Jared Blauer comments

One final note,

After looking over several comments everyone is concerned with English teaching. The protocols of learning go beyond the English lesson and nobody so far has addressed these issues as I read people's responses to the article itself. Learning is not about learning words, vocabularies, explicit or implicit details about everything we require students to study. The most fundamental part of the equation to learning is building upon learning concepts. You want to strip away student learning confusion. A student should be able to take a 1,000 page book which would be like a regular house light and shrink it to the size of an Led while maintaining enough light and understanding to produce information or response to information that could with more help create a sun in its wake.

I am not even sure who wrote this article. By and large the biggest group of English speakers from Asia who speak and use English especially in America are actually Japanese people.

The first reason: 1. Inadequate reinforcement of the lessons this is the same excuse the world over where ever you go in the world not just in Japan for not being able to use English or whatever language a student wants to learn.

Class Control: Huh this person should not be in the classroom. I am already contrived to believe they are insane with the advice they are giving which is not much at all. From this teacher's perspective students should be on Thorazine and drooling on themselves just enough to make the class interesting.

Inadequate practice? What does that mean... this guy is giving out hints of what he does in his spare time which is watch games and drink beer. Why not spend some of the time he does these activities and actually develope interactive lessons and activities that entice students to practice the skills we wish them to perform and then there would actually begin to be some sort of practice which is missing in most classroom situations in Japan and other countries.

Silence in grand when nobody is getting made to look inferior. The silence is not just related to Japanese students Korean students do it as well as many other Asian student too. Many Asian countries accept a little physical or mental abuse to keep the students in line. If you are a western teacher it might seem startling to get a glimpse behind the curtain but certainly the students are more aligned to learning that back home where you might be fired, sued or other bad things for things student do or do not actually do. All systems have good and bad things to exploit if you want to be a great teacher then you need to exploit your goods in ways to enhance student learning and change way learning in done one classroom at a time.

Finally, listening to the last bit of advice that English is everything or nothing at all makes this guy seem out of touch with reality especially within the country he is living in. As technology advances, the need to actually mentally learn or physically accept the challenge of learning a new language becomes less. Google has fairly good translation tools and Microsoft is beginning to set out real time voice translation software to use with apps like skype. Actually the days of English teachers may be coming to an end unless you live in a society that is already English speaking.