What I'm Doing Now
- I finished a 104 voyage around the world on Peace Boat on November 24, 2017! It was truly a unique experience where I got to see 22 different ports in 19 countries, learn from guest speakers on board, and meet some truly unique people on board. Great experience, though I still have a lot of processing to do.
- I just started my second semester as a lecturer at Kinjo Gakuin University in Nagoya, Japan in September, 2018. This semester I will be teaching 4 English communication classes. I am striving to elicit and mobilize student knowledge, and hoping that through output, feedback, and more output I can increase student confidence in speaking English.
- A new challenge for me is publishing. Recently I am working on writing papers related to data collected on the Peace Boat and from student data last semester. It has been an eye-opening experience getting used to the format and process involved with research, and is very different from other styles of writing.
- Currently I am reading The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, arguably one of the greatest swordsmen in Japanese history. The book is essentially a guide to fencing, but there are deeper musings about philosophy in the book as well which has bee interesting to contemplate. The need to evolve and adjust to the opponent is a very applicable point to life, but how we evolve and train our mind to react depends on us.
- I recently attended several academic conferences this summer, the LET conference about education and technology in Osaka and JACET (Japan Association of College English Teachers) in Sendai at the end of August. It was exciting to hear about work in the field, and start to think about own research plans as well. Judy Noguchi's lectures about how to prepare our students with skills for the future and jobs that don't exist yet were particularly fascinating.
This page was inspired by Derek Sivers. Check out nownownow.com