Final Thank You

I attended the graduation ceremony tonight. I was thinking to show appreciation to my instructors by walking but not for my benefit since I had graduated from college once five years ago. That was my original reason of waking at the ceremony. However, it turned out very nice! I was not expecting to experience such positive result by participating graduation ceremony. I saw many of my friends and instructors at the event and they cheered me so much throughout the ceremony. I felt so well by knowing the fact that people who I know are part of my life and I did not know them prior to coming to AV two years ago. I was surrounded by familiar faces during the ceremony, and I felt the unity of whole AVC people at the event.

When I first time took classes at AVC in Fall 2008, I did not know even a single person; I did not even remember how to speak English well after being absent from the U.S. for four years. But now, I speak English much better than ever, and even right critically! (Well, I still need improvement though). Class after class, I build friendship with wonderful people including classmates and instructors. And I felt that graduation ceremony was achievement of friendship circle; hugging and shaking hands with friends and instructors after receiving the diploma was one of the best memories in the college life. I confirmed that my people at AVC became part of my life; I also became part of their life through this event. Knowledge and friendships I acquired at AVC are my treasure.

Since I noticed the importance of human relationship by living in various places in the world where I would not have lived well without my friendships, I really appreciate good human relationships. It is not exception in our English class. I really enjoyed interacting with you guys by various group activities, blogs, and discussions. Without this interaction, class would not have been as interesting as now, even though it still be informative class. I believe we need something to motivate ourselves to work hard; to me, getting responses from what I write motivated more to write rather than just writing it to be reviewed for only grading. So I thought blogging part of the class was especially cool part of the class. It was also nice because we get to know our classmates’ possibly distinct point of view which opens my eyes. Without you guys, blogging process could have been just a painful assignment. So I appreciate you guys reading my blog. This is going to be the last blog from English class; however, I am thinking to keep blogging during the summer since I will have bit more time. In order to maintain or improve my writing, I have to practice it constantly. It’s like math, or language, If I do not use it, I lose it. I will try my best to continue blogging, so I may see you guys on my blog site. Well, until then, I enjoyed having class with you guys and thank you for sharing your thought, Good luck in wherever direction you are heading. You guys proved your patience and strong mind by surviving this class. So please remember this fact when you feel weak or impossible to overcome the problem. Peace!!

Audio Book Rocks!

Our final project in English 103 class is the research paper linked with the book, “Reading Lolita in Tehran” by Azar Nafisi, which describes women’s Western literature study linked with their suppressed circumstance in men’s Islamic world. In the process of writing this research paper, I learned that how we are blessed with the human rights comparing to harsh treatment Iranian women experienced during revolutionary era. I felt that women’s voice there was ignored and they were completely suppressed by men’s selfish interpretation of Koran. I could feel the woman’s suffering days by knowing their background which makes our emotion to link to them. I also realized that how important literature plays to liberate one’s spirit. Even though, Iranian women characters in the book were highly suppressed in the society, they could feel they were in another free world when they read western literatures. The literature can take them to its imaginary world, which helps Islamic women’s captured soul free. Since I am in very blessed world with basic human rights, I can do many things without much limitation. Therefore, I did not appreciate the literature as much as after reading this book. At same time, I realized that how literature is powerful. It enables us to travel any types of world in our imagination. Now I understand why many of literature works has been banned in many parts of the world. It is very powerful tool.

This is not directly related to the topic of the research paper, but one of most amazing facts I have learned in doing this research project was experiencing audio book. I was so worried about reading so many pages in the limited time, since I have difficulty reading in English. When I read the text in English, I take too long; moreover, I have to reread some of the sentences to store information to my brain. I think I am more like auditory learner when it comes to English, since my listening skill is much better than reading skill. Then I visited my professor’s office to talk about this concern of reading tons of pages in limited time with good understanding. Then she told asked me if I have ipod. Then all the sudden the light turned on in my brain. Yes, the audio book! She suggested me to listen to the audio book to help reading the text. Then I tried this great idea which I never considered about. I audio book while I was driving long distance on the free way, then I was surprised how I can understand better by listening the text rather than reading. Then, I tried later the audio book with actual text on my hand when I was at home. I was so surprised with the result! It was like a magic, my brain digests the information much more effectively by listening to the text while reading the text. I could underline the important quotations while doing this task and it served as also an English class for me, because many of the words I do not even know how to pronounce. I was so glad to know how effective this method works for me. Now I will be addicted to having audio book and having text on my hand at same time. Thank you to my professor, encountering this method one of the most useful method I have acquired in this class besides all other critical reading and writing skills I have acquired. If some of you really struggle with reading, I definitely suggest you to try audio book plus actual text method. It rocks!

