ESL American Politics

Bush and Perot engage in preoccupied banter during Clinton's soliloquy.A student today was telling me about the recent awarding of the 2010 Nobel Prize for Chemistry to Japanese scientists and a scientist from Purdue, and it led into a discussion of Indiana and how that state fits into American electoral politics.  This in turn devolved into a gross oversimplification of the whole American scene.

We discussed the geopolitical history of the United States from roughly the time of the French and Indian War up until the U.S. Civil War as defined roughly by maintaining the balance of power between northern states with interests in manufacturing and industry and southern states interested in agriculture.  When we discussed the westward expansion, I maintained that this distinction between southern "slave states" and northern "free states" was very much preserved, and forms the basis from which much of modern American geopolitics has come.

We skipped over the Gilded Age and mentioned the New Deal only in passing as primarily concerned with the size, scope, and responsibility of the government before moving on to the Reagan and post-Reagan years as primarily defined by incoherence (although future political historians may be able to overgeneralize about the present as I have here done about the past) since Reagan's Big Tent.  I made her look up the word "incoherent" in her electronic dictionary.

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ESL American History

the Eastern Wild Turkey, perhaps a national symbol superior to the Bald EagleRecently my Saturday night class of Japanese students has taken a keen interest in American History, and last week I lectured about the roles of various immigrant communities in creating the current demographics of the United States.  This week, one of my students asked me about whether American states, cities, and towns had holidays unique to themselves, as is common in Japan.  After waxing about Boston's Evacuation Day and St. Patrick's Day being both on March 17th, I mentioned that Thanksgiving was originally a local celebration, but had spread to the rest of the United States as homesteaders from New England made their ways to the midwest, mountain states, and west coast.

In a way, I realized, the history of Thanksgiving serves as a metaphor for the entire history of the United States.

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ESL Economics

symbol of the Chinese economic menaceI teach English to Japanese students in my spare time.  I had a student today who wanted to talk about the Lehmann shock, the sub-prime loan crisis, and China.  The student was of the high-intermediate variety and ignorant of economic terms, so the resulting explanation was in simple (oversimplified?) language.

The student asked me what the difference was between savings and investment.  I told her savings basically means doing nothing with your money.  Investing is buying something that will make you money in the future: a car can be considered an investment, and even a "savings" account is actually an investment.  Saving is basically a waste, but it's necessary to save a little in case investments turn sour. 

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