olds. At each school, we planned cooking activities, preparing sandwiches, soup, and pizzas using recipes the children wrote.

During this time, we also collected eye movement research on about 20 children reading a picture book in Japanese. There were a lot of exciting moments documented during children’s reading, the analysis of which is my priority for April. 

And just after collecting the data for our eye movement study, I took a week off while my parents came to visit me for one of the best vacations I’ve ever had. We managed to visit two of my schools and meet all my coworkers, watch a sumo tournament in Osaka, go to a Spring festival in Kyoto, spot the Hiroshima Carps baseball team, be included in a wedding photo, eat wild boar. 4 major cities, 2 islands, and just about every mode of transportation available, all in one week. Being able to connect my family with my life abroad is certainly the highlight of my time spent here. 

And just after my parents left, and much sooner than I wanted, two of my schools held graduation ceremonies for the 5 year students. The largest part of my job here has been with these children, and I wasn’t ready to see them go.

Both ceremonies were very formal and emotional events, really unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. Parents and teachers all wore dark suits. Children walked in one-by-one and sat in the front seats. The ceremony included a number of speeches where teachers, principals, and parents fought back tears to finish their message. 

After the children were handed their diplomas, the 5 year class sang a song to the incoming 5 year class. This really hit everyone pretty hard, including the elementary principal who came to say a few words to his new students. 

Last, the 5 year teacher spoke to her class, little of which I could understand but can only imagine was incredibly passionate and heartfelt, based on the increase in sniffles during her speech. During the year, the teachers and I talked a lot about pedagogy, and what kind of activities and methods are best for children’s learning development, etc. But really, anything that can produce that much love and care for the school, the teachers, and the children must be doing something right in my opinion.

I remember at the ceremony thinking about an article I had read recently about the U.S. Dept. of Ed. considering merit pay for teachers. Below is part of an editorial on the subject. 

 

Public-school teachers should have their pay tied to performance, Hobbs [Sen. Steve Hobbs, D-Lake Stevens] told Seattle Weekly.

Because merit pay has worked so well in the corporate world.

The times are schizophrenic, aren’t they? Just as we go ballistic over bonus pay in the financial world — even blaming it for causing the meltdown — President Obama and many lawmakers locally are pushing the same premise in the educational world.

There are a zillion versions of merit pay. But the basic idea is to link a person’s pay with some measure of whether they’re good at their job.

For Wall Street bankers, the gauge was profits or stock prices. For classroom teachers, it’s usually student test scores. Those who get higher profits or test scores earn more cash. Those who don’t are left behind, and eventually weeded out.

Simple, efficient, Darwinian. 

Except on Wall Street it was a disaster.

Setting aside the practical questions raised by how you measure performance, I thought about what it would be like, after Mika the 5-year teacher spoke at the ceremony, to tell her that she would get paid more if next year her students did better. How insulting that idea is to teachers like her that put their heart out and work hard because they love children. What an insult. 

Sorry for that tangent. Anyway, the best part of the ceremony for me was learning that 4 of the graduates were going to begin a private lesson with me in the afternoons, which I’m very much looking forward to. 

If the sun comes out, I’ll be sure to get pictures of the cherry blossoms posted, hopefully sooner than later. 

On Monday nights I stay with the owners of Midori nursery school. This Tuesday morning, shortly after seeing everyone’s snow pictures posted online, I walked outside to this…

The kids enjoyed it for the few hours it lasted. 

Last October, I mentioned traveling back to the states to pick up and receive training on a piece of research equipment that my boss wanted to use for a new study on Japanese beginning readers. After staying briefly in Boston and Birmingham, holding up each security checkpoint at every airport, I made it back to Japan with two computers, mini monitors, a bunch of cables, and an ASL Eye Tracker D6, a high-speed camera and control unit that can detect and record the eye movements of a reader.

This equipment is the newest advancement in observing what your eyes do when you read, a subject that has actually been researched for over 100 years. The original researchers, of which I’m reading a book about now, used a thin plaster of Paris cup with a tiny hole drilled in the center, coated with a little cocaine and placed on the surface of a reader’s eye, and an aluminum pointer connected to the cup that flicked marks onto “smoked paper” when the eye moved while reading (lying on their back, I presume; I wish I had a picture to share).

