It's all About the Presentation(s)

Another fairly long break from updating, sorry about that. I've been preparing 3 presentations over the past few weeks, so the other-wise largely work-free exchange student lifestyle has been a bit busier than normal. I've still got one left to do, though it really should have been done last week were it not for technical issues (ie, Powerpoint).

Out of the three (Translation Studies, Second Language Acquisition and International Communication), International Communication provided the most laughs. Given it's not really a proper class per-say, you're allowed a little more leeway when it comes to taking the piss with things, hence one group's referencing of the Tellytubbies ("He's happy because there is no death penalty in his world"), and out citations of the movies "Independance Day" and "Armageddon". Our topic was nuclear weapons (and nuclear power as my group DIDN'T TELL ME until it came up on the projector screen), and I figured that having been given the task of coming up with the case for, (in a conversation that went something along the following lines:

3 Japanese Students (to another foreign student): What country are you from?

Foreign Student: Malaysia

3 Japanese Students (to me): What about you?

Me: The UK

3 Japanese Students: Right, well since your country is the only one here that has nuclear weapons, you must be in favour of them, so you do the "pro" section.

There's logic in there somewhere....)

Anyway, back to the point, I figured that this being Japan, I had the choice of the "It wasnae me" route, or the "I love the bomb so much" route. Of which I picked the latter, leading to lines such as "Thanks to nuclear weapons, my country was protected and I was born in a free Europe" and "As you can see from these movies, Nuclear bombs are will be very useful when the asteroid/aliens come"...

Other notable taste/sensitivity/reasonableness-fails courtesy of International Comm. class presentations included "Japan's justified acquisition of Korea" (I believe the word she was searching for was "rather brutal invasion and occupation of") from the Textbook controversy/historical revisionism group, and "Abortion. First, lets look at reasons why parents kill their children" from the interestingly titled "Abortion and Infanticide" group who effectively tried to argue that the term "Abortion" applied to children up to the age of 8 or 9...

A number of groups covered capitol punishment as well, and on repeated occasions brought up the argument that some criminals commit crimes in order to be sentenced to death... given that no cases were cited I'm not quite sure where they got that point from, much less where they were going with it (If we abolish capital punishment the crime rate will drop?).

Without meaning to have a massive go at the Japanese students, I do feel that their presentation skills and delivery techniques are far below what would be considered acceptable for undergraduate students in Europe or America. Having never had to do a university level presentation outside of physics perhaps my judgment is not the most well-informed, but does anybody consider standing at the lecturn, staring down at a pre-written sheet of paper and reading it out aloud (no-powerpoint) to be acceptable?

This criticism is more aimed at the other two classes where the Japanese students deliver their presentations in Japanese. Given that in Int. Comm. we have to present in the target language, reading off pre-prepared notes is more forgivable given most of us are not at the level of being able to make up presentations on the spot or from small flashcards in our target language.

I'll just mention now that the Japanese education system is frequently criticised by foreigners who have had contact with it as being too focused on cram-learning "facts" rather than developing any sort of analysis skills... I emphasis that this criticism is made by foreigners because rather frustrating Japanese cultural taboos forbid people from actually criticising most things, regardless of how they feel.

Hmm, this has turned into a rather negative article... I'll just make it clear I'm still having a great time here and I'm not in a bad mood, just seeing/ doing all these presentations lately has made me think about some stuff...

Oh, Yoo comes back from his gap year in Germany/Italy in a few weeks, so I'm going to go meet him a the airport since it's not that far from here. It'll be interesting to see how his German has improved since I saw him in Italy in September... He's probably better than me now...

Oh, and I just wanted to mention this. Without meaning to a)politicise this blog, or much more importantly b) trivialise the terrible tragedy in Haiti, I would like to point out that that the official casualty figure from the earthquake now stands at 100,000 people, which is approximately 1/6th of the 2006 death toll of Iraqi civilians directly or indirectly as a result of our invasion, as calculated by the peer-reviewed Lancet survey. Granted I only pick up information from BBC news website and Facebook, but in light of the above does the whole "Save Haiti" media blitz not strike a certain note of moral indulgence with anyone?

Just a small though...