The 3rd Summer Seminar 2002 at MSU-A MY POEM my love of learning and teaching English The following is my poem I've just written for the seminar, which represents my idea about learning or teaching English and my belief, autonomy in learning. I will try to change words here and there and try to complete it before the end of the seminar. Will you help me to better it? Is there anyone who is a poet among us? I think it's a good idea that each of the participants, will write and complete his/her own poem by the end of the seminar. Such a poem, which can and will keep encouraging you for a long time after the seminar. It's also good to share and discuss everyone's poems at the seminar, I think. If you agree, let's do it. Mine is as follows. Takeshi July 15, 2002 YOUR FLOWER Don't just wait for someone to bring you a flower Grow your own flower instead Choose the best shape, size and colors you like Bloom your own flower Feel good about your flower Work hard to make it more beautiful Take a risk to protect it because it is your flower Don't let it lose its beauty Keep working all the time Be proud and love it but be humble, too Someday your flower will be the best flower you could possibly grow Then some of your students will notice and admire "How beautiful your flower is!" And the beauty in your flower will continue to live and bloom in the hearts of your students Don't wait for someone to bring you a flower Grow and bloom your own flower Takeshi Suzuki, August, 2002 Go to the detailed Report about what we learned in the seminar with more pictures & stories

Hello to the 11 participants!

How are you doing? Hope everything is enjoyable.

Do you remember this?

Of course, you do! You might be missing the funny but good message.

Do me a favor, will you? Send your reports or anything about the seminar to me by email for these pages, please. Thanks.

Your friend,
Takeshi (September 21, 2002)

Miki Kato sent in her report about the seminar in Japanese. Miki's report

Will you please tell your friends about the seminar and encourage them to join it, please. We need some more participants to get it going. Thanks.

Some of us are planning to have a summer seminar to be held at MSU-A (Minnesota State University-Akita) between Monday, July 29 and Friday, August 2. You can commute from home. This will be an intensive course and therefore an excellent opportunity to develop your English skills. It is open to anybody - school teachers (elementary, junior, senior high or college), juku teachers, home teachers, students, or learners, etc, who speaks English. Anybody is welcome. Only English will be used during the course. No Japanese language is allowed.

If you are interested in joining us, please send email to Takeshi Suzuki
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You don't have to take part in all activities if your schedule is tight.This seminar is very flexible.
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Everybody can join in the process of making the plans on what to do in the seminar.
So send me your plans on what you want to do and what you want to learn at the seminar. I will put down your wishes below.

When the participants send me email about the seminar, I will put it on this page so that everyone else can share it as we discussed it on Saturday, July 13. If you want to keep your email just between you and me, please specify that! If you want to make any part of your particular email private, please tell me that part is "off the record" or "private" or "between you and me" or anything so that I know if I can't put it here. When your email is put on the page and in case you want to change any words in it, let me know.

In your email, please write your opinions, ideas or suggestions about the seminar freely.
Your email might cover your ideas about the following:



1) What you want to learn in the seminar
2) What kinds of activities you want to engage in
3) What you want to achieve
4) What (speeches, presentations, workshops) you want to give
5) What you want the MSU-A professors to teach you
6) What you want the MSU-A professors to help you with
7) Any other ideas or suggestions to make the seminar more interesting or exciting as well as useful
8) Anything else

Email sent to the participants before the seminar

(Below is my email sent to the participants on July 26, 2002)
Dear participant in the seminar,

Hello again.

Good news to tell you! The number of applicants who are participating in the seminar has reached 10. One or two might be joining us, too. The more, the merrier. The group consists of an interesting and diverse mixture of people; high school teachers, a homemaker, a university teacher, high school students, teachers who teach at home. One thing common to us all is that we want to improve our communicative English skills, I believe. We are highly self-motivated to learn better, too. Let's be proud of ourselves.

Originally we had a plan of having organized the project much earlier. Then Prof. Dave Ragan of MSU-A faculty, who will be in charge of the seminar next week, would have liked to spend more time to prepare for the seminar. He really believes in good, solid preparation for a successful class. Unfortunately, we didn't have enough applicants earlier and it was just recently that he was asked to facilitate the seminar for us. Personally I wish we could have given him more time. I would like you all to understand the situation.

Having said that, Prof. Ragan is a real professional teacher, who has been specialized in ESL education for more than ten years at MSU-A. And he will be doing his best to address everyone's needs during the seminar. He will talk about this in his introduction next Monday morning. Remember that we, the participants, are a bunch of good learners, who really like to improve. The seminar will be a very good one, I believe.

*additional information
1. What to bring
    a recording device (tape recorder, MD recorder, etc)
    pens, markers, highlighters,
    (E-E)dictionary,
    notebook, etc.

