Our Chain Story...Title TBD

I will let all of you write this as you wish! 

Once upon on time...

((Free No.3) A messy draft of my personal narrative...just start like this!

First of all, I found this advice for narrative writing on this nice site. It gives me some good ideas. Thanks!


Also, this site gives advice for good narratives (or any writing) as follows:
Good writing should have 6 Language Traits:

1. Idea Development (Communicate meaning!)
2. Organization (By time order, flashbacks, by character etc.)
3. Word Choice (Don't "tell", "Show!" with descriptive words!)
4. Voice (Be yourself. Don't hide. Tell your story)
5. Sentence Fluency (Transitions...flow...rhythm. Short sentences, dialgoue etc)
6. Conventions (periods, commas, capital letters...the boring stuff, but feel free to be creative and flexible!

A Mentor Text: "A Doubtful Christmas"
http://www.thinthreads.com/samples/xmas.html

------------ My Draft ------------

Title:  Panic

Grabber/Lead: 

On April 29, 2006, my two-year old son disappeared.

Problem/Challenge/Even  

We were at Parco, a department store near Chofu-station in Tokyo, and I was paying for some food in the basement grocery area. My son was near me, but when I finished paying and turned around, he was gone.

Action/What Happened

I called his name and walked around quietly at first, but it gradually turned into a full panic. He was nowhere to be seen.

Solution / What I/We Did

Takeaway / What I Learned / Ending Thoughts

(Week 3) One of my most precious things...

I have many precious things in my life. My family, my friends, my job, my beliefs, memories, experiences...my house...my hair (just kidding-I can lose that) are just of the things I don't want to lose.

I could write about any of those, but after some brainstorming, I felt that I have one ESPECIALLY precious thing that really seems to support all of the things precious to me. When I thought about "What would be the worst thing to lose in my life?" there are many things that would devastate me...like losing my wife Megumi or my children or one of my friends...but also discovered one other less tangible thing that would be really scary to lose. So I've decided to write about it to identify what it is a little more clearly in my own mind.

I think I would call it "a belief in the importance of caring," and I owe it mainly to my parents and their example. I believe that I should care for others and put others first, and that I can sacrifice my own interests (to some extent) to do that. Why do I believe that? One reason might be the Christian background I have and how I learned about the importance of selfless, unconditional love in church and the Bible. But I think it comes from other places too, and I think the strongest origin is in seeing my parents' example of loving and caring for not only family members (like us kids--who were difficult to love at times), but also even strangers.

One of my most impressive memories is the periodic visits my father made to a Hansen's Disease community in Karuizawa each year. The community has many Christians and my father and other missionaries from the Saku area would visit them to have a chapel time and interact. The first time I went, I was really frightened of the Hansen's Disease patients. Many had no hands or feet, and many had disfigured faces such as no nose, no eyes, and one gentleman even looked like his whole face had melted off with just a hole for a mouth remaining. Most people would stay away.

One of the gentlemen I met looked like this. In fact, this may be him.

However, there is no fear of getting the disease because they have all healed. They just have former scars of the disease. These people should be living with their families in regular communities, but they choose to stay in their own community because of the prejudice against them. Their community is very isolated deep in the mountains of Karuizawa/Kusatsu, and they really enjoy having people visit them.

My father visited them one a year or more, I think, and when I went with him and I felt the wonderfulness of having a heart of selfless caring for others. I also felt that that value of caring is something that is lost easily...as we get busy worrying about our own lives and own interests. But if we all begin to lose this, who is going to care for people who need help or love. And who will care for you when you become weak or useless? The ability to love and care for others is an elusive value, and, even though my ability may still be weak, I am glad that my parents helped me see this importance early on in my life. It is an extremely precious treasure that I want to keep activated in my own life.

Possible Genres of Writing - Think about POSSIBILITIES, NOT LIMITATIONS!

Find a genre that you think will be interesting to try + one that is good for the message/content that you want to communicate!

Fiction...(extremely) short stories, poetry, haiku, SF novels, children's stories, romance, comedy, skits, plays, mysteries, manga...

Non fiction...personal narrative / memoir, opinion essays, letters to the editor, interviews, academic research papers, recipes, how to manuals...

This is just the beginning of the list!

(Free No.2) If I could create a new elementary school...

"You are in charge of creating a new private elementary school. You can do whatever you want with almost no limitations at all."

This weekend I met a friend who is faced with a question like this. What would I do with a challenge like this? What would you do? The question is fascinating and mind-boggling. Not ever having taught in an elementary school, it is difficult for me to know what is possible and what is too idealistic, so I do not claim that the list below is final or realistic in any way. It is just based on my own experiences in various schools in the US, Japan, and China, and based on what I have heard and seen about good learning for children. So here goes:

