nac_est Wrote:Besides, that's about half of the population of Alaska

HA!

This class is great. For the first test, I didn't even really crack the book -- I went purely off of this site. It's an incredible asset.

In response to Chadokoro_K,

I, like you, ended up changing a number of Heisig's keywords when I went through the book myself, for various reasons--I knew them already in a different context, or I stumbled on one that seemed more distinct from others in the book, or I just thought Heisig didn't choose the most obvious thing (I was disappointed that he didn't take the opportunity of the new printing to re-think some of his original keywords and stories). One decision I made in putting together a class, though, was to stick to the book. With 20 people working together and maintaining a dialogue about these characters, it just seemed to make more sense to keep that uniformity, even in all of its awkwardness. (Another reason for keeping the keywords: this site. The students are getting a lot of value out of this site and the stories submitted by members.)

The usefulness of this method can't be argued, in my opinion, so I've gone into this class with some confidence. The experimental side of it is the group writing of stories. Many of my best stories have personal ingredients, so they wouldn't work well for anyone else--my students are charged with a different task, which is to not only come up with a great story, but to make one that is understandable to a wide audience. The jury's still out on that.

This class is listed as JPN 310: Special Topics--in the past the same course number has been applied to Japanese literature classes, Japanese film classes, advanced grammar classes, and so on. Using RTK is a first at this university. I would like to see it become a 2-semester course that covers the entire book, but for now, I'll just feel lucky if they let me teach it again someday.

-koun

Koun,

Thanks for your reply explaining both the route you have chosen to take with teaching this class and why you have chosen to set it up that way.

kouun Wrote:The experimental side of it is the group writing of stories. Many of my best stories have personal ingredients, so they wouldn't work well for anyone else--my students are charged with a different task, which is to not only come up with a great story, but to make one that is understandable to a wide audience. The jury's still out on that.

It will be very interesting to see how successful your students are with this. Of course, I think this site also has some great stories that pass the "more universal" test as well.

Hopefully your class will contribute some of the gems you come up with here.

Keep us posted on your results, what you learn about teaching a class based on RTK, what you might change if you have the opportunity to teach the first half again, etc.

Also, best of luck in getting the OK to teach the second half.

From what I've heard, a sequel class, using the second book, has been approved for the fall semester. Most of us, currently enrolled, plan to take it.
We're a ways past the 50% mark (We're testing #800-880 on Thursday), and nothing major has delayed the class. Midterms were administered by means of two separate 200-kanji quizzes from the first 560 kanji. The final will most likely follow a similar layout.
The last of our extra-class stories are due on the 22nd, at which time the entire storybook will be compiled.
This is going wonderfully.

Has anyone dropped Heisig先生 a line about this? I seem to remember him saying in the introduction to one of his books that he's not aware of his technique ever being used in a classroom setting, and this is clearly an effective counterexample.

I'm curious how this ended up turning out.

It was excellent! It seemed to work very well, the way Kouun Sensei facilitated the class. We learned a bit about how to read cursive kanji and about the history of kanji during our actual class time. The final results were interesting, from what Sensei told us: we either did really well, average, or very poorly... it seems that there weren't "B"s or "D"s.

Over the summer, some of us are finishing the last 840 or so kanji in the first book so we can be as prepared as possible for fall. (Supposedly, there might be a possibility for us to get credit for the summer studying, if we can take a test and pass... I haven't heard anything else about it though, so that may not happen). The fall class will be focusing on book 2 and the compounds, rather than be a continuation of book 1.

We'll all be back on here at some point, I'm sure. Thanks for your interest!

rajih

Just resurrecting this thread to see how the fall semester went! Please report, Alaskans!

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Yes! We wanna know how it's going in Alaska!

What will the Japanese Department of Education's response be when more universities start adding RTK as an accredited (first year) course? Suddenly Western students around the world are better at recognizing and writing kanji than the average Japanese citizen. As RTK becomes mainstream, it also becomes more efficient with improvements in keywords and kanji order. Shared stories become sharper with the imaginations of tens of thousands of new students. High schools start adding RTK and students become better in one semester than what took their Japanese high school counterparts 12 years.

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Blasphemy!

bodhisamaya Wrote:What will the Japanese Department of Education's response be when more universities start adding RTK as an accredited (first year) course? Suddenly Western students around the world are better at recognizing and writing kanji than the average Japanese citizen.

I'm guilty of the same thinking (full disclosure here), but it's best to be careful thinking we are better at writing and recognizing kanji than the average Japanese citizen. They have YEARS of passive and active exposure to kanji.

Yeah, we can do alot given an English keyword. But I think they will smear us if only Japanese were used.

Even a test where they're given context sentences with Kana for the word and we're tested with the same kanji keywords is skewed. They have to deal with a distraction of homonyms while we get unique words. But it would be an interesting test.

For those who have completely mastered RTK, teach it at your local community college as a non-credit course. They offer, "Getting in touch with your Guardian Angel" here in Kauai for Jimini's sake!