June is just around the corner!

Upon getting into June, GTS will fly to Kansas City for AP Japanese Scoring Session between 6/3-16 just before taking 14 students to Kyoto for the Study Abroad Program. Probably just about 2000 high schoolers took this year's AP Japanese tests to hope to get some college credits before entering a college/university.

Starting the next year, AP Scoring location will be in Salt Lake City, UT.

Fall registration has begun and 10 students registered for 1101 (100 seats in 4 sections available).

Japan seems to be attacked by 2nd typhoon this year already and the rainy season has also begun. Hopefully the rainy season ends earlier so that my students can enjoy more there!

Study Abroad Orientation passed successfully!

Two-day Study Abroad Orientation was successfully finished last weekend and everyone got excited about the up-coming trip to Japan. There are 14 students (10 from COD, 1 from Waubonsee CC, 2 from Harper CC and 1 from Prairie State College). 10 male students will protect 4 female students during the trip and 3 students with over two years of Japanese learning experience will assist other students. It is a small but good group and I am confident in making this trip very fruitful!

2010-2011 academic year ended!

Final exam week has just passed and all grades were reported! The academic year has done and now should be ready for the orientation weekend for the study abroad program coming up in a few days! Since GTS allows students to withdraw in the last minutes to avoid lowering GPA, quite a few withdrew from classes after the actual enjoyment of the class activities with other classsmates.

Japanese 2252: 1 A, 2 B's (3 survived out of 3)

Japanese 2202: 3 A's, 1 B, 3 C's, 2 S's and 1 F (9 survived out of 10)

Japanese 1102: 12 A's, 2 B's, 1 C, 5 D's 1 S, 2 F's (21 survived out of 23)

Japanese 1101: 4 A's, 1 B, 3 C's, 2 F (9 survived out of 10)

Waubonsee 102: 2 A's, 1 B, 2 C's (5 survived)

Well, over 100 students began learning Japanese last fall and 21 survived (20%)!! Is this low? Not quite!

May Dinner is coming up tomorrow!

Time really flies and May JCC/GTS Dinner will be tomorrow and hope to see many of you at the end of this semester. June and July don't have a dinner because of the GTS' AP Scoring and Study Abroad Program but we will meet again in August 5th before the fall semester!
First experience of 1101 in the Spring semester began with over 25 students but there are only 10 left in class at the end. Hopefully everyone passes the course. 1102 students mostly pulled through the course and wait and see how they are! Summer Study Abroad Program in Kyoto for 6 weeks will have 15 students despite the nuclear and natural disaster!

A few more weeks to go!

1101 has been shrinking into almost a dozen regular attending students especially after the spring break as expected. 1102 still has about 35 students in two classes of which 15-20 students seem to continue to get into 2201 in fall and that is good. 1102 may not make it in fall due to the lack of students yet some current 1102 students may join! One excited thing is the new Learning Community Course (Interdisciplinary experience) between my Japanese 1100 (Culture/Civilization of Japan) and Political Science 2220 (World Politics) taught by Christian Goergen. Political Science 2220 will be on Tuesday night (7-9) and Japanese 1100 will be on Thursday night (7-9) and students must register both classes. We will virtually meet with Japanese students in Hiroshima real-time and discuss several global issues!!

Spring Break has passed! Dinner will be on 4/8!

Last one month of the semester is now left. Each class has a couple of chapters to go in the textbook. Because of recent events in Japan, summer study abroad group got a bit smaller with 15 students, which is still nicely sized! April JCC/GTS dinner is coming up this Friday (4/8). I hope to see many friends there.

Conference in Hawaii!!

Association of Teachers of Japanese will have the annual conference in University of Hawaii this weekend in conjunction with the annual conference of Association for Asian Studies. As GTS is one of the conference organizers, I am in Hawaii now to be ready for it. Since I am in Hawaii, indeed, I am having some fun now at North Shore, Kailua, Dole Plantation, etc. I did swim with 2 daughters under nice sunshine! Last visit to Hawaii was summer 2005, so 5 years have passed. Hopefully I can come back here in Hawaii in 5 years again! Refreshing at least now!