Hello from IR/PS

Hello, my name is Jason Packman, and welcome to my first
entry in the IR/PS student blog. I was born and raised in
the San Francisco Bay Area. I went to UCLA, where I
majored in East Asian Studies with a concentration in
Japan. While there, I spent a summer abroad in Kyoto and
a year abroad in Singapore.

From there, I went to live in Japan on (surprise!) the JET
program. However, I never left. I spent three years in
Ojiya, Niigata. It is a small town in the mountains, in
the middle of "Snow Country." Kawabata's novel of the
same name is set in Echigo-Yuzawa, which is about an hour
by local train from Ojiya. After a bit of "individual
travel" throughout East Asia, I moved to Yokohama, where I
lived the last four-plus years, mostly teaching English at
public elementary schools around Tokyo. I only left Japan
the Wednesday before prep began.

The biggest change from being a student at IR/PS hasn't
come from being in the classroom; I never left it. But, I
have spent the past few years observing teachers and
thinking about how he or she is presenting material in
order to improve either their teaching or my own. I enjoy
teaching, so it is fun to watch and learn from the styles
of my new teachers. I just have to remember that they
probably don't want to hear my opinion of their teaching
at the end of the day.

Being thrown into math prep class after doing no math
aside from figuring out exchange rates, time differences,
and converting meters to feet or Celcius to Fahrenheit has
given me a better idea how my students must have felt when
it was time for English class, and they would have to
switch from understanding everythng without a second
though to having to struggle just to understand and
express simple concepts. During the difficult times, when
the numbers and formulas are flying out of Prof. Sieburg
mind faster than I can keep up with, I remember the hard
work my students did in my classes, and just try to do the
same.

Anyways, from the day after tomorrow the quick review of
the grammar of IR/PS, and the world, will be finished.
Numbers and data are just as much a world language as
English is, and some of us will continue on in the one of
the "real world" applications of it, Economics.

I had at least taken a Calculus class during my college
career; I dropped the one Econ class I took. Hopefully I
will be okay enough to update you on how that is going
sometime next week.

--------------------------------------
For All Sports Lovers!
http://pr.mail.yahoo.co.jp/yells/