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Lily “Lollipop” in Bloom

The new writing system of wordpress has made difficult to write and edit a post. It seems a HTML geek is proud of building an automatic function to form “DIV” commands. But it is almost painful to me. I want someone to get the old simple writing system back.

By the way, I asked a neighbor to cultivate the land and grow vegetable so that the garden would not be an abandoned bush. On Monday the person was cutting weed for us but he mistakenly cut the lily that I planted several years ago (Because the lily was among the weed). He brought that lily to my house with some apology. My mom put it in a brown glass bottle of a cheap “energy drink”. Since the bud of lily was still young, we didn’t expect the lily would be able to bloom. To our surprise, the lily flower opened in the following day.

Lily “Lollipop” in the bottle of Lipovitan D

I bought bulbs of lily “Lolipop” several years ago in DIY shop “Komeri”. The bulbs were discounted because they were apparently unsold long time. I thought, if it were going to be a waste, I would buy and plant them in the garden. After that, Lollipop had been in bloom every year even though I didn’t take care of them. The neighbor didn’t cut them all, so some are still left on the ground.

Lily “Lolipop” on the Ground

Yesterday my mom went outside around the noon to get her lunch. It was so hot, so she gave up staying outside, just buying a lunch box, and then came back home. She told me to look at her lunch box that costed only 330 Japanese Yen. She wanted to show that there were a lot of things in a cheap lunch box that would be equivalent to three USD. But I have to say, I don’t think it is good to eat those cheap processed food. It should be bad for health.

330 Yen Lunch Box (=3USD)

Green beans that I planted are growing in the garden although it will take more than a month or so from now until the harvest.

Young Green Beans are Growing on the Ground

I found the gooseberry was turning to be red. Taste? of course anything from the garden is always sour. I have already confirmed it by the most reddest goose berry fruit.

Fruits of Gooseberry Now Turning to be Red

And this morning I found that flowers of hollyhock started blooming.

Rare Color of Hollyhock Flower

Uh,… I wasted my one hour to make this post. The blog that people hardly view is called “an isolated island on the continent” in Japanese. Mine is also like that.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on June 8, 2020

Date: June 8th on Monday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 65 slides

Numbers of Students: 24 out of 28. At least 4 students were absent from the entire minutes of the class.

Fully attendant for 90min : 20

Shorter signing-in: 78, 6, and 12 seconds.

One student was recorded as completely absent by the system, however he?she? was probably listening to the class because of sending answers of 5-question quiz. Duration of participation was not clear.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 26. However, three of the 26 were recorded as completely absent by the system.

– 1st Quiz: 21 students responded. This was to ask changes of particles when a causative sentence was made from an intransitive verb sentence.

– 2nd Quiz: 23 students responded.This was to ask particles to be used in casative sentences of intransitive verb and transitive verb, respectively.

– 3rd Quiz: 23 students responded. This was to find out one causative sentence of intransitive verb from 5 causative sentences with other 4 being of transitive verbs.

– Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This was one-sentence composition for a student to type onto BBS. The students were asked to compose a causative sentence using not an intransitive verb but a transite verb.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences. The concept of causative sentences, making causative form of verbs, and conversions from a non-causative sentence to causative sentence that was using an intransitive verb.

– Introduction and exercises of causative sentences of transitive verbs.

– Exercise of a construction “V1-shinaiyouni, V2-shimasu.”

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned. But the students were encouraged to do self-grading of a short test that was about the section 14 of the textbook.

– Three students were asked to send a MP3 or M4A by Wednesday night. Those students were asked to record their own speaking of conversation between two part time job workers.

Issues and Problems:

<No time to write about it, right now>

Fruits and Vegetables are Growing in the Garden.

A fruit of silverberry (goumi) has turned to be red. Actually there were only three fruits on the silverberry tree. This is one of them.

I have already taken this one. Only two goumi(s) remain on the tree now. They are still green.

