Why?

Because when Teachers go on vacation, they look at ways to exploit their adventures for students. Whether collecting foreign magazines for language class, or foreign coins for math class, or postcards for geography class, Teachers always look for inexpensive ways to make learning more interesting and relevant.

Because Teachers know that The Voice is a super power to be used wisely.

Because Teachers believe that strong coffee (or tea, or energy drinks) can substitute for sleep when they’ve stayed up until 3 am on a school night to attend an online workshop in another time zone, or to play with a new tool that just might have potential for students.

Because Teachers have Facebook friends who are half their age, and it’s not creepy. They answer homework questions from these friends until the wee hours (and again pretend that coffee, tea, or Red Bull is as good as sleep).

Because Teachers support other teachers. It’s not that Teachers are always one, big, happy, egalitarian family. There’s a hierarchy that ranges from (roughly) Ph.D. weilding professors in “real” subjects at the top, to bilingual Teachers working with children at the bottom. However, Teachers take pride in their profession, and in colleagues working to strengthen that profession, particularly when it seems that they’re the only ones who actually consider teaching to BE a profession.

Because Teachers manage to smile rather than scream when facing non-Teachers who think the “people who can’t, teach” joke is funny. Ditto for dealing with people who assume that teaching was their fall-back job.

Because Teachers turn every freakin’ thing they touch into an educational opportunity. Teachers looked at World of Warcraft and thought, this just might motivate reluctant learners. They visited Second Life and said, “Cool place to teach! Look at the potential here!” They looked at Skype and saw a way to connect their students with the world. They looked at Twitter and said, “Great way to share resources!”

Because Teachers fight passionately for education ideals–to include technology, to exclude technology, to abolish standardized tests, to improve standardized tests, to open classrooms to the world, to protect children from the world. But, at the end of the day, Teachers work to help students succeed within whatever reality they face.

Because Teachers are reading this and wondering why I’m making a fuss about the things they do every day. Because they assume that other teachers would do the same, if they were able to. Because they can’t imagine doing anything but Teach.

Happy World Teachers Day! Thank you for inspiring the world’s children.

• Karen Frazier, Ritsuko Nakata, Carolyn Graham and I finished the 4th edition of Let’s Go.
• I did workshops on the 5 largest islands in the Japanese archipelago (Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, Kyushu and Okinawa, in case you’re curious), in Korea, and online.
• Chuck Sandy, Kate Cory-Wright and I co-wrote a course, English for Teachers, for International Teacher Development Institute.
• I wrote two columns: Teacher’s File 2.0 for Teachers Learning with Children, and Barb’s Bits and Bytes for ELT News.
• Most Wednesdays found me helping to moderate ELT Chat with Marisa Constantidides, Shaun Wilding, Berni Wall and Shelly Terrell.
• I taught. And blogged.

Barbara

Kazu: I want us to provide teacher training workshops in all areas of Japan.
Me: OUP  already organizes workshops every year in all regions. How would this be any different?
Kazu: I want to send authors and trainers to the rural areas that don’t usually get attention. Even if only a few teachers attend, that’s OK. I want teachers to know that they matter.
Me: That’s nice.

I smiled, and gave Kazu credit for having his heart in the right place, but really didn’t expect to hear anything about his idea again.

Then, earlier this year, I got the list of venues for the OUP All-Japan Summer Tour. 123 workshops in 60 locations around Japan between June and October. I was impressed, but still didn’t really believe that something this massive could be pulled off. To give you an idea about the difference in scale, I’ve just received the list of venues for the Spring Teaching Workshop Series, which will have workshops in eleven cities over a period of two months–a more typical schedule. The logistics of getting speakers, support staff, books, and technical equipment to as may as nine different locations in the same weekend would be a challenge for even a large organization. OUP Japan is not a large organization.