I Will Survive!

Now we are very close to the end of the semester. This semester has been most challenging and difficult semester because having six classes (three are honors related classes) beside participating more than 100 hours of activities by honors society, and working as a math and accounting tutor at the college. I have been spending longest hours of all in this class, but always I have been fighting with time. Reading and writing takes so many hours from me. I am very slow reader and writer even though I have improved so much in this class. Therefore, I often cut my sleeping hour to compensate the time, 2, 3 hours of sleep per night, or even 30 minutes of sleep per day occur. I honestly very exhausted physically and mentally. Then my current situation does not favor me. My dad just came from Japan visiting me for the business, and I have to accompany him 3 days this week. Even though, it is nice to see my dad, honestly I feel this is not a good time. For instance, yesterday, I had to pick him up at LAX, taking him to Claremont with traffic, and coming back to Lancaster from Claremont 1 AM, and still trying to do the home work to catch up. It is glad to receive scholarships, but convocation on Tuesday and tomorrow (Friday) just make me nervous of running out of time. Going to the Shakespeare play for the class tomorrow night supposed to be fun, but I am sure I will feel awkward. Then accompanying my dad on Saturday and Sunday make the situation very hard to manage my time to do school works. I just feel like to give up everything and just go to sleep to catch all the sleep I missed!! However, my dad told me that he sleeps on average only 4 hours a day even on weekends due to his work even though he is 60 years old! I am actually little bit worried about him if he is going to be OK doing so for many years. Many people in Japan die through too much hard work. I am much better off because I am not going to be like my dad for many years, but doing so for just this semester. So I should be able to do it.

I should try my best and keep cutting back sleeping hours in order to achieve best work possible. I have survived until today academically, and I still have hoped to maintain 4.0GPA in total more than 120 units I am going to have at the end of this semester. I cannot give up my dream of accomplishing this so easily. Result of my four years of college being fulltime student is going to determined in this 2 weeks! I will do achieve it! I am not going to give up!

My reality in research project is maybe poorest. I honestly reveal my status. I just bought Lolita by Nabokov few hours ago to read it and it has 300 pages. I feel so ashamed for being this status, but I do not regret of this result because I have always worked hard to do all academic and volunteer works, it’s not result of just being a slacker. However, this reality is very harsh for me. I read around 10 pages per hour; it takes 30 hours to read. Then I have to upload 5 pages based on reading until this Sunday. What I have to do is just read as much as possible without wasting any moment. I should have such attitude to accomplish this. Thus, I will bring the book when I accompany my dad, every moment I can read a book. I know that only 2 weeks left from to finish this semester. After doing my best, I will be proud of myself, but if I fail to do so, I will stick with my regret. I am mentally motivating myself by saying “I can do it” “I can do it!” Yes, sure I can do it! I will try my best! Please wish me luck and I will wish all of you luck as well. 2 more weeks! We can do it!

We Need Ordinary Conversation

Nowadays, our communication relies on E-mails heavily. It is really rare to see adults without an E-mail account in the U.S. Even college our college provides us E-mail accounts for each student. Why the demand of E-mail as a communication device grew so much? We can analyze the advantages of E-mails over ordinary conversation. We can communicate with an individual in almost any part of the world who has internet connection and an account by simply typing and send an E-mail. It does not charge delivery fee, and it is very speedy, it takes only seconds to send an E-mail to other side of the globe. The E-mail does not require sender and receiver to be connected at same time. E-mail allows communication without actually facing senders and receivers. They are so many more advantages of using E-mails.