2. Time Schedule
    10:00-12:00 (morning), 13:20-14:50, 15:20-16:50 (afternoon)
    (The time might change slightly)

3. Where to have lunch
    classroom (your "obento"), Cycling Terminal, Hotel Cripton
    the MSU-A cafeteria will not be open

4. Opening time of the library
    13:00PM - 17:00PM

The writer of this email, Takeshi, will be attending the seminar as a participant. But I'll also be willing to work to make sure that you would be enjoying as much as possible and be comfortable throughout the seminar. So please feel free to come and tell me - frankly - your comments, suggestions, or criticisms or whatever problems you might run into. I will try to help you as much as I can.

I am looking forward to seeing you next Monday morning 10:00AM at GH-300 of the Minnesota State University Akita campus. Don't forget to bring the participation fee with you! ;-) Seriously I really hope you will have a great time next week, which will remain long in your heart as a good memory of summer in 2002.

Feel free to ask me any questions if you have. Good luck to you.

Sincerely
Takeshi

the URL of the seminar web page:
http://www.edinet.ne.jp/~takeshis/summersemi.htm#summerseminar
__________________________________________
Takeshi Suzuki
Akita JALT president
PALS English Class
164-1 Detomachi Aza Gomon, Honjo-shi, Akita 015-0007


(email from Michiro Hayashi July 22)
Thank you very much for your notices.

Regarding themes for the seminar, I have once proposed an idea, i.e. note-taking, and you have shown your idea that mind-mapping would be lectured by Dr. Ragan in the seminar series.

I am looking forward to having Dr. Ragan’s lecture on mind-mapping. I, on the other hand, do hope we can have skill training for REGULAR note-taking, since that is a skill I regularly need to have on my daily work (e.g. in case of participating seminars). Since I do want to be really TRAINED, I also hope that the session will be not just a lecture but training workshops, which include note-taking practices against simulated discourses with evaluation afterward.

And, I cannot attend the seminars on Jul. 29 (Mon) and Aug. 1(Thu), and possibly every morning session. If you could arrange the session on slots of afternoons except the two days, it would be much more appreciated.

I do hope my idea above is seriously considered, though we have only limited time until the Seminar course.

Thank you, again.

Sincerely,

Michiro Hayashi


(Below is my email sent to the participants on July 22, 2002)
Dear the summer seminar participants,

Our seminar intensive course is just a week away!

The participants are Chieko Shibata, Haruyo Abe, Michiro Hayashi, Miki Kato, Mio Kimura, Yoshiko Ito and Takeshi Suzuki, who all have committed to signing up. An excellent group of 7 nice people! We will have a great time next week starting from Monday through Friday (10:00AM - around 5:00PM). We will have one MSU-A teacher instead of two since the number is small. As for the participation fee, 25,000 yen, please bring it (in cash) when you turn up next Monday.

"Everybody is a teacher" is a slogan for this seminar. So you are encouraged to give a speech, presentation, workshop, poster session or anything on your own during the seminar. We will have enough time for everyone although it is not a "must". The more positive and active your participation will be, the more fun you will have. And the seminar will be more interesting and exciting to us all. I'd appreciate it if you could send me your plan for such a presentation you are making -- any time this week.

By the way our ad of the seminar is on today's Sakigake paper. We are still looking for participants. It would be great if you've found somebody interested in joining us. Just let me know. Or you could even bring someone to MSU-A next Monday. If we get nobody, that's OK, too. The seven of us is a great group to enjoy spending the five days together.

Have a nice week. Don't work too hard. Stay "genki". We can't afford to lose any of you for the seminar. ;-)
Takeshi

PS: I will try to send you another email later, most probably on Thursday, for more information.


(email from Miki Kato July 12)
Hello!!!  
  I know I will be meeting you tomorrow in JALT, however, I am writing to you.  
  As for my attendance, because of extra classes like "Intensive Summer Course" for college-student-wanna-bes, I have to say that I will miss the every first part of our MSU-A seminar.  I have to be in Omagari Kogyo from 9:00 to 10:30 at least.  It takes an hour to get to Yuwa-machi.  Classes at Kogyo are to be held two more weeks!!  All the bad luck ( good for the students, though!?) derives from the fact that I am in charge of the 3rd graders this year....

