rules – hannah ananas

Legal versus face-to-face

I feel like rules on paper can make anyone feel inadequate for something. I have been working off and on somewhere for years – years – and I read some updated guidelines for my “position” today. There are other, newer people who needed the guidelines, so they were hastily written, and we all had to sign off on having read them. Now, remember that I have done work there for years. I have been comfortable doing the work there, and in a very at-home kind of way.

Yet, after reading the guidelines/handbook today, I was slightly terrified. No, none of it was technically new information. However, having the legal-esque writing about rules and regulations and possible results and responses to breaking any of those rules made it kind of sound like a place I wouldn’t want to be. They kind of scared me. Like I really would have to watch my back and watch myself, so as not to make any errors, even by accident.

And listen, none of these rules are rules that I would have been breaking in the first place – not in the least. And yet, I was somewhat terrified. Now that it all was laid out in front of me, in black and white, so solid and unforgiving, it was scary.

That’s one reason I believe humans always will be necessary for certain things. A handbook doesn’t communicate the culture of a place – hardly at all. Based on this handbook today, the place is rigid, and bit frigid, narrow-minded, and super strict. And yet, I know the place to be none of those things. It is a wonderful place, full of genuine people who care about making the world a better place, now and in the future. That’s why I love it so much.

And I do not love that handbook.

I believe that handbook exists merely due to our absurd development in culture for people to sue one another for unreasonable claims. And that – every level of that idea – is saddening to me. That is usually an interaction of the lowest forms of ourselves, not the highest. When we are at our best, love is our central, driving force. And here is no love in suing like that.

Anyway, that’s all on that for now. Goodnight, folks.

Post-a-day 2021

^Barely got it

Copycat, copy the cat

A friend is helping me prepare for my goodbye speeches at my schools. I wanted to do them in Japanese, and I wanted them to be good. Yes, I could rumble my way through some Japanese and be mostly understood without much prep. However, I want the speeches to be better than that, seeing as they will be each given during a whole ceremony thing at each school. Not the time I want to be casual with my words. Also, almost no one would understand the English anyway, if I gave the speeches in English.

All of that, however, is merely the precursor to this next bit…

This friend who is helping me, she’s helping me by recording herself giving the speech. Why? Because I want to hear a native speaker give the speech. As we were discussing this, I mentioned that I do better copycatting someone’s speaking when I have never heard a certain word or phrase already spoken. (If I have heard it already, then I usually have already learned the appropriate natural way of saying it, and can produce it on my own, without aural prompting or guidance.)

When I mentioned this to my friend, her reply caught me off guard.

copying is the basic way for learning 👍🏻

What?

And yes, it is so utterly and beautifully true. As babies, we copy our parents and family members in order to learn to talk and walk and eat and do basically everything that we do successfully. The same applies as we learn new behaviors theighout our whole lives, and it definitely includes learning to speak a new(foreign) language properly.

And yet, schools have this huge concept of ‘copying is cheating, and cheating is bad, so copying is bad.’

I once found myself in a meeting with fellow faculty who were arguing/fussing about preventing cheating in the school, while I was wondering what the whole big deal with cheating was on the first place. It’s not that I was (or currently am) approving of cheating – I was (and still am) simply wondering what the reasoning was behind this terror-inducing aversion to cheating. It just kind of felt like a sort of blind belief situation, with no real background to support it validly. It may very well be completely valid – I have just never sat down a brainstormed enough to find out if it is or isn’t. And I was wondering in that meeting if anyone else had done that. (Though I found it highly unlikely, so I didn’t bother asking – it would have just stirred up trouble.)

And here, tonight, my friend says that copying is like the basis for learning. And with only a brief bit of thought, this idea, this concept, seems to make sense, and much more than the ‘no cheating’ one ever has.

After a bit of discussion in this new topic with my friend, I discovered that the word in Japanese for “to learn” comes from the word for “to copy”. I was in momentary disbelief, and then complete unsurprise – of course Japanese has that. I can so see that, it makes such easy sense with the Japanese culture.

It turns out that the old word for “to copy” is 真似ぶ(manebu) (and the current is 真似る(maneru)). The word for “to learn” is 学ぶ(manabu).

Put more visually simple:

学ぶ(manabu/ to learn)
真似ぶ(manebu/ to copy)
真似る(maneru/ to copy) (old word)

(And manebu is the old word for maneru, but the have the same meaning.)
Wow. Just wow.

I certainly plan to ponder this topic much, much more. This concludes my thoughts so far, however.

Post-a-day 2017

Trains, Phones, and Social Experiments

Riding on the train tonight felt like a sort of social experiment.

In all the trains in Japan, there are signs, and even announcements, informing everyone not only to put their phones on silent mode, but to refrain from talking on the phones. Therefore, even though almost every single person on the train is using his or her phone, people are usually using headphones, and the train is always rather quiet. Tonight, therefore, when I heard a noise that was clearly coming from a phone, I looked up immediately.

The girl standing near me seems to be playing a video on her phone. I wondered what the deal was, seeing as how nobody ever did such a thing, letting the sound play openly from the phone. After a quick visual evaluation, I realized that although I knew her phone was playing the video on loudspeaker, she likely had no idea. I watched as she turned up the volume to full blast, even, and had to refrain from laughing. People around the train car kept looking up from their own phones, clearly wondering what on earth was going on. (I wonder if they thought I was the one doing it at first, seeing as I was before and are on the train, and then they were surprised that it was a Japanese girl.) Now I knew that this was kind of a huge sort of social faux pas, but what I really was excited to discover was whether anyone would actually do anything to correct this girl’s utterly unfathomable and inappropriate behavior (as it seems to be for them).

This girl, you see, was wearing headphones. They just simply were not plugged into her phone. After the sort of music video ended, I kept an eye on the grill and her phone screen – she was scrolling through some sort of news feed on what looked like a Japanese social media site. I kept waiting for another video, to test my theory that she had no idea that her headphones were unplugged, and that it wasn’t intentional that she play just the one thing out loud, not caring at all what other people thought.

After a few minutes, I got my chance – a video started blaring from her phone again. Oddly enough, it was actually the exact same video as before. So, I’m not so sure what was up with that, but whatever… Perhaps 20 seconds into the video, as I was watching in an attempt to figure out what the video was, the guy sitting facing her right in front of her, who happened to be wearing his own headphones, quickly but casually waved his hand in her frame of view, and then quickly but gently grabbed and handed her the unplugged end of her headphones, which had apparently been just hanging down in front of her the whole time. In a sort of fluttery panic, the girl took her headphone cord from the guy, attempted multiple times to pause her video while turning down the volume, – she did eventually succeed – and then plugged in her headphones cord to her phone. I had a huge smile on my face for not the first time with the incident, and I found it incredibly difficult not to burst into laughter right then and there on the newly silent train. 😛
Post-a-day 2017