However, those advantages can serve as weak point as well. The major difference between communication via E-mail and ordinary conversation is that one does not require face-to-face interaction, while other requires it. I personally think that relying on E-mail as communication tool too much can lead disorder in human interaction behavior since it does not require face-to-face interaction.
When I communicate with people via E-mail, it is very easy to be get confused; for instance, when I read an e-mail which seems criticizing me which was actually meant as a joke. Or when I was intending to point out the error kindly may be received as insult to the other, because of absence of non-verbal cues in the E-mail communication. Telling joke would be perceived by looking one’s smile, or kindly telling one’s mistake can be understood by mild expression in the face. Or anger could be caught by the tone of the voice. Expressing right emotion in writing requires very critical writing skill, and most of would have hard time doing so; this imprecise emotion in E-mail can lead to misunderstanding among senders and receivers.

This neutral effect of emotion, because of absence in non-verbal cues, is nurturing people who cannot communicate in ordinal conversation. Today, in Japan many young people stay in their home and do not even leave from their room; they are called “HIKIKOMORI.” Those people decided to disconnect themselves from real world because of their traumatic experiences. Some of them became Hikikomori due to school buries, while others may be loss of self confidence by losing job. This trend among Japanese young people is getting bigger and bigger each day, which was not seen before in my parents’ generation. Because Hikikomori people can communicate with people via E-mails and internet, they can avoid ordinal face-to-face conversation which they usually afraid of. Thus they are many people who never leaves from their home for years; they do not even communicate with family member. Because of internet and E-mail development, they still enjoy communication with others, but absence of face-to-face interaction for long time makes them difficulties to express their own expression toward others. They slowly become unbalanced emotional people; their awkwardness of expressing their emotion toward real people combined with their fear against facing real human makes them almost unable to return to the real world outside of their room. Because of their long period of staying in small place makes them frustrated and unbalanced in hormones due to stress and lack of exercise, explosion of their emotion can lead to hurting their own family members. Unfortunately, each year, there are many serious incidents caused by hikikomori people. E-mail is very convenient, but we also have to re-evaluate the goodness of face-to-face conversation of interacting emotions. We, humans are social creatures. Without any face-to-face interaction, we will never understand the concept of caring each other, because we never see real smile through E-mail. We are not built to interact with machines.

The Right Thing to Do: Public Talk by Dr. Terrence Roberts

I attended an event on public talk by Dr. Terrence Roberts titled, "What Lessons Can We Learn from Little Rock” on May 11th, 2010 at Antelope Valley College Cafeteria. It was a great moment to find personal connection to the civil rights movement period, because I get chance to interact with the person who experienced the historical event. I have learned about “little rock nine” when I took African American History Honors class in Fall 2009 Semester, thus I was very excited to hear Dr. Roberts’ personal experience and his point of view. In fact, he answered my question on “how can we take a step to get rid of discrimination?” His answer encouraged me to practice “the right thing to do” with confidence to improve the society and the mind of people.

The event started with welcome speech by Professor Scott Memmer to appreciate Dr. Terrence and his supporters to attend this event. He also thanked the stuff and instructors who coordinated and set this event. Shortly after the speech, we reviewed brief educational film regarding to historical event of Little Rock Nine in 1957. The film suggested that after 1954 court decision of Brown vs. Board of Education led all segregated public schools in the nation to convert to racially integrated school. Film also acknowledged us that “Little Rock Nine” was a historical event since nine Black students attended their first day of formally White school with National Guard in order to prevent violence from White students. The circumstance in Little Rock High School was particularly bad because majority of population there did not want to support integration; even Arkansas Governor did not want to support racial integration because he wanted to earn popularity from majority of White people in Arkansas who were segregationists, but Federal Government forced to do so.

