2009第２回勉強会
１月１２日、Wさん宅でJを講師に, 勉強会を持ちました。本日付のＪａｐａｎ Ｔｉｍｅｓから、Obama’s plan to fix broken AmericaとOpinionの紙面のEnglish taught in Englishの２本を読みました。参加者はＷとＴの２名。
■ English taught in English
New teaching guidelines released by the education ministry call for high school English to be taught primarily in English from 2013. This conversion from traditional methods to a more active and communicative approach is decades behind the rest of the world. As China, Vietnam and South Korea have moved ahead, Japan’s English education policies have languished. It may be a case of too little too late. Japan’s position in the future internationalized world will be determined by the nation’s English ability.
The is not to say that many teachers have not already moved ahead on their own. Many have already instituted what the government is just now starting to recommend. Excellent–quality English programs exist here and there and , generally, English-teaching methods have improved. However, ministry guidelines for increasing conversation, upping vocabulary levels and offering more active learning, amiable as they are, must be put into practice broadly and completely in more classrooms. English education in Japan has been hobbled by an overemphasis on grammar study, pressure to pass entrance exams and over-reliance on translation. As a result, years and years of English study typically produce more anxiety than communicative ability. Changing the tradition of explaining everything in Japanese by creating more active English-based approaches will not happen overnight.
If the ministry’s decision-makers are serious, they will commit to training teachers, finding more active textbooks, financing extra materials and study centers, and changing the overall English study curriculum.
Mostly, though, what needs to be changed is attitude. The resistance to teaching in English may stem from some teachers’ embarrassment over their own ability. Yet, that is just the attitude that must be changed in students’ minds. The burden of shitting to a more active approach will inevitably fall on English teachers. Yet, many teachers have already undertaken that shift with or without government support. Their individual efforts should be applauded and their innovations studied and exchanged.
■Obama’s plan to fix broken America
Frugality is in and luxury is a shameful word as America grapples with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Paul Harris
New York
THE OBSERVER
When writer Hector Tobar returned to America last year after seven years living in Latin America, he came back to a profoundly changed land. He had left a United States riding an economic boom. House prices were soaring, suburbs were gobbling up farmland and good times were rolling on Wall Street.
Now all that has gone. Tobar, an acclaimed author and essayist, was stunned to find America in the grip of an economic turmoil that was changing his native country before his eyes, plunging it into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. “There is a sense of mourning and confusion and real feeling of living in the last days of empire,” Tobar said.
This new America is what President-elect Barack Obama has inherited. It is in many ways a broken country. When Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 watched by millions of Americans, his burden will be heavy in the extreme. The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America’s first African-American president will almost be a historical footnote.
The numbers describe the extent of the catastrophe best. Seven trillion dollars has been wiped off a stock market that has dropped 33 percent, its biggest fall since 1931. Two million jobs have disappeared, wages are frozen and millions have lost their homes. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to keep the economy afloat. Banks have been partly nationalized and the car industry of Detroit—once the symbol of the all-American lifestyle—is on life support and may not see the end of 2009.
These terrible facts are accompanied by a profound cultural shit. The era of individualistic consumption that swept aside the Great Society of the 1960s has come to an end. For three decades, American culture and life has celebrated the glories of unabashed capitalism and the ideals of the rich. No longer.
From Hollywood movies to celebrity culture to television, frugalism is taking hold. Consumers are cutting back. Luxury brands are falling by the wayside. Even the excesses of the sporting world, from the Super Bowl to Nascar, are being curbed. A national belt-tightening is having an impact on everything from restaurants to books to a collapse in the demand for cosmetic surgery. The recession is reshaping the cultural landscape in which ordinary people live their lives. As it prepares to inaugurate a new president, America is also trying to forge a fresh identity in a world unimaginably different from the one inherited by U.S. President George W. Bush only eight years ago.
