I once taught English in a Japanese high school. Usually I taught a conversation class. The class was 55 minutes long and I had 43 students in the class. At one point I thought, I should speak to each student in the class every day.... and then I did the math. That's just over a minute to speak to each student even if I didn't do anything else in the class. Inequality is both normal and necessary most of the time. I can't give each student an equal amount of my attention and time every single class or else I will accomplish nothing of value.
You might say that if I had less students in my class, then I could give them each an equal amount of attention. However, when I had those situations I was even less likely to do so. Each one of my students was different. They had different needs, and different desires. Indeed, ideally I would give each of my students completely different and unequal attention according to their needs and desires.
However, the key is that each of my students should have equal access to my teaching. I do not need, nor want to treat my students equally, but I should give each access to everything I can do to help them within my constraints. And, at the very least, if I can only help a limited number of students meaningfully, each student should have an equal chance at that help.
I tend to agree with you that these labels of "bad" and "good" from a moral perspective are problematic. However, from the perspective of building a society, we need to discriminate between what is going to further our aims and what is not. It is a tricky thing.
I'd make a slight caveat with this. The our job is to make something that is as close as possible to the complexity of the problem. You don't want to make it more complex for obvious reasons. However, you also don't want to make it less complex, because then you are removing fidelity. Let me aim a slightly playful jab at the GNOME people for "simplifying" by removing features that I actually need. Only slightly playful as it's the reason I had to give up GNOME. ;-)
Just keep at it! When I first moved to Japan, I couldn't have a good conversation with anyone. I eventually met a young woman with Downes syndrome and she kindly chatted with me every time she met me. It was such a huge help! There was an older woman who would see me gardening in containers and come over to give me advice. I couldn't follow what she was saying at all, but she kept coming over and chatting anyway. I kept going in to corner stores and chatting with the staff -- nothing too long. Just a few sentences each time. I went every single day (even now, I know all the staff of every convenience store in town!) Eventually your language gets better and better and better. There is always someone who is lonely, or kind who you can chat to :-) Just keep smiling. Keep making contact. Say hello to everyone you meet. Every day try to have a short conversation with someone. You'll eventually find people who will be happy to chat with you in Spanish.
I've worked as a teacher before. I'm a bit confused as to the 17,000 hours time claimed to collect attendance information (and hence the justification that you need to automate it). Where is that number coming from?
As part of my job, I had to be able to recognise and put a name to all of my students. This is legitimately difficult and I spent a lot of time doing it. However, it was not for doing attendance! If you are in a school system below university and your teacher doesn't recognise you or know your name... I mean... I can't even comprehend what a bad situation that is. How could you ever teach a student if you know so little about them that you can't even recognise them? When you are marking their paper and see their name, if you don't even know who they are, how can you give appropriate guidance? That kind of situation would be shocking. And to be fair... because it is really, really hard I know a lot of teachers who have no clue... but seriously, this is not what we aim for!
Once you know the students, attendance is easy. Why is that chair empty? Who is supposed to sit there? Look at your seating chart (seriously, it's the best way to learn their names...). Is that person anywhere else in the room? No? They are absent. Mark it on your list. That takes all of 2 seconds. If you are really doing your job, you can ask why the person is missing. Maybe you can have their friend take them some homework. A surveillance system can't do that.
I mean... Why would you ever want an automated system in this circumstance? It just makes no sense.
I think the reality of the situation is that they really wanted a surveillance system. They didn't want to record attendance, they wanted to know where the students were in every second of the day. They wanted to time home long they are in the toilet so that they can catch them smoking or dealing drugs. They wanted to see them leaving the school o that they can lie in wait and nab them as they cut class: students 2 and 5 are supposed to be in band class but they are headed in the opposite direction -- go all you zigs! For great justice!
I just can't imagine any other reason you'd want this. Perhaps I'm wrong. I certainly hope so!
> The culture of obedience and resignation seems diametrically opposed to some notions of the French culture.
My parents lived in France for a while and still revere parts of French culture, so I'm familiar with it. Honestly I can't imagine having to reconcile that with Japanese culture. I'm often surprised, though, because French people in general seem to do well in Japan -- especially compared to Americans or British people. Anyway, I feel for your situation. It can't be easy. I hope you find a path that works out for you!
