If you have children who are interested in a summer immersion language programs — or you have friends who do — check out the Middlebury Monterey Language Academy. In its second year offering French, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic, MMLA programs help middle and high school students leap ahead of their peers in language proficiency.
Day: January 15, 2009
New Student Orientation starts January 27
New spring students are arriving on campus in time for orientation, which runs from January 27-30. We are expecting 65-70 new enrollees across the four schools. Please take a few extra minutes to welcome them and offer assistance to students looking a bit lost.
Tsuneo Akaha Shares Experiences in Japan
MIIS welcomes back GSIPS professor Tsuneo Akaha, who has been teaching in Japan for the summer and fall semester. We thought you would all be interested in his activities:
- Tsuneo taught an MA seminar at Waseda University in Tokyo in the fall of 2008. The topic was Asian Regional Integration, a very hot topic in the region. His experience in the seminar included serving not only as the instructor but also as an interpreter for two of the students. One was a Nepalese student with fairly advanced English language skills (despite the fact that he never used English until he enrolled at Waseda) but little or no Japanese language, and the other was a Chinese student with highly developed Japanese language proficiency but very limited spoken English. Hence, when either of them gave their presentations or spoke up in class, Tsuneo served as their interpreter.
“Un” Book Club Reflections
In the first “un” book club meeting, we discussed the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. There was a nice, diverse group of folks who came by the TLC sandbox to discuss the main concepts and relate them to our work here at MIIS. In his book, Gladwell outlines some relatively hidden secrets to success – timing, opportunity, culture and experience. The typical success story is told as if the person arose from ashes and took the world by surprise when actually the very opposite is the case. He highlights cases such as Bill Gates who was born in the exact right year in the exact right town to have access to computers at a young age so by the time he left college, he had more than 10,000 hours of experience working with computers.
Some of the big ideas/questions that came up during the meeting were:
- Should we be trying to recruit outliers, create outliers, raise the curve of outliers or treat each student as if they are a potential outlier?
- How can we “engineer” opportunities for students?
- Timing is so important – we must prepare students so that they are ready to take advantage of an opportunity when the time strikes.
After a successful first “un” book club meeting, the group has decided to move forward and pick a new book to help us frame our upcoming conversation. The new book will be My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. We will be meeting at noon on Monday, February 9th in the TLC Sandbox (Kade, second floor).