Mike Levine, founder of leading Los Angeles public relations firm Levine Communications, believes the cultural change is even hitting the ethereal world of the uber-rich celebrities who inhabit L-La land. Gone are the days of bling and Beluga caviar, of quaffing Krug in high-end clubs and driving around Hollywood in a Hummer. “The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling ‘Luxury Shame,’” he dais. “In the extraordinary recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one’s luxurious lifestyle.”
Paris Hilton—not usually a name associated with the economic hard times—has already run afoul of the new cultural mood. On a trip to Australia for New Year’s Eve, a shopping splurge on luxury items earned her a barrage of negative headlines for her insensitivity.
On the TV show “Entrourage,” which normally celebrates its male cast’s acquisition of brand-name products, the rapper Bow Wow recently bought a Prius.
“I caution even the most successful celebrities to go bling-less,” Levine said. Perhaps not coincidentally, several forthcoming Hollywood movies, such as Clive Owen’s “The International,” have as their mail villains banks or financiers. In a recent trailer for the film, Owen’s character is seen preparing to execute a rogue banker at gunpoint—no doubt a satisfying moment for many multiplex audiences.
Many experts see the cultural rejection of luxury and excess as a watershed moment that for many Americans seemed to descend out of a clear blue sky. “This is about a rethinking of the fundamentals that comes about because society is suddenly under a large amount of stress, “ said Mikes Orvell, a professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
It certainly seems a cultural milestone every bit as significant as the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ushered in an era of conservatism, deregulation, fee markets and muscular nationalism. The Reagan revolution ended the progressive era of residents such as Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. It celebrated Wall Street and making money. It was the era of Gordon Gekko and Rambo.
The presidency of Bill Clinton did little to change course, and it continued unabated into the Bush years as hedge funds became the new Masters of the Universe and America became the world’s only superpower. In both high finance and global politics, it seemed that the wealthy and powerful had written their own rule book.
But, culturally at least, that book is being redrawn in the face of the recession and the election of a president whose mantra was based on rejecting conflict and forging a consensus. Historians see echoes of the 1930s when the Great Depression inspired art and new forms of literature. Chief among them were works that focused on ordinary people’s troubles, such as John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which examined poverty in the South.
Overll believes the coming recession will see a similar flowering of art and literature, reflecting the times. He is predicting a greater focus on community and an end to individualism as the dominant ideal.
“Stress brings new ways of thinking. This will have a profound effect on culture fro people at the bottom to people at the very top, like Obama, “ he said.
Obama is likely both to lead and to encapsulate these changes. Dealing with the economy is the No. 1 topic in America, greater than Iraq, greater than the “war on terror.” Obama’s actions there are the yardstick by which he will be judged. His success or failure on the economy is how he will be rated.
But the recessions is already reshaping people’s lives in ways trivial and profound. Sales of red meat are falling, while cheaper foodstuffs, such as pasta, are going up. Car sales have collapsed by up to 30 percent, perhaps meaning that the greatest American icon of the 20th century is struggling.
Frugal is the new cool putting an end to hyper-consumption. The orgy of credit card abuse is over. The Web site Debt Proof Living launched a daily e-mail tip sheet last summer and now has 100,000 subscribers. Oprah Winfrey forsook her annual holiday list of expensive gift suggestions in favor of more modest favorite things,” Salons and spas are seeing customers desert them as women pamper themselves on the cheap at home.
The demand for cosmetic surgery has collapsed with some clinics reporting a fall in patients of 30 to 40 percent. What was once seen as a standard luxury for the wealthy elite—inspiring the TV series “Nip/Tuck”—is now regarded as grotesque excess alongside owning a polluting big car. “It’s the new SUV,” declared Victoria Pitts-Tailor, author of “Surgery Junkies.”
Tobar sees the changes in his own life. While living in Latin America he would return to the U.S. with his young son. “He would always say, ‘Why are the cookies so big here?’ And he was right. Everything was bigger, including the people.”