View Oxford University Press All-Japan Summer Tour 2011 in a larger map

In addition to simple logistics, the tour faced a few challenges from mother nature. There was a typhoon in Okinawa and an earthquake during the workshop in Fukushima. The biggest wrench was thrown in before the tour even began. In the original schedule, Sendai and Fukushima were scheduled to host two of the earliest workshops. The earthquake and tsunami in March changed everything (in more ways than messing with a tour schedule). I wouldn’t have been surprised if OUP had dropped both cities from the tour after the disaster, but the only concession was moving the dates to the end of the tour to allow time for recovery and to find new locations.

The All-Japan tour was a huge success, but not because it attracted huge numbers of teachers. A typical OUP workshop in Tokyo might attract 400 teachers. Many of the summer workshops were small. Very small. Granted, when you’re conducting a workshop in the middle of a bookstore or a coffee shop, a large group would be problematic, anyway. No matter how many (or few) teachers attended a workshop, they had a good time and they learned something new to take back to class. It was the first time that I’m aware of any publisher sending teacher trainers to some of the more remote locations we visited. It’s expensive to do so and all companies have to justify the money they spend on things like workshops, especially these days when money is tight for everyone. However, in every one of those hard to reach corners of the country, I met teachers who had never before attended a teacher training workshop . They’d never had a chance to connect with other English teachers professionally. They had fun and they learned something new, and (just as important) they were ready to look for additional professional development opportunities. They were excited that someone cared enough about them to organize a workshop where they lived. They felt like they mattered.

If you’d like a taste of what the long and somewhat crazy tour looked like, I’ve put together a short a slide show. If you would like to see more of the photos, I’ve started a group pool on Flickr called Oxford University Press All-Japan Summer Tour 2011. If you attended a workshop and have photos you’d like to share, please add them to the pool. Or, if you attended a workshop, please say “hi!” in the comments!

(If the link doesn’t work for the embedded player, you can see the slideshow on animoto)

Finally, a heartfelt THANK YOU to the workshop presenters and the team at OUP who gave up their weekends and explored the gamut of transportation, hotel and food options available in Japan over the past five months in order to make the summer tour possible:

Richard Attwood, Oli Bayley, Marco Brazil, Kevin Churchley, Aurora Dobashi, Simon Downes, Caroline Gerner, James Harris, Yoshiko Hashimoto, Kim Horne, Kayoko Ikeda, Yumiko Igawa, Kathleen Kampa, Michiko Kanamaru, Eric Kane, Ken Kamoshita, Yuco Kikuchi, Koji Kita, Ako Kitamura, Koichi Kobayashi, Matthew Lane, Gerard Marchesseau, Noriko Matsumoto, Ritsuko Nakata, Kazu Nakamura, Yoko Niwa, Karl O’Callaghan, Eri Okuda, Noriko Ono, Rob Peacock, Frank Pridgen, Naoko Saito, Miki Sakai, Kaj Schwermer, Fuyu Shimomura, Kaori Sueyoshi, Devon Thagard, Setsuko Toyama, Charles Ullmann, Chuck Vilina, Jason Wains, Keiko Willhite

Thank you putting the idea that teachers everywhere matter into action. I’m certainly happy to be home long enough to unpack my suitcase, but I’ll never forget the All-Japan Summer Tour!

Image: Edinblur

This is the story of a sensitive soul who decided to teach English as a foreign language. Like other such souls she was acutely aware that the world is not as it ought to be. While at university she had seen fellow students flocking to the careers fair and queuing up to become employees of the big corporations, ditching their ideals (if they had any) for the best possible pay check. She wasn’t going to ditch her ideals, and becoming a teacher seemed to be a way of joining the forces of good.

One of her hopes was to inculcate a love of the subject. Knowing what remarkable voices are to be heard in the more thoughtful corners of English-speaking culture, she wanted to bring students to the point at which they could really hear those voices and feel them in the core of their being.  What she hoped was to begin what could become a lifelong dialogue in English, with students beginning to feel at home in the language and finding that some particularly eloquent works in English have become part of their private cultural worlds.

The sensitive soul left her motherland, travelled to Greece and found work in a small school in a rather poor neighbourhood on the edge of Athens. The intense newness of everything helped stop her being deterred by the sight of the box-like classrooms, with the rows of immovable benches and desks facing the front, the stark white walls with only one decoration above the blackboard at the front: a small icon of Christ gazing up to a turquoise heaven and seeming to say: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” No she was not deterred.

