I Got Lazy!

I didn’t update my blog for more than three weeks! There are a few reasons. First and foremost, I got physically tired and therefore lazy. As I started going to F Elementary and Junior High Schools on a regular basis (typically I observe students from 8am to 4pm three days a week), I felt exhausted after writing up my fieldnotes for three to four hours at night. I didn’t realize that fieldwork is this demanding not only mentally but also physically--especially at its initial stage when a fieldworker has to find his way into local social relationships and organizations, setting up logistics, arrangements, and terms of ensuing fieldwork. But this is a feeble excuse....

I was encouraged by my friend who emailed me yesterday and asked why I hadn’t updated my blog for weeks. It’s good to know that there is someone who actually reads my blog! Since I have encountered several interesting episodes and patterns of cognition and emotion behind them during the first month of my fieldwork, I will try to report some of my findings from now on.

I. 2nd graders already have a concept of the Japanese and use it to explain observable attributes of a person.

One 2nd-grade boy asked me why I am able to speak Japanese. He didn’t understand why a student from America can read Chinese characters. A girl sitting next to him laughed and said to him “Because he is Japanese!” After staring at me for a couple of seconds, the boy asked me “But you are able to speak English, too... Why?” I told him that is because I have learned English.

The girl’s statement indicates that she is capable of using a concept of the Japanese as a cause to explain my being able to read Chinese characters. The boy’s cognition operates according to the same logic. That’s why he was perplexed after he was primed by the girl to foreground my being Japanese: he had difficulty understanding why I am able to speak English even though I am Japanese.

More later...!

To Bring Parents to School

F Junior High was in session today. In Japan this is typically called “lesson observation day”: parents come to school and observe how their children are learning. After they observed the first period, parents moved to the gym for a PTA general assembly and discussed how they could support club activities at the school.

While I am not a parent, I argue that parents have more to contribute to the school. I am sure that there are parents who can offer the school extra academic resources (e.g., expertise in certain subjects and interesting life experiences from which students can learn). Put in Vygotskian language, parents—together with the school—can extend and enrich the zone of proximal development of students. But it seems that most parents in the neighborhood in which the school is located are not quite ready to participate in this collective enterprise...

Learning to Play the Piano

I started learning the piano a week ago. Until I leave Japan next March, I will meet with a teacher three times a month and practice by myself every day. Since I was new to the instrument (and I even didn’t know how to read music scores), I had to start with a correct posture and positions of fingers—literally the baby stuff; however, I absolutely enjoy practicing the piano. If I could “restart” my life, I would become a pianist and conductor/composer. Even if not for music in particular, I believe I have a talent for becoming a good artisan-artist because I am the kind of person who is able to devote his life to perfection of an “art,” be it Yoga or Sociology.

There are three people who inspired me to learn the piano. The first person is Sviatoslav Richter. When I heard his brilliant performance of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude, Op. 32 for the first time, I was so shocked that I felt like falling down from my chair. The second is Maurizio Pollini and his mind-blowing execution of Stravinsky’s Petrouchka; I couldn’t believe such perfection was possible. The third is Leonard Bernstein. I learned tremendously from his wonderful lectures on music--“Young People’s Concerts” and “Whither Music?” Most importantly, from him I learned to love music.

Meeting with Young Teachers

Yesterday I went to visit the university to attend a meeting. The meeting was about how to teach social studies at elementary and junior high schools. There were five participants, including myself. One of them was a part-time teacher of social studies at a junior high school who was an alumnus of the university. Three were college seniors who had been going to junior high schools as practice teachers of social studies. The format of the meeting was that the part-time teacher helped the students create their lesson plans for next week.

Although I was neither a teacher nor a practice one, I listened to their conversations carefully and chimed in whenever I could. They were very nice and we talked about the Japanese school system, issues in social studies, my own research, and whatnot. To my (pleasant) surprise, the part-time teacher Mr. Y has done a survey in two elementary schools to examine knowledge that schoolchildren have about foreign countries. Since our interests were similar, we exchanged information (mostly I asked him questions!) and entertained a possibility of collaborative work in the future. It was indeed refreshing and inspiring to talk with young teachers. My conversation with them reinforced my conviction that I must engage in the kind of research that could have social significance and practical implications.

Fieldwork is Wasteful...

I am sometimes afraid that my fieldnotes are not adding to anything significant. I feel this way probably because it’s been only two weeks since I entered the field. If I have a lot more pages of fieldnotes in the next several months, I’m sure I will find patterns of practices and discourses that are revealing about Japanese youth’s cognitions of national groups. The bottom line is that fieldwork is not a very efficient way to collect data. It produces a lot of details that will be “wasted” when it comes to a time to write up final reports; however, it is an excellent supplement to quantitative data and an effective antidote to self-indulgence in high-flying theorization that has no social significance.

I Resolved to Update My Blog Everyday, But...

For the past two days, I was unable to update my blog. Through 5/30 to today I’ve been observing activities at F Junior High; I walked to the school at 7:50am and stayed until 4pm. After I came home, I spent 4-5 hours writing up fieldnotes. On top of that, I had to go buy suits, shirts, and shoes in the evening because the vice principal had told me to dress formally and I had not had any suits for summer. I find it fairly challenging to comprehend rules of behaviors and structures of interactions—both explicit and implicit— among actors in different social locations and develop social skills to interact with teachers and students in such a way that they feel like helping my research. Oh well, I should be patient....

I’m glad that I was able to chat with a dozen of students today. Although there are so many things that I don’t know about those junior high school students (not to mention their cognitions of Japan and other countries!), I began penetrating into what preoccupies their everyday life.