That sort of excess, on everything from cookies to cars, is now on the way out. The era of supersizing is over. There has been a cultural humbling that makes consumption and sheer size more unacceptable than at any time in the past three decades.
The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has tapped into the zeitgeist better than most. In a recent column that became a huge hit across the blogosphere and talking point on cable news, he took America to task. “I’ve got a New Year’s resolution and a new slogan for the country,” he wrote before going on to eviscerate the culture of debt-spending, blind consumption and rampant consumerism that, he said, had created everything from the Iraq war to the housing crisis. Herbert’s new slogan was simple enough: “Stop Being Stupid.”
Hollywood is rightly often seen as the psyche of the American public. So perhaps it is no wonder that the villain of 2008 was Heath Ledger’s chilling portrayal of The Joker. Transcending the comic books genre, Ledger created a villain who sowed anarchy and chaotic destruction with little regard to motivation or the consequences for the innocent. For many Americans, who have seen their houses repossessed, their pension funds wiped out and millions of jobs vanish, that is a pretty accurate reflection of what 2008 felt like. And that sort of destruction produces a cultural cost as well as cultural shift.
Theaters from Broadway to Hollywood are closing shows as crowds stay ways. Attendance at the cinema box office is falling, hitting the production of new movies and putting actors and support workers out of jobs. Aft galleries are closing, suction houses are laying off workers. The art market is going into a recession as deep as the rest of the economy.
The great U.S. sports are being hit hard in a major blow to national pride. The National Football League has laid off 10 percent its staff. Major League Baseball has followed suit. Nascar, whose roaring car fans and Nascar dads became a demographic, has hiring freeze.
And while luxury may fall out of fashion, it is not as if quality is replacing it. The stores that are booming in these grim times are the huge big-box outlets of Qal-Mart and Target. Anyone expecting the recession to drive Americans back into the arms of quaint family-owned shops an Main Street is likely to get an ugly wakeup call. Low-paying Wal-Mart, stuffed with cheap goods from China and with a famously union-busting management, is booming. So busy were the crowds at one recent sales day at a Long Island Wal-Mart that one employee was crushed to death.
Neither will the recession and the collapse of the car industry immediately bring about a greener, more public transport-friendly America. Faced with hard times, Americans are not going out to buy electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They are too expensive. Instead, they are patching up and mending their old gas guzzlers and keeping them on the road longer. America ‘s sense of rugged individualism and distrust of government solutions will remain, for good or for ill. In this sense Obama’s new America will be just like the old one.
“It is too deeply ingrained, that sense of the individual. It was right there at the founding of the republic,” said Tobar.
The hard times are also bringing real pain to the most vulnerable. In Los Angeles, calls to suicide hotlines are up 60 percent. Like the first wave of a pandemic, the crisis is picking off the weak first. It is hitting the young, who find they cannot find jobs in a marketplace where employers are not hiring and the old are refusing to retire because of their wrecked pensions It is destroying the lives of 10 million or more illegal immigrants, who are the first to lose their jobs in a weakened economy.
The truth is that rippling impact of the broken America that Obama is inheriting has spread out across the world, just as the influence of Reagan’s policies once did. America now is more frugal, less consumerist and more community-minded. But it is also poorer, angry and afraid.
Obama’ job is to address those fears. America is a country desperately looking for a new president who can provide the answers to its problems. But it will be no easy task. Obama is inheriting a different country than his predecessor did.
■ English taught in English
New teaching guidelines released by the education ministry call for high school English to be taught primarily in English from 2013. This conversion from traditional methods to a more active and communicative approach is decades behind the rest of the world. As China, Vietnam and South Korea have moved ahead, Japan’s English education policies have languished. It may be a case of too little too late. Japan’s position in the future internationalized world will be determined by the nation’s English ability.