Then, Dr Roberts initiated to speak his personal experience on racial issue. He exposed that he was taught from his mother that “what to be a black kid in the U.S.” Thus, he was aware of racial problem and became obedient child. He also acknowledged us the experience he have had when he was thirteen years old; he entered to the restaurant for white people by front door and sat there; immediately after sating down, he felt close attention from surroundings. Even though no one said a word, non verbal message was strong enough to convince him that he was been rejected. Thus he ran out from the store running with emotional mess, fear, anger, and hopelessness; then he realized that he could been killed by crowd, just as thirteen years old Emmitt Tilt, Black boy from Chicago who had same age as little Terrence and was killed by white people in Mississippi due to just talking with White lady. When I heard this incident, I was terrified by the fact that how racial tension was strong and injustice was openly practiced under Jim Crow law. Two years later, he voluntarily decided to attend formally segregated white school as one of the first Black students in school history. He revealed that originally 115 students were planned to attend that Little Rock high school; however, rumor, parents, and kids themselves pulled from an option: only nine of them remained. Many people thought Terrence as insane kid because he was taking risk to attend there. Nevertheless, he decide do attend there because he believed that it was “the right things to do.” In fact, little Terrence experienced strong racism. Dr. Terrence Roberts described the very first day of school that he felt atmosphere of non verbal expression of “we don’t like you” from other students, and also felt he is in a “wrong place.” Dr. Roberts exposed the cruel fact that he experienced any physically and psychologically offense which we can image. The words from Dr. Roberts, who experienced the racial struggle, were much more powerful than acquiring the information from the text book. I felt the reality of racism rather than just understanding as a concept by listening to one’s personal struggle in racial issue.
After addressing his personal experience, Dr Roberts allowed us to have open question time. More or less, ten students asked each question. His answers included the idea of “accepting the fact is good, and it does not necessarily mean to accept the idea, because knowing the truth is important to face the issue.” Another idea by Dr. Roberts was that “we are so connected each other; someone impacts another in some way.” He also acknowledged us that “the language is power; people are going to judge based on that.” And the most important idea of all, he addressed that “choosing moral behavior with strongly determined attitude will make others to follow us;” in other words, we should practice what we think “the right things to do.” Dr. Roberts gave us lots of key ideas which help us to be a better person or a role model.

This public talk, on “What Lessons Can We Learn from Little Rock” by Dr. Terrence Roberts, was very productive to recognize that racial issue existed and still continues to exist. There was also a connection to our English class because Dr. Terrence emphasized the importance of the language which we covered in chapter ? of Exploring Literature text book; after studying in our class, I really agree with Dr. Terrence that indeed “language is power.” His humorous tone was unexpected to me; however, this positive attitude of talking on racial issue gave me an impression that he is a very strong minded person who does not flinch with threat. Maybe his optimistic attitude could be one of the factors which succeeded him to be a part of historical movement. His argument of practicing moral behavior as a strong tool to change the society was very convincing after knowing some reflection of Dr. Roberts’ personal character. He demonstrated us that practicing “the right things to do” indeed attract people to follow him. Dr. Roberts’ encouragement of practicing powered moral behavior would nurture future role models from Antelope Valley College who are touched by his words. I will continue believing in my moral behavior to lead society to the right direction.

Works Cited
Roberts, Terrence. What Lessons Can We Learn from Little Rock. May 11, 2010. Lecture.

Censoring Taboo Language for Our Children

Censorship of taboo words in the television would be controversial issue since some people may think censorship of taboo words gives awkwardness to the characters who are talking on controversial issue without referring to taboo words. Or some others may argue that replacing taboo words with alternative words is like hiding the truth. On the other hand, supporter of censorship of taboo words may say that banning such words will protect children who are easily offended from taboo language on television.