10 Things An Elementary School Should Do:

1. Students would collaborate and share ideas, and learn to develop their learning as a community of learners who cooperate in challenging and supporting each other.
2. Teachers would collaborate and share ideas, but respect each other's professional freedom to innovate and experiment with new ways of teaching. 
3. The model of learning would be based on developing individual potential and creativity in a variety of diverse ways rather than one-size-fits-all industrial model of education that aims to produce a certain set of similar individuals.
4. Students would learn to be real readers and writers who love to read and write their whole lives. They would read a lot of self-selected books, write about those books, and talk about those books with other people while being challenged to try new genres when they are ready. They would write pieces on self-selected like authors, stories, poems, opinion essays in various genres that they learn about and publish their works openly in supportive community of classmates.
5. A lot of classes would be based on projects that are brainstormed by students and carried out by students. Projects that make a difference in the local community would be especially encouraged.
6. Classes would have connections to students in other classrooms, schools, countries to get other ideas. Competence in intercultural communication and also IT and digital media literacy will be needed for this.
7. Students would clean their own school and also do cleaning and other volunteer service in the local community.
8. A love of nature would fostered through having a garden, forest, pond, and other environments where students learn to coexist with plants and animals in a harmonious way.
9. Students and teachers will get out of the classroom often to explore what is happening in the world around them. I guess this means field trips...but it would be as simple as having class outside, or in the local community, or in a different venue from the regular classroom. Why not have music class in a senior home, or science class in the local sewage plant, or a math class in a super market. Visitors coming to classes should be encouraged as well.
10. The main goal will be a love of communication and learning and the necessary personal, social, and intellectual development to make that possible at the maximum potential of each individual in the community.

I'll have to think about this more, but I guess this will do for a start.

Class Summary and Homework 9/19-21

We are using these two days for your Who Am I? 10x10 presentations. Please be ready with your set of PowerPoint slides on a USB memory device.

I hope the process of preparing the 10x10 is helpful for thinking about who you are and what is meaningful to you.

I also hope that listening to your classmates presentations will help all of you develop a sense of community as you begin to write and communicate about yourselves.

Homework for 9/26 Monday:
On Monday, we will start exploring the process of writing and various genres that you can write and publish in this class. I will provide a "sample plan" for drafting, revising, and publishing 3 pieces of creative, personal writing (personal narrative, haiku/poem, and short story) and give examples and resources.

1) Bring a notebook of any size to class. This will be your Writer's Notebook for brainstorming or jotting down sudden inspirations.

2) Continue your blogging: This week's fixed topic is Who Am I?  Please also write an open topic blog--choose a topic that is meaningful for you! If possible, try to embed your Who Am I? slides on your blog using www.SlideShare.net.

3) Comment on your partners' blogs: For all of the topics so far, please leave a short or long comment to show your reaction, ask a question, or send a message. The groups of 4 for commenting are, in order of student number:

Genta, Mitsuru, Aze, Kumiko

Chihiro, Meiko, Yu Inoue, Soichiro

Kan, Yu K., Tetsuro, Kazuki

Riki, Uka, Arisa, Natsuki

Buchi, Hisashi, Mio, Kaori

These partner groups for commenting will continue until Week 5. Then I will change the groups. Of course, you are free to comment on all classmate blogs and my blog posts too! I hope somebody will leave me a message because blogging with no reactions is very lonely. I plan to leave a comment on everyone's blog over this long weekend too.

Mark's Sample (Open Topic): What's the most beautiful thing I ever experienced?

The most beautiful thing I have ever seen is my son Michael's birth in 2003 and my daughter Mei's birth in 2007. I was just an observer. Megumi, my wife, did all the hard, painful work of a natural birth with no epidural anesthesia in both cases and I was privileged to be able to watch both of my children come out into the world and cry their first cry.

Mei and Dad

Both babies were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in the whole world, and as ugly as new born babies are...with their wrinkled red faces and (at least before their bath) covered with various fluids...my memory of the scene is the most powerful memory of happiness that I have in my mind. My wife Megumi also, as exhausted as she was after hours of labor, seemed to glow with beauty. The whole scene had a fuzzy warmth and brightness to it.

This is no doubt partly because of my relief after the birth went smoothly without complication and both babies and mother were healthy. But it is something much more than just relief. It is hard to express how much happiness came to me from seeing my kids born. You want to cry and laugh and just sit there in awe, all at the same time.

I have videos of the moment of birth of both kids and one day I want to take the audio of initial cries off of it and put it on my blog. That initial voice of a new born baby (when it is yours, at least) is the most beautiful sound I have ever heard.

I don't think that I have a blog article on this topic (except this and this, very short posts), so I very glad that I had a chance to remember and write about it. I think I have some materials from my son's birth on a computer backup disk somewhere, but it is definitely better to have everything organized and connected on one blog...

Mark's Sample (Week 1): Do I like to write?

Yes and no. No and yes.

Until a few years ago when I started to study about how to teach writing in a more authentic way, I thought writing was something you do because you have to. You write because your teacher tells you. Or your boss. Or because you have no choice if you want to get something you want (like university entrance).

Write for fun? Personal development? Enjoyment? Creativity? Publishing something I want to communicate to others? These were all alien ideas to me.

Somehow that spark of "desire to write" had never been ignited in me through my education and life. How about you?