Soon, though, the rocks on which hopes are dashed began to appear. One had to do with time and childhood, and the fact that her lessons were adding to a schedule for her students that was already too full. She wanted her students to enjoy what was left of their childhood before being cast into the loveless world of work, and to have enough free time to grapple with what maturity was to mean to them. So she began to feel guilty about overloading students with extra lessons, knowing that most students would only be able to cope with such a heavy schedule by taking no particular interest in any particular subject.

EFL may be just one in a long list of evening classes on which students feel forced to enrol, but the sensitive soul hoped that English could be a lesson with a difference. Other rocks appeared. Employers demand certificates and parents want tangible proof of progress, and time, being money, is limited, so there is a rush to prepare students for exams. The books she was given to teach were all about exam preparation, and they were books so thick that there was no time left for anything else.

She thought for a while about exams, and felt that English exams could have been different. Surely something could have been included to value a student’s personal response to one or two works in English. Texts could have been chosen that students might actually want to go into in depth. Students could have written on topics geared to their interests, and write at their own pace, drafting and redrafting their work with feedback from their peers. Such coursework could have been an important part of the final assessment.

As it was, the reading exercises she had to prepare her students for put all the weight on forms of speed reading for which a genuine interest in the text would have been a definite handicap, and the essays had to be written in a time so short that there was no opportunity to do anything other than re-heat pre-processed, pre-cooked ideas.

Teaching can kill. And when the language is reduced to rules, lists and endless cloze exercises, and students are put through their paces again and again until they can tick the correct boxes, and along the way are denied the chance to make the language their own, the prognosis is not good.

Reflecting upon this, the sensitive soul realised that her beloved language had been reduced to an instrument, a tool of no intrinsic value – a language so devoid of expression it began to seem dead. The voices that turn life into poetry went unheard and the hoped-for lifelong dialogue was stillborn. She realised, too, that her students were being trained in a horribly cold and thoughtless kind of efficiency. The sensitive soul had hoped for something more. Now she is racked by her complicity and she despairs at the thought that if the hope for something better cannot be nurtured in the realm of education, where else?

Torn Halves is a teacher, designer, writer and smallholder, based in Greece. You can read more of his writing on his website and his blog.

August 17th is Independence Day in Indonesia. Just like other countries, on this day we celebrate the history of how Indonesia became a nation. When I was a student, I felt like I was drowning in nationalism, even when it wasn’t anywhere near Independence Day.

Most Indonesians my age can recite the preamble of the Constitution of Indonesia and the Indonesian Proclamation. In school, we also had to memorize the names of all of our heroes along with National songs. Our government back then made sure that all children appreciated Indonesian history. We were proud of memorizing all the dates and tiny details about the battles of our heroes in their fight to form this country.

Time changes things, including governments and education policies. In hope of preparing future generations for the so-called Global Era, most schools nowadays try to be more international, which means they use English in school with more world-based lessons. People hope that this will make our children ready for the world.

But, people are also concerned that perhaps children have become too global and are forgetting their roots. Not many students can recite what I and my generation could. Not all remember Pancasila or can sing national songs. It somehow brings a sad feeling to many knowing that with their new curriculum, that was supposed to make them able to compete with the rest of the world, Indonesian children are in jeopardy of losing their identity.

I too became concerned about it, especially since the media also sometimes like to exaggerate things by saying that the current generation has lost itself. But I realize that there are actually many ways for our students to connect with the world while staying true to who they are.

One of the things we can do is to take students to museums. Here in Indonesia we have ‘Taman Mini Indonesia Indah’ or the Indonesian mini garden, a place where all our rich cultures are shown. Students can walk through real-sized traditional houses from all over Indonesia as well as touch traditional clothing. It’s not a boring museum where they exhibits are all in glass boxes.

Here we can ‘travel’ all over Indonesia because each province has its own mini garden and we walk from garden to garden to travel to each province. When I took a class, we actually found it hard to visit each province during our visit there.