I don’t know whether this silverberry is edible or not. As was obvious for the case of strawberry, nothing from my garden can be sweet. They are always sour so that you would like to jump up when you put them in your mouth.

I left the silverberry like this on the table. Soon I found that this small tiny red fruit had disappeared. I asked my mom where the silverberry had gone. She answered that she offered it to the deceased my father. And then I saw this small red thing was put in front of my dad’s photo.

Flower of cucumber has already had the young cucumber .

This is a flower of egg plant.

This is a flower of pumpkin. If it was a female flower, it would be a pumpkin. But you know, the flowers are almost always male flowers. A female flower is very rare. There is no easy thing in this world.

This yellow flowers are not of pumpkin but zucchini.

These vegetables were not that I planted. Since I am very busy in days and nights for the online teaching things, I asked a neighbor to cultivate and grow vegetables in my family’s garden. I should be thankful to him.

But there is a one vegetable that I planted.

I planted some seeds of green beans. Seeds were sold by 200 JPY (tax exclusive) that was approximately equivalent to 2 dollars. The seeds were imported to Japan from the country where the authority used teargas to disperse the peaceful demonstrations in order to do a photo op in front of a church to show a man holding a book that he had actually never read at all (probably).

But anyway, it is not that big issue, I mean, where the seeds came from. Because they have germinated safely on the land of Japan. If I can harvest green beans, I will boil them just a little, dip into mayonnaise, and then eat them in hot summer night with chilled beer. I am looking forward to doing so.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on June 5, 2020

Date: June 5th on Friday, 2020 from 13:40 to 15:10 (14:40 – 16:10 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 25 of 28, 3 were recorded as completely absent by the system.

Fully attendant for 90min : 19

Shorter signing-in: 84, 78, 61, and 9 minutes. Two students were recorded as absent by the system, but they sent me the answers of 5-question quiz. It is impossible to know how many minutes they watched the class.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself : 25 students input “Shusseki” onto BBS. Two of the 25 was actually recorded as completely absent by the system. However they sent me the answers of 5-question quiz. They are identical to the two mentioned above.

– 1st Quiz: 22 students responded. The quiz was to make the students realize that there are two types of causative sentences in Japanese; one is to allow someone to do something, the other is to force someone to do something.

– 2nd Quiz: 24 students responded. The question was to know what particle should be used in the causative sentence when the causative action was expressed by an intransitive verb.

– 3rd Quiz : 20 students responded. The question was to find one exception from four causative sentences. In three sentences, a higher person makes a lower person do something. In the sentence of exception, a lower person makes a higher person have some kinds of emotion.

– Attendance check at the end: 24 students responded. Students were asked to choose the correct combination of particles that were used in three different types sentences; give-take, passive, and causative. Interestingly enough, two particles are applied to these three types in the same manner.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences

– Introduction of concept of causative sentences.

– Exercises of conversations using causative sentences whose actions were expressed by intransitive verbs.

Homework Assignment:

– Self grading of the short text for the section 13 that is about passive sentences.

– Four students were asked to send a mp3 or m4a sound data by speaking the script of conversation of two part time job workers; Park-san and Chin-san that was in Dekiru Nihongo (yellow).

Issues and Problems:

The biggest issue is whether or not my explanations were good for the students to understand the concept of causative sentences in Japanese. I don’t think my explanations were good. For the introduction, I totally relied on the section 13 of Dekiru-Nihongo Yellow, CD track C29.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Composition) on June 5, 2020

Date: June 5th on Friday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 22 out of 28; Six students were recorded as absent.

– 90 minutes attendance: 19 students

– Shorter attendances: 84, 60, and 54 minutes were recorded for three students.

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

Attendance check at the beginning: 23 students responded. Of the 23, one student was recorded that they didn’t watch the streaming.

A question and responses on BBS in the middle of the class: 18 students responded. This was a question to ask the day’s highest temperature by the weather forecast. The students input numbers in Celsius of the city he/she lives now. Temperatures varied form 20 to 35 Celsius degree.