  Still, I would like to attend the MSU-A summer seminar.  One of the good points is that we will be able to join in the process of making the plans, I mean a kind of curriculum.  Although my idea is not so concrete, one thing I am looking forward to is like this:

  Idea #1
 1) Interpretation of text (script), which needs "reading between the lines"
  2) Acting practice, using the script mentioned above

  Anyway, I will see you tomorrow.  Till then, good-bye.
Miki


(Below is my email sent to the participants and supporters on July 16, 2002)
Hi all,

Miki Kato, a high school teacher, wrote to me that she would attend the MSU-A seminar even though she will have to attend her special summer class every morning during July 29 and August 2. That means that she will drive one hour to MSU-A after her class and join us the afternoon sessions. Her positive and enthusiastic attitude impressed me a lot last Friday.

Michiro Hayashi, who is in charge of JETRO in Akita, decided to join us last Saturday when some of us in the address box list got together and talked about the seminar last Saturday. He might not be able to take part in all the activities because he will have to work in his office during the period. His quick decision made us very excited.

It is quite OK that you will be absent from some part of the seminar course depending upon your busy schedule - with one condition. Yes, you've guessed it right. You'll have to pay the full amount of the participation fee, 25,000 yen. ;-) Sorry, but that is it. At the meeting last Saturday, everybody agreed that a student will have a special discount fee of 20,000 yen. At this point no student has applied, but we are contacting some Akita university students.

Also today I received "I will attend" email from Yoshiko Ito, who lives in Noshiro teaching at a high school. Thank you, Yoshiko-san.

Now seven people have committed to signing up the seminar. The three already mentioned plus the following four: Haruyo Abe, a high school teacher; Mio Kimura, ECC teacher; Chieko Shibata, ECC teacher, Takeshi Suzuki, a PALS teacher.

Thank you, Mio-san, for putting an ad in the paper and thank, you, Chieko-san, for trying to contact to put an ad on the bulletin board. Thank you, Haruyo-san, for talking to some school teachers that you know. Thank you, everyone, for spreading the news and talking to other people. I've written to many people today since I am sure that the seminar will be held as planned.

I really hope that we will be getting several more people.

Send me your opinions, suggestions, ideas or anything about the seminar. I will put them on the page of my website so that everyone else will be able to know what others are thinking about it. In case you send me anything you'd rather not see on the age, please let me know "the message is between you and me."
Takeshi


(Below is my email sent to the supporters on July 6, 2002)
Hello everyone who supports the MSU-A summer seminar 2002,

This is an update of our challenging plan to hold a summer seminar at MSU-A this summer, which is tentatively scheduled between Monday, July 29 and Friday, August 2.

As you see in the address box, there are at the present moment 9 people who have shown interest in the project - 6 short of our target 15. Maybe the minimum will be 12. Akemi-san can't make it because she plans to visit US then. So we need to collect several more interested people to get it finalized. Any ideas? One of my ideas is to contact Iwate JALT and try to get a few, who might be interested. So please spread the news to your friends. I appreciate any of your ideas to recruit more participants, too.

Good news is that the participation fee could be reduced to 25,000 yen. A possibility is that the cheaper it will be if we manage to get more.

Yesterday I had a chance to observe Prof. Dave Ragan's class at MSU-A. It was a worthwhile experience. After the class Dave and I discussed the seminar plan. He says that Prof. David Weaver will be willing to help us during the seminar, which is another good news.

As for the content of the seminar, I'd like all of you to think about it and exchange your good ideas among you whenever some of you have a chance to get together at a meeting. The most important thing is for you to express yourselves on what you want to do and achieve during the week and how it should be organized. In the case of ordinary seminars all the activities had been decided beforehand. You can't participate in the decision making of what to do and how to do it. You just follow the decided schedule. We don't want that, do we?

So let's exchange ideas. Send me what you think. I will send what I think later.
Takeshi


(Below is my email sent to the JALT list on June 6, 2002)
Hi,

How are you doing? The following information has nothing to do with JALT.

subject: Summer Seminar at MSU-A 2002

Some of us are planning to have a summer seminar 2002 (all in English) for Japanese English teachers at MSU-A, which will be held between Monday, July 29th and Friday, August 2nd (5 days). The total participation cost will be 30,000 yen.

The seminar will be intensive, learner-centered (not teacher-oriented) and perhaps noisy. :-) Everybody will have a great time, having a lot of chance to speak up and express themselves in English. An excellent chance to develop English skills substantially! This will be the last summer for MSU-A since it will be closed in the spring of 2003. Why don't you make this summer a fruitful and memorable one by joining us?

Will you let me know if you or your friends are interested in the plan? We need to have a certain number like 15 people to get it starting by the end of this month. Any suggestions or ideas about the plan would be appreciated, too.

Thank you.
Takeshi

Go to the detailed Report
about what we learned in the seminar
with more pictures & stories



Summer Seminar related pages:
summer seminar
the 1st day
the 2nd day
the 3rd day
the 4th day
the 5th day-1
the 5th day-2
the 5th day-3
my poem

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