Another way is by including it in our curriculum. Lucky for us, lessons about Indonesia are already in included in a week-long thematic unit in our curriculum. We talk about Indonesian clothes and food in English, and sing Indonesian songs. It may not be enough time, but we always try hard to make sure we include things that will help students build a sense of pride about being Indonesian. It is actually kind of funny to teach about  Indonesia in English, but then again it’s not about the language but how they feel  when they learn it.

Another fun and effective way to build national pride is by celebrating our important holidays; such as Independence Day, Heroes Day, and Kartini’s Day. We actually have plenty of national days but these three are the most popular ones celebrated in Indonesia. Here are ways we celebrate:

• On Independence Day, we celebrate by having a formal ceremony of saluting our Flag and singing our anthem. We also have many traditional competitions, such as moving the flag, carrying marbles in a spoon, and so on. The aim is to make students realize that to win something we have to fight for it. Both children and adults can participate.

• On Heroes Day, we usually ask students to dress up like one of our famous heroes. The goal is obvious, to introduce students to our heroes and hopefully have them learn a thing or two about the fight for Indonesian freedom. We also read or let students watch movies about Indonesian heroes.

• On Kartini’s Day, we celebrate the diversity of our culture by asking students to dress up in traditional costumes. You have no idea how it feels to see students looking all gorgeous and handsome in our national costumes. As this is an annual celebration throughout Indonesia, many places that rent the traditional costume having a hard time keeping up with the demand. Sometimes students have to be satisfied wearing whatever is available rather than their first choice because they have no other option. We usually celebrate the day by having parades and fashion show competitions. It’s always exciting to see not only the students but also the parents taking part in this. Many parents take a day off from work on the day just to be able to accompany their children to school.

Dressing up for Kartini's Day

With all these opportunities available, and the fact that many people still care about Indonesian culture and traditions, I’m not too worried about children forgetting their roots. It’s true that many of our children may not feel as much pride or understand our history in as much detail as we did when we were their age. But things evolve.

We cannot really hold back globalization, even if we wanted to. But then again, it may not be a bad idea for children to have parts of them belonging to the world while the other parts are still carrying their Indonesian roost. I mean it will make us all feel as part of one big happy world. And it’s good thing, because when we feel like we share this world with others, we may be able to stop prejudice and hate. I’m an optimist. As long as we continue to introduce Indonesia to our students, I’m not worried about them becoming too global.

 Icha Sarwono is an English teacher living in Jakarta, Indonesia. She is currently teaching kindergarten but has always had one foot in teaching English. She is an optimist who believes that Education can and will be better when we all put our minds to making it so. She feels lucky to be a teacher and tries to always explore ways to be better. You can follow Icha on Twitter, on Facebook, or on her blog.

So, here’s my iro iro:

20 years of learning and playing with Let’s Go

If you’ve visited the “about me” page, you know that I’m one of the co-authors of Let’s Go. In order to celebrate our 20th anniversary, and the launch of our 4th edition, I sat down and interviewed my co-authors Karen Frazier Tsai and Ritsuko Nakata for Oxford University Press English Language Teaching Global Blog. We also dug through our photo albums to find some pictures of our much younger selves (and our equally young editors), of teachers we’ve met over the years, and students, and mixed them all together with some of the art and music from all four editions of Let’s Go. If you have used the Let’s Go series, I hope you’ll enjoy our little stroll down memory lane. Even if you haven’t used the books, I hope you’ll enjoy our perspective about changes in ELT publishing over the past two decades.

OUP All-Japan Summer Tour (in all 47 prefectures)

If you’re in Japan, both Ritsuko and I will be traveling to many of the country’s 47 prefectures for OUP’s upcoming All-Japan Summer Tour, along with some other wonderful teachers and presenters. You can get details for the tour, and register for the event in your prefecture, on the OUP Japan website.

Little Tech for Big Results

After my adventure as a Skyped-in international speaker at the KOTESOL National Conference, I was invited to fly over to talk in person at the Busan KOTESOL Summer Conference. Adding to an already fun experience, I had a chance to meet up with two of my Webhead heroes–Jeff Lebow and Paul Preibisch.