The is not to say that many teachers have not already moved ahead on their own. Many have already instituted what the government is just now starting to recommend. Excellent–quality English programs exist here and there and , generally, English-teaching methods have improved. However, ministry guidelines for increasing conversation, upping vocabulary levels and offering more active learning, amiable as they are, must be put into practice broadly and completely in more classrooms. English education in Japan has been hobbled by an overemphasis on grammar study, pressure to pass entrance exams and over-reliance on translation. As a result, years and years of English study typically produce more anxiety than communicative ability. Changing the tradition of explaining everything in Japanese by creating more active English-based approaches will not happen overnight.
If the ministry’s decision-makers are serious, they will commit to training teachers, finding more active textbooks, financing extra materials and study centers, and changing the overall English study curriculum.
Mostly, though, what needs to be changed is attitude. The resistance to teaching in English may stem from some teachers’ embarrassment over their own ability. Yet, that is just the attitude that must be changed in students’ minds. The burden of shitting to a more active approach will inevitably fall on English teachers. Yet, many teachers have already undertaken that shift with or without government support. Their individual efforts should be applauded and their innovations studied and exchanged.
■Obama’s plan to fix broken America
Frugality is in and luxury is a shameful word as America grapples with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Paul Harris
New York
THE OBSERVER
When writer Hector Tobar returned to America last year after seven years living in Latin America, he came back to a profoundly changed land. He had left a United States riding an economic boom. House prices were soaring, suburbs were gobbling up farmland and good times were rolling on Wall Street.
Now all that has gone. Tobar, an acclaimed author and essayist, was stunned to find America in the grip of an economic turmoil that was changing his native country before his eyes, plunging it into the worst crisis since the Great Depression. “There is a sense of mourning and confusion and real feeling of living in the last days of empire,” Tobar said.
This new America is what President-elect Barack Obama has inherited. It is in many ways a broken country. When Obama takes the oath of office on Jan. 20 watched by millions of Americans, his burden will be heavy in the extreme. The scale of the disaster is so large that Obama being America’s first African-American president will almost be a historical footnote.
The numbers describe the extent of the catastrophe best. Seven trillion dollars has been wiped off a stock market that has dropped 33 percent, its biggest fall since 1931. Two million jobs have disappeared, wages are frozen and millions have lost their homes. The Federal Reserve is printing billions of dollars to keep the economy afloat. Banks have been partly nationalized and the car industry of Detroit—once the symbol of the all-American lifestyle—is on life support and may not see the end of 2009.
These terrible facts are accompanied by a profound cultural shit. The era of individualistic consumption that swept aside the Great Society of the 1960s has come to an end. For three decades, American culture and life has celebrated the glories of unabashed capitalism and the ideals of the rich. No longer.
From Hollywood movies to celebrity culture to television, frugalism is taking hold. Consumers are cutting back. Luxury brands are falling by the wayside. Even the excesses of the sporting world, from the Super Bowl to Nascar, are being curbed. A national belt-tightening is having an impact on everything from restaurants to books to a collapse in the demand for cosmetic surgery. The recession is reshaping the cultural landscape in which ordinary people live their lives. As it prepares to inaugurate a new president, America is also trying to forge a fresh identity in a world unimaginably different from the one inherited by U.S. President George W. Bush only eight years ago.
Mike Levine, founder of leading Los Angeles public relations firm Levine Communications, believes the cultural change is even hitting the ethereal world of the uber-rich celebrities who inhabit L-La land. Gone are the days of bling and Beluga caviar, of quaffing Krug in high-end clubs and driving around Hollywood in a Hummer. “The new year will be marked by a cultural trend I am calling ‘Luxury Shame,’” he dais. “In the extraordinary recessionary times, it seems vulgar to flaunt one’s luxurious lifestyle.”
Paris Hilton—not usually a name associated with the economic hard times—has already run afoul of the new cultural mood. On a trip to Australia for New Year’s Eve, a shopping splurge on luxury items earned her a barrage of negative headlines for her insensitivity.
