Kagie's Thought Dump

Classroom Management

Sanctions Given to Deviant Students

Sanctions are given to students who violate the rules. These are given according to the level of their violation. Different schools give different sanctions to deviant students.

Detention is done in many schools. Detention is when a student is asked to stay after class to be in the detention office. The length of detention is given according to the student’s violation. Some schools requires students who have violated the rules to do a community service. Some help in the offices, while others clean the school premises. When a deviant student have exceeded the limits, his parents would be called for a meeting with the teacher or with the school’s official in many schools.

Alienation by teachers is a common sanction of schools.

These sanctions are given in order to teach these students there lesson. Still, others don’t, but the school exerts much effort in order to mold these students to be better.

Deviant Students: How to Deal With Them?

Every teacher is facing the challenge of dealing with deviant students. Many first timers are having a hard time dealing with them. So here are some tips that will help them:

First, the teacher should be disciplined his/herself. The teacher is the role model of the students. Thus, he/she should be a good example to his/her students. Second, the teacher should have proper classroom management plans. He/she should also strictly implement rules for the students to follow. Third, in times of trouble, the teacher should stay calm and and be able to think faster on what to do. He/she should always be prepared for this kind of situations.

Creating an engaging classroom environment helps too.

These are only some of the many handy tips and tricks to be able to manage a class. We hope these help the teachers especially the first timers. Good luck and have fun teaching!

Deviant Student: Their Reasons

Deviant students have been one of the major problems in schools, particularly in classrooms. Some learn after being reprimanded, still others repeat their acts. The questions is, what are the reasons of these students? Why do they commit these kind of acts? What are the factors that cause them to do such acts?

One of the reasons might be because of lack of attention and guidance. Without much guidance from the parents, the child may become a deviant student. Also maybe, the child doesn’t get much attention at home, so he tries to get the attention of others, for example his classmates and teachers, by disobeying the rules. Another reason may also be because of the child’s desire to be intimidating and to be superior than others. This desire may lead the child to do acts of violence, harrassment, and bullying. Lastly, it can also be beause of adolescence. Children or teens in this stage are under the pressure of their body. This is when their feelings are at an intense stage.

Discipline and guidance can help mitigate bullying

The reasons mentioned above are only some of the many reasons why some students are deviant. In order to solve the problem with deviant students, it is important that we assess the situation first by knowing the root cause of the deviance of the students.

Classroom Discipline: What It Is

Classroom discipline has been a long-standing issue inside school campuses all over the world. Classroom discipline refers to the skills and effectiveness of an education on how to manage students’ behaviour and attitudes during class time. It also defined as the method of teaching others to follow rules or norms using verbal warnings or sanctions to correct the undesirable behaviours of the student in the classroom. With the proper classroom management in the classroom, it will promote and provide a friendly and safe environment for the students to learn effectively.

Multimedia Literacia : The Importance of Multimedia and Multimedia Literacy in Our Ever-changing World

According to Charles Darwin: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” The same thing could be said in today’s society, wherein the market demands more and more skills from the working class, pushing more and more people to adapt to the ever-changing needs of the market, in order to survive. One of the skills that are needed is the ability to use multimedia. But before I delve into the topic more, let me explain what multimedia is.

Multimedia, an amalgamation of the Latin word multus, meaning many, and the plural form of the word medium, which came from the Latin word medius, which means median, or middle, is the use of a variety of artistic or communicative media. Relating to the aforementioned statement, the word media is a plural form of the word medium, and we could see the correlation of the unity of the words multi and media, which may be transcribed as: “Multiple mediums being used to transmit information, art, and the like.”

Multimedia has existed since the first cave paintings in the Prehistoric Era, but the first most notable use of multimedia was when the printing press was invented in around 1439, by a man named Johannes Gutenberg. Ever since then, writing and reading became a widespread skill, in contrast to the days of yore, when only the religious, financial and aristocratic elites had access to reading and writing, and with almost everyone knowing how to read and write, people could absorb information through multiple sources.

administration articles bank black and white — The newspaper, an antiquated form of media, but is still in use until now.

After the invention of the printing press, books, newspapers, flyers, and the like were mass produced and people were using paper as their main source of information until the birth of the transistor and the Industrial Age ushered in a new age of media. It brought upon the telegram, which made exchanging information faster, the radio, which made information exchange via audio possible, the telephone, which made instant communication between individuals possible, and the television which brought upon the advent of audiovisual media. Technological advances only benefited multimedia, with the advent of the colored television, in contrast to the monochrome televisions, the personal computer, and the Internet.

laptop technology ipad tablet — Two examples of multimedia devices.