Paul, me, and Jeff

Jeff recorded my presentation, and then we sat down to chat. You can watch both recordings (along with recordings and interviews with other KOTESOL presenters) here.

Thank you for your support!

This year’s Top 100 Language Lovers competition (hosted by Bab.la and Lexiophiles) included over 700 nominations which received more than 10,000 votes. Thanks to your support, Teaching Village ranked 5th in the best Language Learning blogs, and 10th overall. When you have time, please pay a visit to the Villagers page to learn more about the guest authors who are a big reason for our strong ranking (and read some of their contributions!). And, thank you again!

]]> http://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/06/10/iro-iro/feed/ 2 http://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/05/05/aftershocks-5/ http://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/05/05/aftershocks-5/#comments Thu, 05 May 2011 11:24:04 +0000 Barbara http://www.teachingvillage.org/?p=3748 It’s Children’s Day in Japan, a holiday for rejoicing in children’s unique personalities and celebrating their happiness. It seemed appropriate to use this post to showcase some of the ways that children around the world have worked with their teachers to respond to the earthquake and tsunami in this country.

One Love

Jeremy Macdonald‘s elementary school students in Klamath Falls, Oregon wanted to show their concern and love. Jeremy explains a bit about the process his students went through in putting their project together on his blog. Here’s a video showing them creating their banner and origami pelicans, and the finished products, backed by one of my favorite songs.

 

Songs for Japan

Yoon Soo Lim teaches middle school music in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  In her blog, she explains that  her seventh and eighth grade students thought of songs that would bring “healing, encouragement and hope to people facing hardships in Japan.” They collected their song choices, and the reasons behind those choices into glogs. I was extremely touched, and think you will be, too.

Click here to visit the seventh grade glog.

Click here to visit the eighth grade glog.

Yoon has also set up a page of sticky notes for teachers and students who would like to contribute their favorite song to the Songs for Japan project.

Hope for Japan

Katie Gibson teaches Family and Consumer Science at a middle school in Olathe, Kansas. She created an animoto video to show her students, and they began by learning what happened and imagining themselves as the people in the pictures.

Students talked about the wants and needs of the people in Japan (which is part of their curriculum) and wrote a journal entry from the perspective of a person in the devastated area in Japan. They brainstormed ideas to find ways they could help, and decided to sew tote bags and iPod/phone covers. They’ve been selling them to others in their school community in order to raise money to help Japan. You can read more about their project on the Olathe District website.

Quakestories

Mary Fish and Kim Cofino teach at international schools in Japan. After the quake, they encouraged their students to share stories about their experiences on and after March 11th. They felt that the stories deserved to be shared beyond the limits of their classrooms. In a bit of serendipity, they met at a conference about the same time that the Quakebook project was getting started. They created the quakestories wiki to provide a central location to collect stories and to share them.  So far, students from five international schools in Japan have submitted stories for this project. Their stories are amazing!

These are just a few of the ways that students and teachers are turning their experiences into expression. If you know of other projects, I hope you’ll share them in the comments!

The (fairly accurate) numbers:

• Over 11,000 people have been confirmed dead, more than 2700 have been injured and more than 17,000 are still missing.
• Over 243,000 people are in shelters
• Over 177,000 people have been evacuated (so far) from the area in Fukushima around the nuclear power plants.
• Over 192,000 homes still have no electricity and 530,000 have no water.
• Over 19,000 buildings were completely destroyed.
• Damage estimates so far are as high as 25 trillion yen ($309 billion). (This estimate includes only damage to buildings, roads, and other infrastructure)
• Already, 133 countries and 39 international organizations have offered to help.
• The earthquake moved Honshu (the main Japanese island)  2.4 meters (7.9 feet) east and shifted the Earth’s axis by almost 10 centimeters (3.9 inches).
• There have been over 800 earthquakes since March 11th. Many of them have been over magnitude 5. (I’m mesmerized each time I visit this data visualization of the quakes.)