Submission of 5 answers of quiz right after the class: 18 students submitted. Only one student got the perfect scores of 5. Average was 3.2 point.

Teaching:

Teachings were almost identical to the class for 1836 on Tuesday.

Homework:

Homework assignment was also almost identical to what was assigned for class 1836.

Issues and Problems:

Like I wrote one week ago, I no longer have any practical ideas to continue the teaching except writing a paper about tourism in each prefecture in Japan. It is like there is no well-organized curriculum, no strategy, but only short term tactics. I mean one of the short term tactics is to make feed-backs for errors on 5-question quiz on the class one week before. It is good to improve students’ Japanese by picking up a particular issue. But each student is different. I mean one issue is not applicable to every students. For example, I explain one issue about an error that some students made. That explanation is useful to the student who made the same mistake, but not for the students who did not make that error. And it is obviously the nature of Hodge-podge things, my teaching is not streamlined at all. I think that, to the students, my PPT slides seem to be too confusing and complicated to understand. I still have four weeks in this semester, but I am worrying that I may be messing up towards the end. I think that I had done well in the first semester for this composition class for the second grade students. But somehow I have burned out. I failed to organize a good curriculum for the second semester. What I think is that, if I make one year curriculum for this composition class by averaging what I have done in the first and second semesters, it would be very streamlined curriculum. I wished that I could enhance my composition class by reviewing and reorganizing the experiences that I got in this year. But last week I was told by the chief that I would not be assigned to the composition class in the coming first semester.

How to Take Care of Your Tomato

This is to show you how to take care of your tomato in this time around.

You need to cut off the buds of branch so that the main stem can grow. The orange circle in the photograph shows a bud coming from between the main stem and a leaf. It should be removed.

This photograph shows, by a blue circle, that an unnecessary branch has been cut off. In this time of season, you need to check this very frequently like almost everyday. If you leave those branches to grow, your tomato will be terrible and chaotic with many stems and branches such that you want to start singing “Welcome to the jungle!”. Cut them off, or you will get small size tomato.

Online Teaching for Class 1836 (Composition) on Jun. 2, 2020

Date: June 2nd on Tuesday, 2020 from 15:30 to 17:00 (16:30 – 18:00 in JST)

Course: Japanese Basic Composition 2

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 63 slides

Numbers of Students: 27. The class has 28 members. One student was absent today because of his?her? medical reason.

24 students participated for whole 90 minutes.

2 students were recorded for their short attendances: 84 and 64 minutes, respectively. One student was recorded as absent by the system but this student sent me 5-question quiz. This is why I think there were 27 participants : 24+2+1

Responses to my requests like Quiz answers onto BBS:

– Attendance check by reporting his/her-selves: 27.

– 5 Quiz were given to the students during the class. Answers to the 5-quiz were sent to me right after the class. 26 students sent the answers to me.

– I would not have any responses from the students if the 5-question quiz were only thing that I assigned to them. In order to get responses, I asked the students to input the highest temperature of the day in each students city at the half way point of the 90 minutes class.  23 students responded. And the temperature varied from 20 to 37 Celsius degree.

Teaching:

1. Review for the 5-q quiz of the last class. The followings were topics; V-te miru for trying to do something, abstract nouns, especially “koto”, Ending point “-made”, and so on.

2. Writing a paper about the sightseeing of a particular prefecture of Japan.

A student needs to pay attention not to use “desu-masu style” for their writing. Font must be MS mincho, not Simsun. Introduction of a prefecture’s tourism has to focus on topic that a student wants to write a suggestion, and so on.

3. Some tips for writing a composition using the textbook.

Differences on usages between “hazu” and “beki”.

Homework:

To write the suggestion to the tourism on the Prefecture.

Issues and Problems:

I was confused verbs’ forms of potential, honorable, and passive.

I implicitly gave a caution to a student who recently have not sent me homework. The student sent a message to me after the class.

Strawberry in the Garden: So Sour

Several photographs that I took on Sunday.

