I sometimes make board games for use in my English classes. Today I’d like to tell you about the most recent of those, Cross-Country, which was designed to use a map of U.S. states as the board.
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JET Program
Japan
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Games
The Soul of BitSummit
This was originally posted on March 9, 2013 on my blog on Gamasutra. I really should have cross-posted it here in the first place. BitSummit is awesome and I am proud to have helped out with it. I fully intend to help again next year. So, BitSummit happened on Saturday. It was a Continue Reading
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Japan
My Students are Awesome
I have awesome students. I don’t know the third person in this conversation — I assume it’s one of my student’s new friends at his high school. Still, I’m pretty damn proud of him right now. His English really is clunky at best, but I’ll be damned if he doesn’t Continue Reading
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JET Program
Letter to My Graduating Students
Spring is here, and with it the end of the Japanese school year. I have been asked to write a letter to my students, which will appear in what is, as far as I can tell from the explanation I was given, their yearbook. Spring 2013 Dear graduating students, What Continue Reading
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Japan
A Cheeky Child and a Troubled Transfer
The Cheeky Child At the beginning of every one of my classes (at all levels of education from preschool to high school), I ask each student, “How are you?” This would take too much time if I had more students. As things stand it’s a good, regular way to start Continue Reading
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Japan
The Japanese and the Weather
Up until now, I’ve been keeping my JET Program blog posts on a separate blog. I want to blog more regularly, but have no desire to devote the time necessary to keep two blogs up at once, so I’m merging it into this blog. The now defunct blog is here. Continue Reading
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JET Program
What I’ve Been Up To
The following is copy-pasted from a post I just made on the NerdFitness forums. It pretty much sums up how things have been for me for the past couple of months. I dunno how many of you went, “Hmm… WTF happened to Crowbeak?” after I dropped off the radar, but Continue Reading
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Japan
The Area of a Japanese Circle
The formula for the area of a circle is pi times the square of its radius. The Japanese government has evacuated an area around the Fukushima power plants with a radius of 40km, or 5,024km sq. Right after the power plants went critical, the US government strongly recommended (at around Continue Reading
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Japan
The Molted Cicada
This was written for one of my classes this semester. The class is titled Women’s Voices in Japanese Literature. The assignment was to compare/contrast two poems from The Tale of Genji, one of the staples of classic Japanese literature. There are many tanka poems in The Tale of Genji. These Continue Reading
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Studying Japanese
Japanese First-Grader Textbook Story Translations
One of my professors in the Japanese department here at UAF gave me the opportunity to take a JLPT N2 practice test. I did rather poorly on it. As I suspected would be the case, my lacking vocabulary was at the heart of all the problems I had with the Continue Reading