We started the unit on the Right to Die vs Right to Life. There were a lot of intereting issues that came up in our first discussion. The first article in the unit gave some background on the issue and mentioned living wills. There are a lot of sites out there with information on this topic. A questioned was raised about how people would know if you had a document like this and I mentioned there was a group making a database. It is called the the U.S. Living Will Registry. When talking about how this issue seen in Japan the topic came up about organ donor and the definition of death that the Japanese Diet wrestled with when rewriting the organ transplant law. One other person and myself carry organ donor cards, but one person didn't approve of the idea. The question raised was what will prevent the creating of clones just for harvesting organs for transplanting. There were also questions about the religious issues related to living wills and transplants. I found this article about the Catholic Church, and this one for the Jewish faith. We will talk more about euthanasia next week after we listen to the tape. I just found this article
1C
The opinions that people had about what was ok for a 15-year-old to do were interesting. Peoples thinking was pretty similar. It was also interesting to hear people's first experiences. There was a lot of variety here. We will change partners and do the conversation again next class.
The homework is to answer the questions for both the A and B parts in the pair work.
1L
The opinions that people had about what was ok for a 15-year-old to do were interesting. Peoples' thinking was pretty similar. It was also interesting to hear people's first experiences. There was a lot of variety here. We will change partners and do the conversation again next class.
The homework is to answer the questions for both the A and B parts in the pair work.
4K
There were some interesting news items today. Miyako reported about a 61 year-old cross-country skier who had completed many ski marathons. Atsuko talked about Shimizu Town's plan to hire an extra elementary school teacher using town funds so that the class sizes don't have to be so large.
Class size is an important issue in American education and one that will be more in the news in the coming months. Many states, the main provider of money for education, are in very bad financial positions now and are having to make a lot of budgets cuts. Education is one of the areas. Some school districts are experimenting with a four-day school week. If that doesn't work the next step will be to cut teachers and increase class sizes.
Naoko had an article about a solar housing development planned for Sapporo. Solar is definitely the wave of the future. The cost of the panels is coming down every year and pretty soon they may be standard for houses. If you are interested in solar energy this site has a lot of interesting things.
The homework for next is the Looking at Language section and try to add three or four idoms that you know. Please add a comment 1:44:31 PM
