October 17, 2013
-
Pay Attention!
Artley is back, and the vibration that I kind of liked is gone, but it sure is bright and shiny. Maybe I just have to get reacquainted with it. I wonder what was causing the vibration in the first place. It is nice to have it back anyway. (^-^) Being haunted by eBay Miyazawa again. There is a relisted open hole model reduced from about $900 and the bidding is now around $300 which is a VERY nice price. There is one bidder, so the only thing to do is snipe if I am able. Only newbies show up an bid early and drive the price up in the process of trying to stay highest bidder. Sniping is really the way to go - just hold your breath and wait for the last possible second to slap your winning bid down. No, no, STOP THE MADNESS!!! Then again there is that $50 Hensel or Edsel or whatever it is in the recycle shop, but it is probably just a piece of junk. It is a Hernals made of nickel. I wonder what it sounds like. It probably needs work and I don't want to invest in fixing a piece of junk. But I could try it out and see if it is playable condition... STOP IT, I SAY!!!
I could watch the Naadam video 100 times and not get sick of it. Ok, the noisy music was not perfect, but this is a bunch of very smart people who were engaged in an extra-curricular band at school. The members' ages span a period of years. This group does not just dissolve when the members graduate, it continues on outside of the school context and encompasses all past and present members. They have all become a big family, and have gotten together in spite of their full-to-bursting scheduals to rejoice in each other and in the joy of two of its beloved family members who have decided to commit themselves to each other for life.
Brudder John had some interesting insights on smart phones and dumb people. He walked into a classroom and saw seven students all busy with seven smartphones and told them they were all dumb to be conversing with people who were not there while totally ignoring all the nice folks in the room whose acquaintences they could be making if they tried. Everybody also listens to headphones, too. Brudder says that is like self induced artificial schizophrenia to be listening to voices and talking to people who are not there all the time. At my school they are talking about ipads for kids in the language lab, but I don't know why anyone thinks that kids need another screen to mess around with. Their attention spans are so short already. They are failing to develop any kind of attention span in this fast paced screen world, and one needs to develop the skill of paying attention to be able to retain anything. (An aside - a fellow paying too much attention to his smart phone did a dumb thing and walked into a railroad crossing. He, um, won't be doing that or anything else again.)
Maybe this is what is causing me to feel frustrated with the kids at school. Some of them just have zero self control and zero attention span. I actually think many Japanese parents lack skills for teaching their kids self control. If the children act in an undesirable manner, the parent does nothing and ignores the disturbance until the child exhausts itself and gives up. This does not teach the child to control itself, nor does it provide any negative feedback that a child with no self control needs to have. I tell kids repeatedly not to chatter in class, but they don't even seem to realize that they are creating a distraction and a disturbance. They don't even seem to realize they are chattering! I tell kids to write sample sentences in their books, but have to go around and give half of the kids individual instructions on what I want them to do simply because they were not trained to put forth the effort to listen when I gave the exact same instructions to the entire group.
You know what really trained my attention span and my ability to listen and pay attention? Sitting in church services as a child. I was bored to death and hated being stuck in a pew for an hour. But the folks we sat with while Grandma played the organ and Parents sat in the choir loft were patient, and we did manage to sit quietly even if we were not mentally engaged. We had to, because there was no childrens' church or any other sort of relief, and our parents had a full view if we stepped out of line in our seats. If we did we knew there would be consequenses, and we voluntarily or involuntarily developed our skills of self control. But gradually I began to understand the sermons and was able to make the effort to listen and follow what was being said, and discovered that what was being said was organized and useful, and I learned to sit still and listen. Thank you, Pastor Nelson.
I am a bit frustrated with people's reaction to Daniel 2. I worked very hard on the content and the message, but all people are remembering or commenting on is that it was too long. It should have been split into two days, if you ask me, but no one did.
