Thursday, February 03, 2005

Feb 1st thermometer


Feb 1st thermometer
Originally uploaded by Jason In Japan.

If you click on the photo, you can maybe see that it reads 3°C!!!! (about 39°F) That's how cold it is in the hallways and other parts of my school that they don't bother to heat. We use big kerosene heaters (like the one shown Here in my friend Emily's blog) to heat the staff room and selected classrooms.
I read an interesting article recently on the quality of Japanese education and ways to improve it. One person pointed out that students' basic comfort should be more of a concern, since shivering from the cold isn't necessarily conducive to learning.

Speaking of shivering, one reason I haven't been posting more is my house isn't much warmer than the school hallways. I got home yesterday and it was 2°C in my house! My fingers will literally go numb with cold from exposure after typing on my laptop for more than 30 minutes.

So just be thankful for whatever nuggets I throw at ya... :)

-JCH
Not "too cool for school" but "too cold in school"

1 comment:

Emily K said...

Hey hey, thanks for the shout-out.
The permanent link to that post is
http://modernemily.blogspot.com/2005/02/big-kerosene-heater.html

One nice thing about having a laptop as large and unwieldy as mine is that it runs fairly hot, so the keyboard's always nice and warm in the winter (or not-so-nice and warm, in midsummer).

I expect next month's electric bill will be on the order of two man. I started leaving the air-con on all day back in November so my birds wouldn't freeze, but after realizing they could tolerate lower temperatures than those to which I'd been subjecting them, I still continued running the air-con all day, cos I realized how nice it was to come inside and feel warm. My apartment's far from toasty, but at least I never see my breath.