The ASL EyeTracker allows a reader to sit comfortably at a computer monitor, while a discreet camera below uses infrared light to detect the angle between the reader’s right pupil and the reflection of light hitting their cornea, which determines where the reader is looking on the screen. EMMA, or Eye Movement and Miscue Analysis, is a recently developed research method that uses this eye-tracking equipment and audio to analyze an oral reader’s eye movements and oral reading miscues compared to the original text.  

From Ken Goodman’s website, 

Miscue analysis, with over 40 years of history, provides a ‘window on the reading process’ and reveals the knowledge and strategies readers use as they comprehend written texts.

And eye-movement analysis opens another window, allowing researchers to observe, in part, what a reader is thinking while they read. Research in both of these areas has found that we may not be doing what we think we’re doing when we read. For example, we don’t look at every word, we don’t consistently look from left to right, and we occasionally substitute, omit, or insert words into the text that are not there. But all of this helps us in making better sense of the text. 

The image above depicts the eye movements of a nursery school teacher, Megumi, reading a few pages from an English children’s book. Although this was done just for practice, (the first line is a bit messy, due to me temporarily losing focus of the eye, and asking the teacher to reread), it contains examples of findings from this line of research that have been so “eye opening” [rimshot]. 

First, a quick explanation of what you’re looking at. The blue dots are fixations, or points where the eye pauses and focuses. The red lines are saccades, or rapid movements the eyes make from one point to another. Since information is only received from the eyes when they are still, the blue dots and the remote area surrounding them are the only places in the text the reader saw. The size of the blue dot denotes the amount of time the reader paused. 

Now Megumi read aloud every word correctly, but her eye movements show that she didn’t look at every word. For example, she didn’t look at “Here”, or “is” on the last line, perhaps because the text repeats these words in each line. She did, however, look at bath twice. Megumi told me after I showed her eye movements to her that the word “bath” seemed odd, since the preceding lines were “blue sheep” and “red sheep”. 

So whereas many researchers have interpreted reading as “decoding” or “word recognition”, and commercial reading programs heavily promote strategies to decode or sound out words, the thought here is that reading must be about more than just seeing words on a page.  The reason a reader can say and understand a word without looking at it is because they are using more than their eyes to read. It’s as if your brain has a joystick that moves the eyes only to places where it needs more information to interpret the text. Or, as Goodman puts it, the eyes are merely “in service” to the brain as it constructs meaning of a text. But this idea really comes at odds with how several very popular reading programs assume reading works. 

Consider the DIBELS Nonsense Word Fluency test, used by millions of children in America after it was approved as scientifically based by the Dept. of Ed. and funded in almost every Reading First grant. Children are timed and measured on their ability to sound out nonsense words (raj, zur, wal, fiv) as an indicator of reading development. Do you really have to be able to sound out nonsense before you can make sense of print? I think the eye movement and miscue analysis research makes a strong case that readers reading real texts don’t have to be so concerned with each letter or word to read. In fact, Edmund Huey, who authored the 100 year old book on eye movement and reading research I’m reading, made the same point. Interestingly, my copy of his book, which has been out of print since the 60’s, came from a library and has the word “DISCARD” written across it. I guess it was. 

Our hope with this study is to see what Japanese beginning readers do when they read, and see how it compares to findings of reading in English. I’ve been really excited to do this, even though preparing for this study has begun to consume a lot of my time outside the classroom.

Meanwhile, back in the classroom, the kids and I have been reading, writing, and talking about food. We started with two big books, Monster Sandwich and Yuck Soup (both by Joy Cowley) which introduced the words yum and yuck. We then made a chart of foods we liked and disliked. We also talked about healthy foods, and found that many of our “yuck” foods the children considered to be healthy, and while there were some pictures of chocolate and cake on our “yum” side, there was also a lot of fruit.

I also realized that the children regularly eat foods they consider “yuck” when it is served to them at lunch. This is a disposition I find to be vastly different than that of children I’ve eaten with in America (and me as a child). We’re planning on cooking something together in the next couple weeks so I hope to share more about the whole project soon.