On the TV show “Entrourage,” which normally celebrates its male cast’s acquisition of brand-name products, the rapper Bow Wow recently bought a Prius.
“I caution even the most successful celebrities to go bling-less,” Levine said. Perhaps not coincidentally, several forthcoming Hollywood movies, such as Clive Owen’s “The International,” have as their mail villains banks or financiers. In a recent trailer for the film, Owen’s character is seen preparing to execute a rogue banker at gunpoint—no doubt a satisfying moment for many multiplex audiences.
Many experts see the cultural rejection of luxury and excess as a watershed moment that for many Americans seemed to descend out of a clear blue sky. “This is about a rethinking of the fundamentals that comes about because society is suddenly under a large amount of stress, “ said Mikes Orvell, a professor of American studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.
It certainly seems a cultural milestone every bit as significant as the election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980, which ushered in an era of conservatism, deregulation, fee markets and muscular nationalism. The Reagan revolution ended the progressive era of residents such as Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy. It celebrated Wall Street and making money. It was the era of Gordon Gekko and Rambo.
The presidency of Bill Clinton did little to change course, and it continued unabated into the Bush years as hedge funds became the new Masters of the Universe and America became the world’s only superpower. In both high finance and global politics, it seemed that the wealthy and powerful had written their own rule book.
But, culturally at least, that book is being redrawn in the face of the recession and the election of a president whose mantra was based on rejecting conflict and forging a consensus. Historians see echoes of the 1930s when the Great Depression inspired art and new forms of literature. Chief among them were works that focused on ordinary people’s troubles, such as John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” and James Agee’s “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which examined poverty in the South.
Overll believes the coming recession will see a similar flowering of art and literature, reflecting the times. He is predicting a greater focus on community and an end to individualism as the dominant ideal.
“Stress brings new ways of thinking. This will have a profound effect on culture fro people at the bottom to people at the very top, like Obama, “ he said.
Obama is likely both to lead and to encapsulate these changes. Dealing with the economy is the No. 1 topic in America, greater than Iraq, greater than the “war on terror.” Obama’s actions there are the yardstick by which he will be judged. His success or failure on the economy is how he will be rated.
But the recessions is already reshaping people’s lives in ways trivial and profound. Sales of red meat are falling, while cheaper foodstuffs, such as pasta, are going up. Car sales have collapsed by up to 30 percent, perhaps meaning that the greatest American icon of the 20th century is struggling.
Frugal is the new cool putting an end to hyper-consumption. The orgy of credit card abuse is over. The Web site Debt Proof Living launched a daily e-mail tip sheet last summer and now has 100,000 subscribers. Oprah Winfrey forsook her annual holiday list of expensive gift suggestions in favor of more modest favorite things,” Salons and spas are seeing customers desert them as women pamper themselves on the cheap at home.
The demand for cosmetic surgery has collapsed with some clinics reporting a fall in patients of 30 to 40 percent. What was once seen as a standard luxury for the wealthy elite—inspiring the TV series “Nip/Tuck”—is now regarded as grotesque excess alongside owning a polluting big car. “It’s the new SUV,” declared Victoria Pitts-Tailor, author of “Surgery Junkies.”
Tobar sees the changes in his own life. While living in Latin America he would return to the U.S. with his young son. “He would always say, ‘Why are the cookies so big here?’ And he was right. Everything was bigger, including the people.”
That sort of excess, on everything from cookies to cars, is now on the way out. The era of supersizing is over. There has been a cultural humbling that makes consumption and sheer size more unacceptable than at any time in the past three decades.
The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has tapped into the zeitgeist better than most. In a recent column that became a huge hit across the blogosphere and talking point on cable news, he took America to task. “I’ve got a New Year’s resolution and a new slogan for the country,” he wrote before going on to eviscerate the culture of debt-spending, blind consumption and rampant consumerism that, he said, had created everything from the Iraq war to the housing crisis. Herbert’s new slogan was simple enough: “Stop Being Stupid.”