Nothing has to do with the black bird, but you know, the new writing system of wordpress is not easy to use. Do I need to got used to this? I am not sure how I can insert HTML code by hand?

And the response of the system is a little slow.

I want the old writing system to back. This is quite difficult to handle.

I forgot to attach this photo onto the initial version of this post.

Okay this is today’s photo that was taken in the garden.

Many of strawberry was already eaten by ants.

Taste? It was just sour. The quality was not that good,, you know, not as good as strawberry on the shelves of grocery store. But strawberry is strawberry.

Uh…, it is quite difficult to continue to write. Let me stop writing. It seems that it will take a time for me to be acquainted to the new system. To be old sometimes means that it would be difficult to learn a new thing.

Online Teaching for Class 1837 (Conversation) on Jun.1, 2020

Date: June 1st on Monday, 2020 from 8:00 to 9:30 (9:00 – 10:30 in JST)

Course: Japanese Conversation 4

Used app: Streaming on DingTalk, Presentation by Powerpoint with 57 slides

Numbers of Students: 23 out of 28. 5 students were recorded as completely absent.

Fully attendant for 90min : 17

Shorter signing-in: 85, 77, 35, 7, and 1 minutes.

Responses onto the BBS:

– Attendance check by a student his/herself: 25. However, three of the 25 were recorded as completely absent by the system. One student came late and stayed shorter times.

– 1st Quiz: 17 students responded. This was simply to ask two particles to make a passive sentence.

– 2nd Quiz: 18 students responded. This was to measure how well the students understand the conversation of Min’nano Nihongo section 37.

– 3rd Quiz: 21 students responded. This was to measure if or not the students understand a conjunctive particle “-noni” that indicated surprise and/or disappointment. No student got the right answer.

– Attendance check at the end: 20 students responded. This was to distinguish a passive sentence and honorable sentence with both using “reru/rareru”.

Teaching: 

– Review of passive sentences. The four types were discussed with rote exercise ogf passive form of verbs.

-Many activities including passive sentences and conjunctive particle “-noni”.

Homework Assignment:

– No homework was assigned.

– Three students were asked to send a MP3 or M4A by Wednesday night. Those students were asked to record their own speaking of conversation between two part time job workers.

Issues and Problems:

<No time to write about it, right now>

I Forgot to Bring a Face Mask but Went into Supermarket.

I have been just in home and doing online teaching things for so long. The only chance for me to go outside world is to take a walk or go to nearby supermarket. Last Sunday, I wanted to do both, but I forgot a face mask. So I just took a walk and went back to my house without going shopping. Today, too, I wanted to take a walk and go shopping.

Before leaving home, I took photos of green fruits in the garden.

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This is a Silver berry that is one of three hanging. I don’t think this will be good to eat. It will probably be ornamental accessory in the room.

 

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I reduced the number of apple “Kougyoku”. Only three remain hanging on the tree because the tree is too small to grow many apples.

 

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Peaches are becoming bigger and bigger. When it comes to reduce the number, I actually reduced too many for peach trees. But it would be okay because the number is not an issue for gardening in a small places. Anyway I left home for a walk after taking these photos.

 

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Flowers on road side.

 

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While I was taking photos, a farmer lady talked to me, saying I should take a good picture of Mountain Yahiko.

 

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So this is Mountain Yahiko. I would like to erase the utility poles and electric cables.

 

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Flowers just by the asphalt pavement.

 

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This is a kind of ornamental flowers, however, it still looks like a wild plant. Many people don’t think this is ornamental. But actually I like these kind of natural plants rather than plants that got too much improvement.

 

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Many people don’t like them. But they are also doing their best to survive.

Taking pictures by my digital camera, and then I went to a supermarket. I looked at people’s faces. And I realized that I forgot to bring a face mask. I thought I should get out of there. But I wanted to buy some food for my supper. I continued shopping with talking by myself “Sumimasen (I am sorry)”, but in that situation, it would have been better not to speak anything if I don’t put a mask on my face.