Presentation

Tomorrow morning we give our presentation. This is a pretty big conference as far as these things go, although we have a pretty crappy slot--second-to last slot on the last day of the conference, on a national holiday. We have to check out of our hotel and take our luggage with us to the venue, give our presentation, and then jump on a train and head to the airport. It's a rock gig, man!

In a way I wish it could be a bit more like a rock gig. It's a lot easier to bullshit my way through a tune onstage than it is to "wing it" through a spoken presentation. In fact just today I saw a very painful example of someone who wasn't properly prepared attempting to explain... Well, I'm not sure what he was trying to explain. TEFL may not be a "science," but (for the most part) it's not (or shouldn't be) abstract art either.

It may be a personal idiosyncrasy of mine, but when people are explaining things I'd like to understand them. I prefer explanations that don't waste words in the process of making themselves clear. I'm talking about "explaining" in a very restricted, academic sense. I could probably do an interpretation of Vygotsky's ideas on the interrelation between language and thought on the drums, and it might even be pretty good to listen to, but if you really want to know anything about Vygotsky, it would probably be a lot easier to check out his Wikipedia page. I only mention Vygotsky because today I had one of his ideas explained to me with such a clear example that I'll never forget it. Whether or not I eventually reject the idea is irrelevant. The only relevant point is that I understand the idea.

[Oh, the idea? Language mediates cognition. The example was a letter to Ann Landers which didn't need a reply because the writer solved the problem herself merely by writing about it. If you don't sometimes talk to yourself, maybe you should. Or start a blog...]

So anyway, we give our presentation tomorrow. I need to practice a bit more...

Conference

In Shizuoka for a work-related conference. Wandering around, clusters of gaijin, each doing their dutiful best to ignore the other.

When you register for one of these things they always give you a bag. Kind of like soccer players getting a cap for their international matches. I've been "bagged" several times, but I don't know if this one counts because it's in Japan. The bag usually contains a bunch of promo crap from text book companies and such. I give the pens, notepads, and other useful stuff to my daughter. She seems to like collecting my name tags, as well. (Recently I found one of my conference tags in which she'd crossed out my name and wrote her own above it. This little girl is worth more to me than the entire world.)

I guess I should be careful what I say. Not everyone is as carefree and irreverent about the theoretical underpinnings of their profession as I am. I'm a skeptic, and I'd be a piss-poor one if I didn't put what I do under the same scrutiny as I'd apply to right-wingnuttery, religion, UFO's, ghosts, and my own beliefs about anything, your beliefs about anything, and generally anything at all (well, except the primacy of the Stones).

Some ideas are better than others, but there are a shitload of bad ideas out there.

You might think that someone whose job lets him support his family and drink beer in so many cool places should probably whine about it a lot less. You'd probably be right.

I'm struggling to reconcile the notion of a restaurant/bar with hundreds of beers from around the world with Pinnochio playing on the wide screen. And Tokyo Ska Paradise playing through the speakers.

I once met a guy in a bar who happened also to be an "English teacher." He'd recently got his PhD in EFL or something. It was amusing to hear him tell me how I was "enculturing" my daughter by speaking to her in English (i.e. the idea being that language=culture; I can't honestly imagine a more ridiculous piece of shit masquerading as "theory"). I'd been telling him how I was teaching my daughter to use chopsticks...

Singapore Swing

I was kidding around a bit over the weekend with the "busy" thing, but I actually have been a bit busy lately with work and family-related stuff. Tomorrow morning I'm off to Singapore for one night and then a few days in Malaysia. It's a work related trip, so I probably won't get any good pictures, but I will probably do some from-the-hotel-room blogging. As is usual with this kind of thing (from me), you won't learn anything useful or interesting about Singapore or Malaysia, unless you need to know how much it costs for a beer, or where the trannies hang out, that sort of thing...