Hollywood is rightly often seen as the psyche of the American public. So perhaps it is no wonder that the villain of 2008 was Heath Ledger’s chilling portrayal of The Joker. Transcending the comic books genre, Ledger created a villain who sowed anarchy and chaotic destruction with little regard to motivation or the consequences for the innocent. For many Americans, who have seen their houses repossessed, their pension funds wiped out and millions of jobs vanish, that is a pretty accurate reflection of what 2008 felt like. And that sort of destruction produces a cultural cost as well as cultural shift.
Theaters from Broadway to Hollywood are closing shows as crowds stay ways. Attendance at the cinema box office is falling, hitting the production of new movies and putting actors and support workers out of jobs. Aft galleries are closing, suction houses are laying off workers. The art market is going into a recession as deep as the rest of the economy.
The great U.S. sports are being hit hard in a major blow to national pride. The National Football League has laid off 10 percent its staff. Major League Baseball has followed suit. Nascar, whose roaring car fans and Nascar dads became a demographic, has hiring freeze.
And while luxury may fall out of fashion, it is not as if quality is replacing it. The stores that are booming in these grim times are the huge big-box outlets of Qal-Mart and Target. Anyone expecting the recession to drive Americans back into the arms of quaint family-owned shops an Main Street is likely to get an ugly wakeup call. Low-paying Wal-Mart, stuffed with cheap goods from China and with a famously union-busting management, is booming. So busy were the crowds at one recent sales day at a Long Island Wal-Mart that one employee was crushed to death.
Neither will the recession and the collapse of the car industry immediately bring about a greener, more public transport-friendly America. Faced with hard times, Americans are not going out to buy electric cars or hybrid vehicles. They are too expensive. Instead, they are patching up and mending their old gas guzzlers and keeping them on the road longer. America ‘s sense of rugged individualism and distrust of government solutions will remain, for good or for ill. In this sense Obama’s new America will be just like the old one.
“It is too deeply ingrained, that sense of the individual. It was right there at the founding of the republic,” said Tobar.
The hard times are also bringing real pain to the most vulnerable. In Los Angeles, calls to suicide hotlines are up 60 percent. Like the first wave of a pandemic, the crisis is picking off the weak first. It is hitting the young, who find they cannot find jobs in a marketplace where employers are not hiring and the old are refusing to retire because of their wrecked pensions It is destroying the lives of 10 million or more illegal immigrants, who are the first to lose their jobs in a weakened economy.
The truth is that rippling impact of the broken America that Obama is inheriting has spread out across the world, just as the influence of Reagan’s policies once did. America now is more frugal, less consumerist and more community-minded. But it is also poorer, angry and afraid.
Obama’ job is to address those fears. America is a country desperately looking for a new president who can provide the answers to its problems. But it will be no easy task. Obama is inheriting a different country than his predecessor did.
2009初勉強会
今年最初の勉強会を開きました。（講師：Ｇ 会場：Ｗ宅、参加Ｗ,Ｔ,Ｓ）
冬休み中、ハワイに帰国していたＧ先生からお菓子とカレンダーを頂きました。
ありがとうございます。
以下、勉強会で学んだ新しい単語です。
【New Words】（雑談中）
■chaperon [名] シャペロン 《昔, 社交界などで若女性に付き添った, 多くは年配の婦人》.
-[動][他]〈若い女性に〉付き添う.-[自]シャペロン役をやる.【古期フランス語｢フ−ド, 帽子｣の意】
生徒の研修付き添いでついていく役という会話で出てきた言葉です。
フランス語語源ついでに、もう一つの職業
■chauf･feur-[名][Ｃ] (自家用車の)おかかえ運転手
【Today's Topis】
Ｊapan Timesの記事を読みました。
headlineは Teacherｓ beset by unruly parents（手に負えない親たちに悩まされる教師たち）です。
いわゆるモンスターピアレントに脅かされる教師受難の話。この問題が解決どころかモンスターは益々増殖するのでは・・・という怖い結び。
■incessant -[形]絶え間ない, 間断のない, ひっきりなしの :〜 chatter ひっきりなしのおしゃべり.