It's one of the difficult things about Japan. All very high end jobs are jobs for life in Japan, pretty much. Your university supervisor has contacts. You get your job from those contacts. There are very few other ways around it. In IT, it's a bit different -- for example, I think it's pretty easy to get a job at Line. I've heard Rakuten only hires foreigners, but I'm not sure about that. I don't know if any of these employees are shokunin (fulltime employees, essentially for life), but if you are used to western IT then the year by year contracts are probably fine anyway. A company really needs to look after a shokunin for life -- they even give them a big lump sum retirement gift when they retire and may even do more for them later.
I good example of a shokunin is a friend of mine who works for a fibre optics company. The company hires x number of people from her university every year. She started there wrapping cables (even though she's an electrical engineer with a very impressive academic record). Eventually after she learned about the company and worked in various departments, she was given managerial role and she will work as one of the elite people in the company for the rest of her career. After she retires, the company will look out for her. For example, my wife's uncle was a manager at Suzuki and they gave him some land near the factory so that he could build a house and retire. That kind of thing is pretty common.
If you miss the boat, your chances at being a shokunin at a large company are pretty much zero. I mean, it still happens if you have good contacts, but it's essentially impossible. Your best bet is to find a small company and get a yearly contract and just be the best employee ever. Then if the company grows, you might become a shokunin.
But you can still have a good career without being one of the elites. Hell, it's the same for me working for western companies. I'm never going to be CTO of some company or VP of software. I don't care. It limits my ability to make money, but I like being on the ground writing software. I don't think I could even be principle architect somewhere because I just don't want to think about the big picture. I like details.
So even if you go to a lower level school and get a lower level position somewhere, it's completely fine. I think that's the thing that people miss -- you can still have a good career and make a reasonable living. It's just that you are very unlikely to be on the elevator to being VP at Honda without coming from a big name university. Again, it happens from time to time, but it's just super unlikely.
I was teaching in a low level public high school. To be fair, the entrance exam system is complicated and I don't fully understand all of the details, but I'll try to elaborate some more.
Essentially you are allowed to apply for 1 public and 1 private high school. Unlike most places in the west, public high schools still cost money in Japan. It's quite expensive: something like $1000 per student per month. However, the government helps you out if you are low income, or if you have multiple children -- so essentially it's affordable, though expensive for everyone. Private high schools can have higher prices, but not always. So it's not necessarily the case that a private high school is much more expensive than a public high school, especially if you are middle class and only have 1 child.
I think the main reason for the 1 choice only was that it used to be that students would write many exams and then pick the best high school they qualified for. What the new system does is make it so you have to strategise a bit: you can apply for a higher level private school (maybe aiming for a scholarship) while applying for a lower level public school. The main result is that students tend to lower their sights to ensure that they get in.
However, there are caveats: What happens if a student doesn't pass either of their exams? What happens if the student doesn't pass their public exam, but can't afford the private school? So there are extra exams. Essentially, the schools pick the students that they want, but leave some spaces open. Then they do another exam and fill up the remaining spaces. So there is always a possibility that you will get accepted in the second round. Access to education at the high school level is assured, so if you totally screw things up, you will still go to school -- but you may go to some random school.
Anyway, it really is the case that students as low level high schools don't study, generally! I don't know how old your child is. You said teenager and given your story about required sports club, that's almost certainly junior high school. Sometimes if you live in a very rural area with only a small school, then you can also be stuck with what you are stuck with. But if your child enrolls in a school that is aiming the students towards trades, or factory work, the academic expectations are practically zero. If you enroll in a school with the goal of going to university, then the expectations a very high. Keep in mind that the vast majority of Japanese students do not go to university -- it's very different than the west. Usually they will go to a kind of junior college (like 2 year dental assistant program), or a trade school, or they will go straight to work.
In my school (which had about 750 students when I taught there), 50% went straight on to work. Normally the number of students going on to university I could count on my fingers (and sometimes only on one hand). In my area there are 4 high schools. 3 of them are similar to the one I taught in. Only 1 has students who are expected to go on to university. This is totally normal here.
The vast majority of high school students in Japan have an easy time of it. You child may not, especially if you expect them to go on to further education.
Don't get me wrong. I completely understand your frustration (or I think I do anyway). It's a very cultural thing. Many of the Brazilians in my area hate the Japanese school system too. The Japanese school system is great at indoctrinating people into the Japanese culture. It instills certain societal values -- many of which are just not shared by people who didn't grow up here. However, it does quite a good job at that -- to the point where if I was raising kids in Japan and I thought my kids would likely remain in Japan as adults, I think it would be a very great injustice to deprive them of Japanese schools.