I personally believe that censorship of taboo words is necessary to nurture role model children. I concern more about quality of the language which children speak than reality of the TV program. One of the reason why censorship of coarse words is necessary is that children are easily influenced since their brain is so flexible to learn anything quickly. If we expose children to the environment where taboo words are often heard, those children are more likely start speaking such language in cordial life. Unfortunately, I have encountered some of very young children who are less than five years old cursing others because they were exposed to the environment where those words are frequently heard; since children develop their language style by observing their surroundings, they will think that using taboo words are not bad at all by being in the environment where taboo words are used without hesitation. If use of coarse language are punished or discouraged in the environment, those children would know that speaking such language is not good, then they are more likely avoid those words in their life. Then those children grow up to be a good role model for their children as well. If coarse words are replaced with alternative words, or simply beeped, children in developing stage will notice that those words are not encouraged; thus they will avoid using such language.

It is hard to imagine conversation among teenagers without any taboo language today; however, in Victorian era, avoiding taboo language was very common in society because people in the era were striving to do so. Therefore, they could communicate each other without use of taboo words, and it was natural back then. If we start nurturing children who are accustomed to express themselves without taboo words, they eventually talk more morally then censorship of taboo words may not be an issue in the future, If all things work well. I know that this is an ideology, so it may be so hard to accomplish. However, if we strive to censor taboo words, we can at least prevent some children to be exposed to taboo words and discourage them to use them, even though their parents may use taboo words frequently. This change slowly changes whole society to move toward less use of taboo language. If we stop banning such language, children will definitely be more exposed to those and they will nurture next generation full with taboo language without any offending feeling. I believe our generation became more abusive user of taboo words through deteriorating moral views; one of the influences is definitely pervasive taboo language from TV shows. If we do not regulate taboo words in the television media, we will create our next generation even worse than us. Our children may call us “people from Victorian era” when they become adults.

It’s All about Practice

We are in eleventh week of English 103 class. We have read more than 900 pages from books so far. I have never read this much pages in English in this short period of time. We also have issued more than 10 blogs. We have written 4 essays in the class so far. And we had so many other activities which require all reading, writing, and critical thinking process. We are in fact loaded with assignments!! We have had various types of activities which as individual work, group work, peer response, discussions…etc. Just reading instruction of assignment requires reading skill. Those various types of assignments provide opportunity to improve writing skill. I feel much more confident in English writing than before, because I improved my writing skill through applying my reading and writing skills constantly through various assignments.

When I started this class in February, I already became overwhelmed by reading the class syllabus, because I was so intimidated by reading in English. Since Japanese is my first language, I have tendency of being scared by alphabets; it may be like non-Japanese speaker trying to read Japanese. Those letters do not click my brain at first sight; I have to pay good attention in order to understand the concept of the text. I often bump into the words I do not know the meaning, so dictionary is my best friend when I read in English. Those facts slow down my reading speed so much, and make me feel like I am first grade elementary school student. On the other hand, when I read Japanese, I can just scam the text, and I get most of the concept written down. Therefore, start reading English text immediately after reading Japanese text is one of the worst moments; it reminds me the sad fact that my English reading level is relatively very poor comparing to one in Japanese, because my Japanese reading is non-stop, but my English reading becomes chopped by inserting often dictionary time; worst consequence is forgetting what I have read before by taking time in finding definition by dictionary, which makes me to repeat the sentence in order to understand the line. Therefore I have tendency of avoiding English reading. Since I do not have much vocabulary, problem with grammar and the articles (there are no articles in Japanese), I feel uncomfortable in English as well, so I have no volunteer spirit to write in English.

However, when it comes to class work, I become responsible because I focus on maintaining good grade from the class. Thus, this class’s assignments helped me so much to improve my writing skills through practicing my reading and writing skills to earn credit. I practice my English skills so much from constant assignments which require such skills. I personally believe everything will improve by practice; without practice, there will not be improvement. In fact, now I do not feel that intimidated by reading or writing in English since I am building my confidence by practicing it and recognizing the achievement I have done in the class. Especially group work and blog response assignments help me to be comfortable in writing since those writing process involves communication; I like to communicate with people, so those writing process take my uncomfortable feeling toward writing. This new aspect of communicating mainly by writing increased both comfort and confidence in writing by actually liking it. Therefore, now I am sure that I feel much more comfortable in writing comparing to the beginning of the semester. So I am looking forward to improve my reading and writing skills through more practice in the class. It’s all about practice!