■rant -[動][自]1◆〔人に〕〔…のことで〕わめく, どなり立てる, 激しくしかる 〈on〉〔at〕 〔about〕
:〜 and rave わめき散らす
-[名][Ｕ] 大言壮語; わめき声.
（本文中には名詞で登場）
Many teachers are perplexed by the repetitive rabt and endless phonecallfrom clamers
多くの教師がひっきりなしのヒステリックな苦情や止むことの無い電話抗議に悩まされています。
■bluff-[動][他]1◆〈人を〉はったり[こけおどし]でだます.2a◆〈人を〉脅して[だまして]〔…を〕させる 〔into〕:They 〜ed him into giving up. 彼を脅してあきらめさせた.b◆〈人を〉脅して[だまして]〔…を〕やめさせる 〔out of〕:〜 a person out of going 人を脅して行かせなくする.3◆[〜 one's way で] 〔…から〕うまくだまして切り抜ける 〔out of〕:〜 one's way out of trouble うまくだまして災難を切り抜ける.
-[自]はったりをかける, からいばりする.
（本文中） Claimers will typically threaten to sue the school or take the issue to the media, or maybe hint that they know politicians. Most of the time they are just bluffing
クレイマ―は、典型的に学校を訴えるだの、マスコミを通報するなどと脅します。あるいは政治家を知ってるぞとほのめかしたりしますが、たいていははったりなのです。
■cow･er -[動][自](寒さ･恐怖などで)ちぢこまる; すくむ.
(本文中)
Teachers are cowering at the feet of such parents.
教師はそのような親に翻弄され、おびえています。
冬休み中、ハワイに帰国していたＧ先生からお菓子とカレンダーを頂きました。
ありがとうございます。
以下、勉強会で学んだ新しい単語です。
【New Words】（雑談中）
■chaperon [名] シャペロン 《昔, 社交界などで若女性に付き添った, 多くは年配の婦人》.
-[動][他]〈若い女性に〉付き添う.-[自]シャペロン役をやる.【古期フランス語｢フ−ド, 帽子｣の意】
生徒の研修付き添いでついていく役という会話で出てきた言葉です。
フランス語語源ついでに、もう一つの職業
■chauf･feur-[名][Ｃ] (自家用車の)おかかえ運転手
【Today's Topis】
Ｊapan Timesの記事を読みました。
headlineは Teacherｓ beset by unruly parents（手に負えない親たちに悩まされる教師たち）です。
いわゆるモンスターピアレントに脅かされる教師受難の話。この問題が解決どころかモンスターは益々増殖するのでは・・・という怖い結び。
■incessant -[形]絶え間ない, 間断のない, ひっきりなしの :〜 chatter ひっきりなしのおしゃべり.
■rant -[動][自]1◆〔人に〕〔…のことで〕わめく, どなり立てる, 激しくしかる 〈on〉〔at〕 〔about〕
:〜 and rave わめき散らす
-[名][Ｕ] 大言壮語; わめき声.
（本文中には名詞で登場）
Many teachers are perplexed by the repetitive rabt and endless phonecallfrom clamers
多くの教師がひっきりなしのヒステリックな苦情や止むことの無い電話抗議に悩まされています。
■bluff-[動][他]1◆〈人を〉はったり[こけおどし]でだます.2a◆〈人を〉脅して[だまして]〔…を〕させる 〔into〕:They 〜ed him into giving up. 彼を脅してあきらめさせた.b◆〈人を〉脅して[だまして]〔…を〕やめさせる 〔out of〕:〜 a person out of going 人を脅して行かせなくする.3◆[〜 one's way で] 〔…から〕うまくだまして切り抜ける 〔out of〕:〜 one's way out of trouble うまくだまして災難を切り抜ける.
