KID ETHNIC IS WRITTEN BY:

saleem
who currently lives on a boat.

kidethnic@gmail.com

ALSO BY KID ETHNIC:

100JapaneseThings.com
A collaborative site to help folks (and each other) find Japanese stuff.

The Whiteboard Videos
Music+Whiteboard Markers+Friends=Good ways to spend weekends

SEAWEED BREAKFAST
A weekly column about Japan for Glimpse.org.

The Annual Kid Ethnic Valentine
Because I love you so much.

The Alpaca Song
I wrote and recorded this for you. Because you need a song about alpacas, don’t you?

Twitter
I twitter infrequently. But hope we can stay friends.

RSS / Atom

Subscribe with Bloglines

FROM THE START:
The Quarter-Japanese Kid hits up the homeland

Tokyo Silence

I'm Oriented

Tilting Towards Kumamoto

Fish Heads and Public Nudity

Halfie the Half-blood falls off his bike

And furthermore: Halfie the Half-blood Breaks a Chair

I Don't Know if I Like Pippi Longstalkings

Tanboy Eats Fish Eyeball

Japanese Communists are Cuddly

Test Your Halfblood Knowledge!

I Scare Small Children

It Was Like a Cuteworld Abby Road

Today's Post Contains Bees. And Profanity.

Typhoons Will Not Stop Me

The Sun Also Sets

Quick Note: Saleem is Not Dead

CORRECTION: Typhoons Scare Me. Lots.

Watch the Tan Kid Blush

Call for Entries: Name My Kids

The Youth Are Quick and True

Open Letter: To the Breaker at City Hall

Halfie Gets a Verbal Sucker Punch

The Kumamoto Drunken Horse Fest

Japanese Houses Hate Halfie's Head

How to Start Your Japanese Rock Band

Halfie's Personal Dignity on Decline

Japanese Sports Day: I Train Young Warriors

Theory: Three Strange Occurences Per Hour

How to Win an iPod While Dressed as a Typhoon

Winnie the (drunken) Pooh

The Earth Quakes

Collecting Japanese Salmon Sperm

Illiterate at 26

Japan's Children Ignore Homeboy's Toothless Face

Japanese Genius Boy Answers Your Question

Our Students Have Respect . For Nelly.

The Young Boxers

Dear 27% of America (Kid Ethnic Registers)

Please Do Not Attempt to Step to My Japanese Rock Band

Infectious: The Screaming Man in the Four-Stroke Engine · 13 October 07

The guys at "Made to Stick" just posted a story I wrote about an old teacher of mine.

It's about the "Screaming Man" in the title of this post. You can read it and come back. I'll wait.

What I love about that story: You tell the story in a bar, it gets a laugh, and, suddenly, everyone knows about 4-stroke engines. Even the drunk guy who won't stop hitting on your girlfriend.

You can't even recount the dang thing without magically teaching people a fundamental lesson in auto-mechanics.

Just talking about the class teaches the lesson.

Contrast this with another great class that I once had, a physics class in which the teacher walked behind the school and shot potatoes out of a home made potato canon after explaining the propulsion and asking us to calculate how far we thought the potatoes would fly.

Now that is a splendid and possibly-illegal class.

But I just told you what we did in the class, and you didn't necessarily learn anything about physics. Whereas if you read about the four-stroke engine guy, the way the engine works is inherently there.

I'm suddenly curious about other stories like that, where in telling them, you can't help but convey the fundamentals of a topic. They're like amoral fables, where the only moral is, uh, science.

| Permanent link to this

* * *

|