The schools have also been busy preparing for their annual Hapiokai, or music festival. It’s a tradition in Japanese schools to hold a musical/theatrical/dance performance for parents every year. Just to give you an idea of the scale, we are talking keyboards, xylophones, kotos, drums, percussion, costumes, sets, and countless hours of rehearsal. As with the Sports Festival in October, the practicing has cut into my English lessons partly, but has also given me more time to prepare for our EMMA study, hopefully to be done in March. Below is a clip from a practice session. After this week, I’ll have videos from the festivals to share. 

Until then, 

 

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 Practice with bells: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

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An old, old, children’s song by a guy named Hap (short for Happy?). I’m pretty tired of hearing it, myself, but some children have recently been requesting that we do it. In fact, I think I’m on my 4th listen that day when I started taking the video.  So here you go, a blast from the past, make way for the parade of colors!

Here are photos from another recently written class book one of my 4-year groups, entitled…

How are You?

Kotoha is happy.

Tatsuki is sad.

Riku is happy.

Yuina and Riko are sad.

Everyone is ANGRY!

Miwa is scared.

Riku and Chisako are hungry.

Tatsuki is sleepy.

Mika is hot.

Hasumi is cold.

Everyone is EXCITED!

Since children are somewhat familiar with Christmas in Japan, my teachers asked me to do something for the holiday. Half enthusiastically, I settled on making stockings, thinking they could try writing their name in English. For many of the kids, it was their first time to do this. 

Now, for pristine bulletin board quality stockings, I would have needed the children to practice the writing beforehand, but this time (more honestly, due to time) I just let them give it a go. Although all but one child used their name tag as a guide, unique differences appeared in their writing process, and the final product. 

Some children copied their names backwards.

Some children wrote Japanese and English together. Makoto (left) wrote his name in English also from right to left, but in Japanese from left to right. Kensin (right), although the letters appear in correct order from left to right, wrote his name starting with the n, and going from right to left. His name appears in Japanese conventionally, from left to right.  

Some children copied the serifs, or letter decorations, used in the font on their nametag, 

and some children didn’t. Why is that? The teachers and I talked a lot about this. Perhaps the children that didn’t include the decorations knew the letters didn’t need them…

All children wrote lower case a’s as they appear in Roman typeface, as opposed to the handwritten a. This is the a that appears on their nametag, and on most environmental print. Kana, the only child to write her name by memory, wrote her a’s with one mark of the pencil (kind of like some people write a 2, just with a larger loop at the bottom. It’s a tiny detail to mention, but it struck me as a more efficient way to make the letter, which suggested further that she was more experienced in writing English.  

The 3-year class also made stockings, but chose whether to write their own name in Japanese, or have the teacher write it. The stocking on the left was written by a child who, when writing independently, draws one stroke for every syllable he speaks. The stocking on the right shows the child’s version of three actual Japanese characters that spell his name. 

When asked what their stocking said, all children responded with their name, pointing to their writing. 

Once the stockings were hung in the classroom, we secretly put candy in each one before the school’s Christmas party, which made the children excited. A decent Christmas activity, I felt.  What interested me more, however, were the discussions the teachers and I had about the children’s writing, trying to figure out why some children did what they did. I feel that all of the children’s nuances reveals something about their understanding of written language. The direction a child chose to write reveals something about that child’s understanding of directionality (which direction you write conventionally). Choosing to and not to mimic the font reveals something about the child’s awareness of the English alphabet. Writing one mark for each sound reveals something about a child’s view of the relationship between oral and written language. And writing both English and Japanese characters together reveals something about their view of both languages as distinct from each other.

I was reminded of Prisca Marten’s I Already Know How to Read, namely how her daughter independently worked through and even challenged the spelling of her name. I also thought about Brian Cambourne’s Coping with Chaos, which documents and describes “process writing” with similar writing samples of children, both books real gems to read. I’d say reading these books made young children’s writing fascinating for me. It changed the 3 year old’s writing from scribbling into testing a theory about written language, from meaningless marks to meaningful writing, something that could easily be ignored into something worth analyzing. Something exciting to end in 2008, and something to build on in 2009. 

Just finished my last day of work for the year, and am headed to Kyoto for some holiday traveling. 

Merry Christmas, 

and a Happy New Year. 