-[自]はったりをかける, からいばりする.
（本文中） Claimers will typically threaten to sue the school or take the issue to the media, or maybe hint that they know politicians. Most of the time they are just bluffing
クレイマ―は、典型的に学校を訴えるだの、マスコミを通報するなどと脅します。あるいは政治家を知ってるぞとほのめかしたりしますが、たいていははったりなのです。
■cow･er -[動][自](寒さ･恐怖などで)ちぢこまる; すくむ.
(本文中)
Teachers are cowering at the feet of such parents.
教師はそのような親に翻弄され、おびえています。
ブルックさんを訪問
１２月２８日、暮れの忙しい時期での一日ではあったが、都合がついたメンバー３人（トトさん、ウィスタリアさん、ホワイト）でブルックさんを訪問。ブルックさんはロビーで待っていてくれて、お部屋では素敵なお茶セットでのサービスも受けた。数ヶ月ぶりにお会いしたが、元気そうで、そこでの生活もなかなか快適そうで安心した。
このブログにもおいおい、文を寄せてくださるそうで大いに楽しみである。
ブルックさん、どうぞ、よろしく。
このブログにもおいおい、文を寄せてくださるそうで大いに楽しみである。
ブルックさん、どうぞ、よろしく。
ＰＯＥＴＥＳＳ英会話サロンとは
ＰＯＥＴＥＳＳの中心は英語の勉強会です。もう２０年以上も続いているのです。
英会話サロンといった方がいいかもしれません。初めはバードさん宅が会場でした。バードさんは最初からの中心メンバー。あとのメンバーは途中から参入しました。
そして、その後 ついこの間までブルックさん宅をお借りしていました。
その緑一点のブルックさんも他県の娘さん近くへ引っ越されて
今はウィスタリアさん宅が主な会場になっています。
メンバーは基本的には主婦でした。おもしろいことに義母と同居という人が多いのです。
主婦でした･･･と過去形なのは子どもの成長と共に皆、英語に関わる仕事に復帰したり、仕事を始めたりしていきましたから。
歴代ネイティブの先生は今まで何人に教えてもらったのか分からないくらい沢山います。
（帰国したり、引っ越していったり、他の仕事で時間が合っわなくなったり）
アメリカ人、カナダ人、オーストラリア人、ＮＺ人、イギリス人、老若男女、皆それぞれ個性があって
皆それぞれ良い人（いい子）でした。
英会話サロンといった方がいいかもしれません。初めはバードさん宅が会場でした。バードさんは最初からの中心メンバー。あとのメンバーは途中から参入しました。
そして、その後 ついこの間までブルックさん宅をお借りしていました。
その緑一点のブルックさんも他県の娘さん近くへ引っ越されて
今はウィスタリアさん宅が主な会場になっています。
メンバーは基本的には主婦でした。おもしろいことに義母と同居という人が多いのです。
主婦でした･･･と過去形なのは子どもの成長と共に皆、英語に関わる仕事に復帰したり、仕事を始めたりしていきましたから。
歴代ネイティブの先生は今まで何人に教えてもらったのか分からないくらい沢山います。
（帰国したり、引っ越していったり、他の仕事で時間が合っわなくなったり）
アメリカ人、カナダ人、オーストラリア人、ＮＺ人、イギリス人、老若男女、皆それぞれ個性があって
皆それぞれ良い人（いい子）でした。
ブルックさん宅の柚子
（トトさん記）
今、家の近所ではあちこちで柚子がたわわに黄色い実をつけています。
それを見ると、「あ〜、ブルックさんがよく私たちに、お庭の柚子をそれぞれに袋にいれて
お土産に持たせてくれたなぁ・・」と、思い出します。