What the numbers don’t show

• First responders (mostly law enforcement and Self Defense Force members) are hurting (mentally and physically) after recovering 11,000 bodies over the past two weeks. (Until someone finds a body, people remain on the missing list)
• Soldiers who are providing portable baths and hot meals for evacuees have been working in miserable conditions without baths and hot food for themselves.
• Electric company employees are still trying to keep the nuclear reactors in Fukushima from becoming a bigger disaster than Japan already faces, working in very harsh conditions with very little support–they sleep for 3 hours at a time, sitting in chairs, don’t have water for bathing or toilets, and have not had real food (Calorie Mate bars don’t count as real food) since they started working on the reactors (2 weeks ago).
• People have disappeared who will never be listed as missing because no one in their family or neighborhood (or city hall) was left alive to report.
• No one knows how many pets were killed in the earthquake, swept away by the tsunami, or left behind during evacuation to fend for themselves. While most rescue efforts focus on people, there are relief organizations whose focus is animals. Most of these are Japan-based, but you can donate through Humane Society International if you wish).

The saddest story I heard today: An elementary school in Ishinomaki had 108 students and 13 teachers and staff before March 11th. After the earthquake, everyone made it to their evacuation area–the playground. They were standing on the playground when the tsunami hit, sweeping away all but 34 students and 3 teachers.

Collections of photos on Boston.com’s Big Picture tell a visual story of the past two weeks.

What people are doing and how you can help

It seems like everyone is trying to help: donating money, donating goods, donating time, offering places to escape grim reality for awhile, offering places to live and jobs,  holding charity events, donating proceeds from sales. Some of the contributions have been very large and very public, but there is even more happening that is unheralded.

I want to let you know about what four groups are doing to help. I’ve chosen these four because they cover a range of relief activities, they accept international donations, they utilize those donations very efficiently, and I have either worked with, supported, or know people involved (so I feel comfortable recommending the groups).

Hope International Development Agency Japan

Hope Japan is about as grassroots as it gets. They’re based in Nagoya, and (with Global Medic) have been collecting supplies (especially medical supplies) and trucking and flying them up to Tohoku daily. They announce what they need, folks bring it to the collection center, and when the truck is full it heads to the disaster area. You can read the organization and donate through their website. You can follow their daily reports, see photos, and get updated lists of needs on Hope Japan’s facebook page.

Things you should know about Hope’s efforts (via Chuck Sandy):

1) The donation drive at the Nagoya Hilton is ongoing and everything collected is getting to people in need via truck and helicopter daily. A whole community of new volunteers has come together to help.

2) This is a long term effort and soon we will be moving into the recovery and rebirth phase in which the help needed will be clean-up, rebuilding, and reinvention

3) The group has a continued commitment to spreading HOPE clubs throughout Japanese schools to in part aid in that recovery phase while at the same time continuing to help around the world where aid is needed most. We’ll also be moving ahead with Design For Change which seems especially relevant at this time. Anyone interested should contact Chuck Sandy (@chucksandy on Twitter).

4) There will be a Hafu Film / HOPE benefit for Tohoku on April 23rd at Shooters (in Nagoya)  with music by John Janzen, a presentation by the Hafu Film team, and pechakucha by area students. It will be 3000 yen at the door with 2000 yen going to featured causes.

Peace Boat

The folks with Peace Boat have been especially successful at getting supplies to smaller evacuation centers and hospitals whose patients have run out of food. Their volunteers have also been clearing mud and muck out of buildings. For people who want to physically go to Tohoku and help, Peace Boat is training teams of volunteers. You can get more details about donating, and volunteering on their website. You can follow their daily reports (and see videos) on their facebook page.

Second Harvest Japan

The day of the earthquake, Second Harvest set up an emergency soup kitchen to feed people who were either stuck in the city, or trying to walk home (without trains or electricity). On the 13th, they were one of the first aid organizations to get a truckload of supplies into the disaster area (by tagging along with a CNN crew). They’ve been taking food and supplies into Tohoku, and feeding people there, ever since. For every 1000 yen donated, Second Harvest is able to provide 10,000 yen worth of food. You can read more about the organization, and donate on their website. You can follow their relief efforts on their blog.