For a month now, I’ve wanted to write about my first field trip. I remember being in complete disbelief when my principal said that the 4 and 5 year classes were going to walk, from the school, across town, to a mountain, summit it, then return. My first thought was “whatever you say”, but I was certainly happy to tag along. 

First thing in the morning, we assembled, two by two, each of us carrying our lunch and a drink, and proceeded out of the school gate. As we walked through the neighborhood around the school, children pointed out their homes. We passed by both neighbors and strangers, in their gardens, on bikes, walking their dogs, all who the children greeted and who wished us well. In the city, we passed store clerks, parking lot attendants, and firemen that the children had recently visited on another field trip. 

We held hands as we walked, and when we crossed the street we raised the other hand. There were four of us adults spread throughout the line. No parents chaperoned, but about halfway through town at the You Me Town shopping complex (where I buy groceries), some parents met us and cheered “Gambate! Gambate!” as we passed, a Japanese expression similar to “Go for it” or “Be strong”.

At the other end of town, we reached the trail that led us to Zao Mountain, and after a short break, Mariko, the principal, asked the children again if they still preferred using their trip money for ice cream over a bus that would take us back to the school after hiking the mountain. She had told me that when explaining the trip to them the last week, specifically how far they would be walking, she let them decide whether they wanted to use a bus, or use that money for ice cream (what a choice!). Both times, the children unanimously chose the ice cream, so onward and upward we went. 

It was a modest climb up the mountain, but the top offered a view of the entire city. Locating a tiny You Me Town with the maximum zoom of my camera lens gave a clearer perspective of how far we had walked thus far. After taking group photos, we continued hiking along a trail to the other side of the mountain ridge. At this point, I remember one 5 year old beginning to cry, but before he knew it, we reached our destination, a little playground where the teachers had planned for us to have lunch. 

For lunch we all ate onigiri (rice balls) and tea. One of my student’s parents packed me some with this note attached:

Dear Daniel,

Please taste some rice balls, 

if you like. The rice was just 

harvested by our friend. Baked

salmon is inside.

                        Lisa’s parents

In the park was also a man practicing his classical guitar, who answered questions for the children and continued to play while we ate. But before getting back on the trail, the kids conquered the playground, and included me in a rousing game of tag. 

As we began to make our descent, I instinctively worried about these little children tripping on roots and scraping their knees on rocks, just as I had worried that we’d wear them out walking that far. I remember thinking that I could never get away with a trip like this back home, first because of liabilities, and second because most roads just don’t accommodate walking anymore. 

And some children did fall as we descended the mountain, but it didn’t really bother them. They kept walking, and kept pointing at all the things we passed: shrines, graveyards, rice fields, gardens. We passed orchards with ripe mican (small oranges) and kaki (persimmons), which they would soon pick on later field trips. Each sight seemed to begin a new strand in some child’s ongoing conversation. 

And as promised, we stopped at You Me Town and together, we picked out about 2,000 yen (or 20 bucks) worth of ice cream, the one expense of the trip. We ate together next to a park, where the kids played one last time before finishing the last leg of our trek. It was only in this last stage where the children began to look worn, but soon enough we made it over the last hill, and passed through the school gate again, almost six hours after we left. A second lunch, an extended nap time, and many congratulations awaited them inside. 

There was both a simplicity and richness of experience in this field trip that has kept me thinking about it. When Mariko asked me if I enjoyed the trip, I told her it was honestly one of the best times I’ve had with children at any school. Partly, it was just exciting to explore the city and community I’ve moved into, but I guess more significantly, it was that the children and I shared this experience together - we were both getting acquainted with our neighborhood - and for the first time I referred to the neighborhood as ours. 

Since the hike, I’ve really felt comfortable bringing the community into my lessons, which has brought me a lot closer to these kids. Using the children’s language as text and my photos of the trip as illustrations, the children and I wrote our first bilingual book together, which we still read together during lessons. A few weeks later, we started an environmental print study, using photographs of many signs we had passed in the city. Recently we’ve written more books together, usually about what we each did on a holiday or weekend, children illustrating their own page. They’re the kind of work I imagine the New Zealand teachers had in mind when they said they could teach reading with just paper and pencil. Simple, but surprisingly rich.