With all of these in mind, you’re probably asking yourself right now: “Why the heck should I listen to this kid and his ramblings?” Good question. Multimedia and multimedia literacy is, believe it or not, very important in today’s society, and I’ll provide two reasons why.

Firstly, you can use it to spread your agenda. Imagine the power that every one of us is wielding. With one single push of a button, we could send our message, our thoughts, our opinions, our rants, our joys, our sadnesses, our everything out into the world for everyone to see. We could use this to “toot our own horn” and get our message across a wide audience. We could use this to broadcast a message, or advertise a certain product, or show your skills to the world, or shed light upon a certain wrongdoing and bring justice upon it.

Secondly, you can use it to inform yourselves. Behind the screen of your computer or smartphone is a plethora of information, news, articles, and the like, which you can use to make opinions, or to make better decisions, or to support your beliefs and opinions with other information to back up aformentioned opinions, et cetera.

In conclusion, multimedia is beneficial, it has always been, and will always be, especially in our modern, connected society, and as such, we must keep up with the trend of multimedia and become multimedia literate.

Filipino and Its Future

Whenever I pass by people on the streets, I hear the passersby talk not in Filipino, not Cebuano and not English, but an amalgam of those three. Now, depending on what part of the Philippines we’re talking about, the locals of the varied regions have their own distinct dialect, but, what unifies them is their use of Taglish, or a hybrid of Tagalog (another word for Filipino) and English, and sometimes mixing their own dialect in the mix. What does this mean for the future of the Filipino language? From what I can gather, I hypothesize that there are two possible outcomes.

The first probable outcome is that Filipino gets wiped off of daily use or business and that English would be the main language of the Philippines, only being used in historical or formal records. Because of a combination of Philippine media promoting foreign-made forms of entertainment such as K-Pop, K-Drama, Western (mostly American) music, and such, to a majority of the population, as well as colonial mentality, Filipinos choose English more and more than their country’s own first language, in order not to be left out from their favorite bands or shows. This also means that the Filipinos will use English more in their daily speech, and will gradually forget more and more Filipino words and parts of speech until, in due time, too much of the language is forgotten, and they will then transition to speaking English exclusively.

The second probable outcome is that English and Filipino merges and forms a Creole language. I believe that this, between these two outcomes, is the more likely one happening, because the English borrowing hasn’t been controlled by one person, rather it is more of a product of colonial mentality. The Creole-ification will happen slowly, but surely over a course of decades, and it will make Taglish a potentially legitimate language.

The purest form of the Philippine language is slowly being forgotten, in favor of English, Korean, Japanese, and other languages, due to, once again, colonial mentality. The Filipino people must do something about it, or else the children of their children’s children will not know about this language.

Why Kanji is Essential to Japanese Writing

Kanji. When I first started learning Japanese, I did my very best to stay away from that writing system. “It’s too much of a hassle, and I can rely on Hiragana and Katakana anyway, so why bother studying Kanji when I can just use the other two writing systems?”, I thought to myself. But now, I love Kanji. So much so that I write in Man’yōgana at times just to get a feel of how Nara Period scholars wrote their poems. Why and how did this happen? I fell in love with it because it was fun to play around with its styles of writing and readings. But what about practicality? Is it really needed in our modern world? I’ll explain to you why Kanji is essential to writing Japanese, whether Old Japanese or Modern Japanese.

Firstly, Kanji acts as a separator between Hiragana and Katakana. If you’ve read any Japanese text, whether a newspaper article or a chapter of a light novel, you would notice that there are little to no blank spaces, and if you transcribe it into the writing systems from the aforementioned statement, it makes it less readable.

For example:

きょうはわたしのともだちのいえにいきました。

今日は私の友達の家に行きました。

These both mean “Today, I went to my friend’s house”, but in terms of readability, the second statement seems easier to read. This is because Kanji acts as visual cues in a statement. Each Kanji character represents an idea, so the second statement may be skimmed over as:

今日は私の友達の家に行きました。

Which makes reading faster since Kanji can give the context without Hiragana. Since Hiragana is mostly used for grammatical particles, it blends in with the other Hiragana words and makes it harder to read.