Save the Children

Save the Children estimates that over 100,000 children have been affected by the disasters (especially the tsunami), many profoundly. They are at risk in evacuation centers and homes with no heat, no electricity, no water, and little food. Save the Children is setting up Child-Safe Spaces in evacuation centers so that children can play with other children while parents take care of relief and recovery needs. Their people are trained to help identify children who are vulnerable, and are training others to help children cope with sometimes profound loss, constant fear of aftershocks, and an eventual return to “normalcy” and school. You can read about their efforts and donate on their website and read reports from the field on their blog.

If you are trying to help children or students deal with trauma, I recommend this article from Daily Yomiuri Online.

One of the reasons I admire these four groups is that they are expanding their efforts to help with relief and recovery in Tohoku, not taking aid away from other, equally needy and vulnerable groups around the world. Hope is still helping the poorest of the poor around the world. Peace Boat is still working to promote human rights, social change, and environmental awareness around the world. Second Harvest is still feeding the homeless in Tokyo. Save the Children is still protecting, feeding, and advocating for children in other danger spots around the world. They’re being very careful to avoid creating new victims while they help victims in Japan.

I think that’s very good way to be. The disaster in Japan is huge, and very well documented. With so many pictures, videos, and live updates, it’s easy to feel connected to what is happening in Japan. It’s a good chance to direct some of that compassion to areas that still need help, but don’t get the same amount of news coverage. Consider allowing your donation to be used “where the need is greatest” or (even better) donating twice–once for Tohoku, and once for the general aid fund.

How you can help, even if you can’t donate money, or goods, and don’t live in Japan

For the most part, it’s not worth mailing goods to Japan for relief efforts. Postage will probably cost more than the value of anything in the box. Some people can’t afford to donate money, and some people live in countries where it is very difficult (or impossible) to send money abroad.

You can still help. Here are three simple ideas.

1. Donate your time, donate food or clothing, or donate money to an organization in your own community. If we can do a better job of taking care of those who need help in our own backyards, it allows the big organizations to focus more effectively on emergency situations around the world.

2. Donate blood. There’s always a need.

3. Have your students identify something that they would like to change in their own community, and figure out a way to change it. If this idea appeals to you, I encourage you (and your students) to become part of Design For Change.

4. Leave a message on the We Love Japan message board. $1 is still being donated to the Japan Relief Fund for each message (until March 31st).

Caring and compassion can create ripples around the world more powerful than any aftershock or tsunami.

I had a wonderful moment in class this week.  I printed out the comments on the We love Japan message board and took them to one of my adult classes. I thought they would provide some lovely, simple reading material on a topic that my students are very familiar with—the earthquake and tsunami. My hidden agenda was to review (again!) how posting comments works online. (On the one hand, my students are sure that any comment they post anywhere online will result in their identity being stolen. On the other hand, they just don’t get the point of anti-spam words.)

Students divvied up the comments, and started by scanning them for locations and then posting them on a world map. Since my students travel a lot, they were especially keen about comments from places that they’d been.

Then, they noticed that most of the comments had a similar message, but used different words to convey it. So we identified the primary messages in the comments–I’m sorry this happened, I’m thinking of you, Be strong—and  I wrote each of the categories on the board. Then I got out of the way. Students took turns reading comments and deciding which bits fit the various categories. At times they asked for translations or explanations, and wrote words and phrases they particularly liked in each of the categories on the board.

They were particularly impressed by comments left by language learners or children–that they were brave enough to leave a message even though they made mistakes.

When they were finished, they’d created a very nice vocabulary bank of words and phrases to show support and caring. They ended up back at my hidden agenda a bit by writing their own comments and pretending to submit them–filling in email and spam word and all (we don’t have Internet in class, so I printed out that part of the message board, too).

Not a very flashy activity, but quite satisfying all the way around. It isn’t often that we have such a collection of short, simple messages on a common theme. I recommend it.

