History midterm 等

Today was the history midterm. I'll be honest. I didn't prepare much for it. I didn't go to class at all last week, got a copy of the study guide from Cannon, and used it to go through my notes and the book yesterday afternoon/evening. (The book sucks. Like one whole sentence on the Heiji War? Not very helpful.) In any case, I think I killed it. *knock on wood* On the exam he gave us five identifications, of which we got to choose three. I wrote about half a page for each (10 points each). Then he gave us two essay questions (from the four on the study guide) and we chose one to write about (70 points, I wrote about two pages). I probably could have written more, but people were trickling out of the room, and I was afraid I was running out of time... turned out I had another 30/40 minutes. Whatever. I'm not worried. When he passed out the test, someone was like "I thought you were going to give us all four essay questions, and we could choose one to write on." How easy do students expect it to be? I mean, I already feel like things are made easy here (take the quiz/test system in religion, in which we have a period of a few days in which to take each of 6 quizzes as many times as we want for no grade and then all the questions on the final test are drawn directly from the quizzes), do we really need to ask for *more*? Man, I remember studying for exams in college, spending days locked in my room with my notes spread all over the floor, panicking at the prospect of *gasp* essay questions... The Japanese education system is messed up. ICU is one of the more rigorous universities here. Its students are considered studious and actually interested in academics. I can only wonder what classes at other schools must be like. But can you blame them? They're pushed from childhood to excel and graduate from top school to top school, put through "examination hell" in order to get into one of the "top" (i.e. famous) universities, and after graduation they join the daily grind of routine overtime and company socializing. If college is "the best time of your life" in America, Japan makes it "the only time you have to enjoy life."

Today in Reading after retaking the placement test we took in the fall (in order to gauge how much we'd actually learned over the year), we did some speed reading. One of the stories was about this girl whose friend seemed to have the perfect, closeknit family to go with her perfect appearance and perfect life. Meanwhile the narrator's father didn't even buy anything for her mom or say "Happy Birthday" on her mom's birthday. Turns out that Perfect Friend's parents are divorced and Narrator's father buys a melon (expensive and delicious luxury fruit) for his wife every year on her older daughter's birthday because the daughter's birth 20-some years ago was very difficult and dangerous and he'd brought her melon then to cheer her up and promised to buy her melon every year afterward if she would get better. Cute and sweet, right? Yes, but... My classmates were like, "Japanese family relationships are messed up." "Dads work too long and don't know how to communicate with their children." "It's a societal problem that needs to be corrected in the workplace." Ninomiya-sensei was like, "Yes yes! Will you please tell the companies that?"