Secondly, Kanji has been deeply ingrained in the Japanese language and in Japanese society that removing it completely will slow Japanese society down. For the most part in Japanese history, they have depended on Kanji to spread information, even before Hiragana and Katakana’s creation. Japanese people have made ways to integrate Chinese characters into the language like the On-Yomi/Kun-Yomi (音読み・訓読み) system and making variations of it called Shinjitai (新字体) and local, regional variatons called Ryakuji (略字). If they stop using this writing system that has been finely tuned for Japanese writing, then it would be like throwing a piece of Japanese culture away and leaving it to rot into obscurity.

Lastly, Kanji can be used for artistic purposes. I consider this to be a point in my arguments defending Kanji because I see it as a double-purpose writing system. On one hand it can be used for very formal and historical purposes, such as historical documents dating back to the Edo Period to the Japanese Constitution and Kanji may be used for making new formal words, but Katakana is most likely used in today’s standards, and on the other hand, it can be used artistically, like making poems entirely in Kanji or manga or anime using antiquated Kanji to add a historic flair or a sense of sobriety to the characters, their dialogue, or the setting. Many writing systems do not have this kind of effect because of it’s homogeneity to it’s writing system, but in Japanese, there are 3 systems to work with, each with it’s own characteristics or tones.

For example, Hiragana can be used for casual, friendly or even childish dialogue, indicating the speaker’s casual nature. Katakana can be used for foreign words or for concepts that the speaker is foreign to. Kanji, however, can be used in two ways: They can be used as regular Kanji with words already made up of Kanji, indicating a serious and mature tone to the speaker, or it can be used as components of a Jukujikun (熟字訓), for a touch of historic flair to a word, or it can be used phonetically and semantically, like kurabu which can be spelt in either Katakana (クラブ) or in Kanji(倶楽部), which, character by character, means both, fun, and department respectively. There are more examples of this but this mostly applies to old words like the old word for Japanese Christianity (キリシタン – 吉利支丹 or, during the Sakoku Period, when foreign concepts were shunned, 鬼利死丹) or the word for raincoat (合羽). These made the tone of the speaker serious, sober and it made the speaker look antiquated, perfect for manga or anime that have a setting in Old Japan.

A common counterargument for Kanji is that Japanese writing can be given blank spaces in between words and particles so that it would be readable even without Kanji acting as a separator. While that may be a good substitute, a problem arises from it. Without Kanji, it may be difficult to distinguish words that sound the same, and this problem can be countered again with words fitting in context, but in high risk scenarios, wouldn’t it be better if the words were more specific? Wouldn’t it be better if there was a difference between たいちょう(隊長) from たいちょう(退庁)?

In conclusion, Kanji is very much essential to Japanese literature and Japanese culture as a whole because it was finely tuned along the course of many centuries to fit the Japanese language and writing system, and to give more artistic expression to Japanese literature.

What Language Should You Learn?

For me, learning a second (Fourth for me since I had to learn English, Filipino, and Japanese all at the same time.) language is quite a tough journey, but it’s so rewarding to know that you know a different language and that you can speak to other people casually with it, with the exception of Latin. You can’t really have a chat with anyone in Latin except college students who’re learning it or people from the Roman Empire. Learning a different is also useful if you’re looking for a job, under certain circumstances.

With these in mind, what language should you learn? Spanish? French? Mandarin? Well, it depends on what you already know.

If you, the reader, can understand English, which you obviously can since you can read this blog, then try learning French, Afrikaans, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish.

Why learn these languages? Well, because they closely resemble English in terms of vocabulary and grammar. According to the Foreign Service Institute (FSI), these languages fall under Category I, the easiest language to learn if English is your first language.

Some examples on how English is similar some to these languages in terms of their vocabulary:

French – Reservoir : English – Reservoir

Italian – Apartment from appartamento which was derived from French

Portuguese – Baroque from barroco

Well what if English isn’t your first language? Maybe Japanese is your first language? If so, then you’re better off learning Korean or Chinese. Korean because its grammar is very similar to Japanese, both following the Subject – Object – Verb structure. Chinese because its vocabulary is very similar to Japanese and Japanese has a writing system called Kanji, Chinese characters in Japanese text.

Maybe Filipino is your first language? If that’s the case, then learn Spanish. Spanish is very, very similar to Filipino

Spanish – Retrato : Filipino – Litrato

Spanish – Viyaje : Filipino – Biyahe

With these in mind, I hope that your journey on learning a language is a fun, memorable and a not-so-hard (To be fair, it’ll probably hard) experience! Bonne journée!