I can read your message and understand how you feel. Japan is a hard place to live in as a foreigner. The culture is not like a buffet. You can't take the bits you like and leave the other bits aside. This is especially challenging if you are raising kids, since the school system is going to instill Japanese values in your kids whether you like it or not. A few people have asked me if they should raise kids here and I think it's totally great, but only if you are ready to buy into the Japanese culture completely. If not, it's going to be -- as you put it: appalling.
I wrote a big sibling post, but I wanted to just point out that schools do tend to use up student's time. Students are required to enter a club and often these clubs are 6 days a week, so compared to the west, students have no individual free time. I know many (most) western parents think this is awful, but most of the students I had loved club and never wanted to go home (we had to turn the lights off at the tennis courts and even then some students would try to play in the dark!)
Some students hate club and we had clubs for students that hated club (unfortunately the English club was one of them). They show up for an hour a week and go home. It depends on the principal, though. Some principals are very much opposed to that idea, so if you don't want your kids to spend a lot of time at school it pays to investigate schools that will accomodate you. I will admit that I like Japanese schools and find them dramatically better than anything else I've experienced, so I'm biased.
It's easy to get led into thinking this is ubiquitous, but it really isn't. Life gets difficult for school children around year 3 min middle school (about grade 9). The long and the short of it is that if you want to get a really top job, then you need to come from a top university, which means that you usually need to come from a top highschool, which means that you must get a good mark on your high school entrance example.
Lately it's gotten even a bit more difficult because you are allowed to apply for only 1 public high school and one private high school (unlike the UK, "public" and "private" refers to what you would normally think -- public is publicly funded and private is privately funded). You can always pay your way into a top school if you have enough money, but generally if you want to get in you need a good result on your entrance exam.
Here's the thing most people don't understand: most students don't care. And by most, I mean about 80%. Only 1/4 of high schools are high performing high schools where students are expected to go on to university. Even with that, most students will prefer to go to a high school that is close to them or where their friends are going. Only a few students choose (or are pushed by their parents) to go to the really top schools.
Even with low level schools, you can still make it to a respectable university. The school I taught in is one of the lowest public schools in the prefecture (one year, due to lack of enrollment, we accepted students who scored 0 on the entrance exam! Seriously, you have to be trying to get zero!) However, we usually sent 4 or 5 students to Nagoya university, which is a decent university. Several of my students when to Shizuoka university too -- which is not a great university, but definitely good enough to get a good job in Shizuoka prefecture.
At low level school, students do not study. I mean, a few study because they like studying, but never once did my students do their homework! Students are carefree, happy and energetic. Compared to the highschools I went to in Canada (I moved around a bit), it is absolutely night and day. It's like comparing prison to a holiday camp.
At high level schools, it's really, really hard work and students stay late to study every day (usually coming home around 8 pm). However, the vast majority of the students like studying! And even if you somehow get pushed into a top level school, every school has a kind of "escape hatch" where you basically decide "academics are not for me -- I'm going to become a factory worker".
This is not to say that there isn't pressure to succeed, but the reputation Japanese schools have is completely undeserved.
And to get to the normal argument: what about suicide rates. We can compare suicide rates by age group in Japan [1] and the US [2]. For Japan under 24 (2014) the number is 1814 (0.0000143 per capita) and for the US (2016) it is 6159 (0.0000190). In other words the US youth suicide rate is about 25% higher than Japan's (Why does Japan have a reputation for high suicide rate? Because older people commit suicide -- it is very rare for young people to do so).
I'm guessing you knew upper middle class kids from over-achieving parents. Normal Japanese children don't do that. Generally speaking, elementary kids are running around on those 2 wheel wobbly skateboards (not sure what they are called), or playing baseball or basketball (around where I live basketball is surprisingly popular). Right now it is summer vacation and across the road my neighbour's kids are yelling at each other like normal ;-)
I admit to using google as a spell checker. That is to say that my browser spell checks but doesn't give me suggestions on how to fix it. I would say at least 2/3 of my "searches" are really just spell checking (or small calculations). I guess that's why I get such weird ads :-D
> Also the stamp has to be registered to have legal value, which makes it tough to change.
This is not actually true. Some stamps need to be registered (for example the stamp for corporation), but personal stamps for most applications don't need to be registered -- even for bank accounts. I have several and I'm always forgetting which one I used for my different bank accounts :-P.