Students can donate $1 to help Japan just by leaving a message of support

After the quake, I heard from teachers whose students wanted to send messages to show they cared. Russell Willis at ELT News was kind enough to create the We love Japan message board so that teachers and students (and anyone else) could send a simple message of support to people in Japan. They’re promoting the messages through their Japanese language network as well, so a lot of Japanese teachers and their students will be aware of the messages (at least when they have electricity and Internet and computers again).

This week, Russell announced that ELTBooks.com will donate 50 cents for each message (up to 2000) to the Pearson Foundation’s Japan Relief Fund. Since the Foundation is currently matching donations, each message will end up meaning a $1 donation. I think it’s a great opportunity for children to be able to feel like they are making a difference.  You can read more about the program in Russell’s editorial. (plus information about other exciting relief projects!)

Pearson has only promised to match donations until March 31st (so far), so I hope you will consider taking this idea into your classes early this week! If your students have already left messages, please let them know that $1 is going to be donated on their behalf.

Tomorrow, I’ll be back with more news about relief efforts big and small, and more ways we can all help

Heroes

Members of Association of Foreign Wives of Japanese (AFWJ) and Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT) have been actively using their online networks (and mobile phones) to confirm the safety of members and non-members alike, offering support, and practical information and assistance. I am extremely proud to be a member.

Not heroes

Individuals I’ve read about who are planning to head to Japan, camera in hand. Please don’t. Relief groups are already having trouble getting into Tohoku—transportation is a mess. There isn’t enough food, or gas, there’s still no water and limited electricity. Even if you speak Japanese fluently, you will be a drain on already stretched resources. If you don’t know Japanese, you will be worse than a drain. There are plenty of other equally stupid things you can do to get your 15 minutes of fame on YouTube. Please consider choosing one of them instead.

Online resources for earthquake information

Olive English is a wikipedia-style website with information for quake survivors. It is editable, so if you have something useful to add to its resources, you can.

There are two groups on Facebook that are doing a great job of disseminating information for non-Japanese speakers. One is HOPE: Disaster News Straight from Japan for English Speakers. It’s exactly what it sounds like–a collection of news sites and translations of news items. Yuko Nagata and Akane Itoh administer the group, and are hoping that more people will contribute resources as they find them.

Jun Shiromitsu has been translating Japanese messages from Twitter of eye-witness accounts of the quake and its aftermath. 140 characters communicates a lot more in Japanese than it does in English, so Twitter has been a great source of information about the quake and people’s experiences, especially since so many in Japan use Twitter from their mobile phones.  There are some wonderful feel-good stories on Jun’s page to balance out all the dreadfulness.

If you are on Twitter, Maki Itoh (@makiwi) has been providing nearly continuous translations of news as it is reported on TV. If you aren’t on Twitter, you can still read what she’s sharing by visiting her Twitter page (click on her Twitter ID above to take you there)—the live stream is always visible there.

What you can do to help

Donate money

Generally, it’s difficult to donate directly to Japanese aid organizations. Most donations are done through postal or bank transfers, not credit cards. One group that is helping to funnel donations to local groups is the Japan Center for International Exchange (JCIE/USA). If you have a favorite international organization (Red Cross, Salvation Army, Save the Children, Humane Society, etc.) you can go ahead and donate to them. They are probably going to be helping here, either by channeling funds to a partner Japanese organization or by working on the ground in Tohoku.  You can always check their homepages to see how they plan on helping. Inter Action has some good advice on their page about the best ways to help. As there are more ways to help, I will update my information.

Send a message of hope and encouragement

I’ve received a lot of queries from teachers and students who want to do something for children in Japan. It’s wonderful to see how many people care about people here. Right now, the relief effort is focused on rescuing the living, identifying the dead, avoiding a nuclear disaster, and getting essentials to the isolated. Identifying Japanese schools that need help is quite far down the list of priorities. In the meantime, ELT News has created a page where you can leave a message to let students (and others) in Japan know that you care about them: We love you,  Japan! ELT News has a Japanese network in place in order to get news to Japanese teachers and students (and parents) so this is the best way I can think of to be sure that you message reaches the people you intend to see it.

That’s all I have for today, except for this video that was on YouTube earlier. It’s closer than I ever hope to be to a tsunami.