Our speaker was Dr. Willaim Asbaugh and associate professor and chair of the History Department at SUNY Oneonta. He is originally from California but has been teaching US Diplomatic and Asian History at SUNY Oneonta for the past 10 years. He has won the Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching and the Susan Sutton Smith Prize for Academic Excellence. In February he returned to the US after teaching through the Fulbright Program at Doshisha University and Kwansei Gakuin University in the greater Kyoto area of Japan. He explained that there are things the US looks at from studying the Japanese schools and there are things the Japanese look at when studying the US schools. In Japan students do well on standardized tests but those skills do not translate, they take tests to get into high schools, and college. In Japan college is a vacation for students. Businesses look at the ranking of the college you get into and what clubs you were in and how you got along in those clubs. The Japanese are fabulous at teaching mathematics. Grading is inflated. In Japan an A is 80-100 and tracking of students is difficult. In Japan they have a difficult time using critical thinking skills. We need to go back to teaching the old values of school Reading, Writing and Critical Thinking.
Other things that were interesting there were the electronics are amazing there, all businesses that get cleaned on a regular basis have a slightly sloping floor and the water after mopping gets drained right out the front door, there is no hot water in the public restrooms, and rock and roll shows start at 7pm and end before 10pm before the subway closes.