One of the strange things about Japanese stamps is that if you let someone have your stamp, then it is considered that you have given them permission to do whatever they want with that stamp. The very fact that they have the stamp means that they are authorised. I got very angry at my previous employer (the government, no less) when my contract was over. They demanded that I give them my stamp I had used for stamping my time card. It happened to be the one I used for my bank account too (because I was clueless at the time!) It took me a couple of months to work around that. If you are ever working in Japan, treat your hanko (stamps) exactly the same way you would treat your encryption keys: use a different one for each application if possible.
I am reminded of the Picasso story where he meets a woman in a park and makes a 30 second sketch. The woman asks how much it would cost to buy it and he replies something like $1000 (insert large amount of money for 30 seconds of work). She asks him why so much money for 30 seconds of work and he replies that it took him 30 years to draw that sketch.
It's easy to build a simple website with no frills that does exactly what the client needs -- if you know how to do it. Even then, it is rarely easy to figure out what the client needs!
A colleague wanted to use a Javascript library for something I thought was probably pretty simple. I suggested we take a look at the library and see what it was doing and determine if it was worth the extra dependency. He joked, "If I wanted to know how it worked, I wouldn't have chosen a dependency". Luckily, it's not how my colleague really feels, but this is exactly what's happening most of the time.
Things are over complicated because people don't know how to build them -- they glue together a patchwork of stuff so that they don't have to know. In the end, they tend to build something whose complexity is many orders of magnitude higher than the complexity of the problem they are working on.
Your two years of job security was not for avoiding framework-of-the-day hype: it was for knowing how to do it. It's the simple 30 second, single line sketch that captures the picture perfectly with no extra complexity. That takes years and years of experience to develop -- and a desire to even get there at all.
I can understand your feeling, but I'm not sure I share it. I did a series of extremely bad Dwarf Fortress videos on YT. I've gotten hundreds of views for some of them (and only a few for the latest ones: a testament to their lack of quality ;-) ). Mostly I think my views come from DF being a small community and it's easy to advertise to those people. If you are making a general comedy channel, I don't think it is surprising that you will get lost in the shuffle. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of them. Even if it comes up on my suggestions, I'm not going to watch it unless I've heard of it.
I think you are correct that YT caters to the big names, but I can hardly blame them. It makes money for them. The platform is not about being fair: it's about making money for Google. I have no problem with that, really. They host my content for free, make it available to almost anyone, retain it for who knows how long... The fact that you have to do advertising and marketing for your content yourself is not really something that bothers me.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Neo4J or their pricing structure. To be fair, though, niche products are often very expensive because there aren't many customers to pay for the development. If you have a million paying customers you can charge them $10 a year each and fund a reasonable sized company. If you have 5, then you need to charge them $2 million each ;-) Having said that, I tried to find pricing information on their website and couldn't find it. For me that's a sign of "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" level of pricing...
I do not fear non-existence. For most of the history of the universe, I did not exist. I have considerable experience with that. Dying appears to be unpleasant, though.
I'm a fair bit closer to the right hand side of the age curve than the left. My advice: Look at the brevity of Alan Kay's responses. When I was young I would have soared past them looking for the point. Now I see that one sentence and I weep. Why didn't anyone say that 20 years ago?
Maybe they did. I was too busy being frustrated with the churn of software development. All my time and energy was focused on new technologies that came out all the time. My young plastic brain spent it's flexibility absorbing the latest framework, etc.
Now that I have lost the motivation, ability and time to keep up with things like the younger folk, I can finally listen to the older folk (hopefully while there are still folk older than me to listen to).
These days I'm trying just to write code. All those young people have soared past the wisdom of their elders looking for the point. It's still there. Don't look at the new frameworks, look at what people were doing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. How does it inform what you are doing?
You might say that if I had less students in my class, then I could give them each an equal amount of attention. However, when I had those situations I was even less likely to do so. Each one of my students was different. They had different needs, and different desires. Indeed, ideally I would give each of my students completely different and unequal attention according to their needs and desires.
However, the key is that each of my students should have equal access to my teaching. I do not need, nor want to treat my students equally, but I should give each access to everything I can do to help them within my constraints. And, at the very least, if I can only help a limited number of students meaningfully, each student should have an equal chance at that help.
I tend to agree with you that these labels of "bad" and "good" from a moral perspective are problematic. However, from the perspective of building a society, we need to discriminate between what is going to further our aims and what is not. It is a tricky thing.