I started blogging in 2006 at age 33. That was the first time I ever wrote for myself. And it was hard. It was almost like I had been conditioned by my education to NOT write unless I was given an assignment. When you think about it, that is pretty scary: an educational system that chokes desire for self-expression. When you look back on your own education of how to write, or what to write, do you feel your self-expression was nurtured? If you can say Yes, I think you might be part of a very fortunate minority. Perhaps the reality is that our educational system is an artifact of the industrial revolution (See Ken Robinson's TED video on this)  and the system is designed to churn out people who will do what they are told faithfully rather than question the logic of the leaders or express alternative ideas based on creative and critical thinking. Am I being too skeptical when I say that?

Anyway, my discovery of a desire to write started with my blogging, which started due to my realization that, since I am a university instructor and expected to publish research reports and books and so on, I should begin to start writing. I had to force myself to overcome an indifference toward writing and chose blogging as a way to start that.

For those interested:
Here's my current Learning Blog on Blogger.
Here's an older one on Livedoor, which I decided to use mainly for blogging in Japanese on family/personal things separate from the Edublog.
And an even older one on Edublogs (link), which apparently is going to shut down soon...and which I abandoned because of a lack of spam comment filters.

So...I have discovered a love of writing. And this has helped me a lot with my professional writing when I write research papers for sharing ideas with other college English teachers.

Blogging has gotten much easier as I got used to it. In a sense, it took time to find my blog "VOICE" in English and Japanese.

Research writing is still very difficult, and I am still finding my voice and passions--but writing together with colleagues and other researchers has been VERY helpful for developing my ability and confidence.

Creative writing or other types of publishing other than research writing is....basically something I have NEVER tried. This course will be a first step toward that for me, just like you.

Mark's Samples (Week 1): Why did I decide to (m)ake this course?

For students, the blogging topic is "Why did you decide to take this class?" but I'll change it slightly to explain why decided to create this course.

For ELP teachers, Sophomore English (SE) is a chance to create any kind of course they want. There is total freedom. For the past four years, my SE course was titled Issues in English Education in Japan, and students researched and debated various challenges that English teachers and learners in Japan are facing.

I enjoyed teaching that course very much, but I was ready for a change.

Around the time that I had to update my course content for SE, I was participating in a research group with a number of professors around Japan who were researching better ways to teach reading and writing. One idea that came out of that group very strongly was that students need to develop IDENTITIES as real "writers" and "readers" from a very early age. This is different from being a "student" who writes for homework, often in a forced way. My feeling was that the ELP and other classes at ICU tend to do writing as an "exercise" for practicing English or some skill, but self-directed writing (and reading, for that matter) is not developed, and students are only taught one limited genre called "academic writing".

Academic Writing

In other words, students in the ELP basically never have a chance to think like a real author...a real author who is given freedom to choose genres (including research writing genres, if they want to go that direction), topics, possibly even deadlines...and to engage in writing for the sake of communicating what they want to communicate in the format that they want to communicate. I agree that academic writing skills are useful for training how to research, think, and organize ideas, but I wanted to push open some new possibilities for developing English writing skills as a set of life-long skill that will go beyond writing a good senior thesis that nobody will read.


In short, this course mainly developed from my desire to see how non-academic writing, creative writing, personal writing, and an very open choice of genre and topic could enrich the learning of ICU students. What would it be like if we gave these talented and motivated students a chance to express themselves in a wide open field rather than to keep them focused on academic writing only (like a race) and to help them write to publish rather than just get a grade.

Free, Creative Expression

And another reason was that, as an ELP instructor, despite my efforts, I had a feeling that I was often never really getting to know my students and what they are thinking in real sense and I wondered what it would be like to really push students to focus on communicating who they are and what thoughts are on their minds. The ELP is designed to rapidly rush through a series of readings and writing skills with little time for students to express themselves in personal ways and begin to thoughtfully connect their own personal development with their interests to various fields of research or society. I have a working theory that our learning here will be richer and deeper if we integrate more personal writing throughout the two years.

We will see how this experiment goes!

(Week 2) Who am I? Mark's Sample Slides

Mark who ami-10x10

View more presentations from markc0908.

Who am I????

I hope the slide show above gives some images of where I lived, who my family are, and what I like to do. The simplist way to think of an identity is where we are from and what groups we are part of...even though that is probably only a small part of who we are.

The difficult thing about this question is that we can answer it very shortly, sort of shortly, or as long as time and space permit. By the way, that is why every one had a 100 second limit in class to show their slides.

The very short version:

I'm husband, father, son, brother, friend and teacher. I spend most of my personal time playing with my children and wife Megumi, drinking and talking with friends, or relaxing by training for marathons, swimming, reading, or watching movies. In my professional life, I enjoy learning together with my college students and colleagues how people around the world can cooperate more effectively by being better understanders, thinkers, and communicators.

The sort of short version:

I was born in Los Angeles on September 8, 1973 to Warren and Eileen Christianson, who were training to be Christian missionaries to Japan. We moved to Japan shortly after and I attended Japanese pre-school, elementary school, and even a year of junior high in local public schools in Asahina in Nagano Prefecture. This could get long but I will try to keep it medium short...more later!

For the long version:

Here is a link (click) to a biography I wrote before.

Welcome Writers! This is where we will post our writings

Welcome to our class blog. Let's build it step by step.  -Mark