HIF Wrap-Up

I know it's a bit late, but this will be my version of the HIF Final Report--since, having blogged, I don't *technically* have to do one.
Academics
While initially I was disappointed at being placed into the 上級 class at HIF (mostly because a fellow Yale third-year placed into the next higher class), I wasn't unhappy with the structure and content of the class itself. There were daily kanji/vocab quizzes, which I didn't find too difficult as they are a feature of Yale's 2nd and 3rd year classes. We spent a lot of time working on speaking and listening skills, with extra emphasis (especially in the listening) on casual and/or slang speech patterns that are often used in normal conversation, but that aren't usually studied. The rest of the bulk of the class was spent in reading, either from the textbook or various newspaper articles, which we would then use in class discussions, debates, and essays.
This brings me to the 作文, essays. We wrote four or five over the course of the semester, 600-800 characters each, on topics such as the Japanese education system, then environment, and my all-time favorite (please note the sarcasm) 豊かさの意味 "The Meaning of Wealth." The thing that I found most annoying was that all essays had to be hand-written (no typing!). The idea was that, on the computer, it's easier to insert kanji that you don't necessarily know otherwise, and the teacher wanted us to try and use our current vocabulary in the essays. I found this extremely ridiculous at the time, having always been allowed to type Japanese essays in the past. However, in retrospect I have to concede that Saitou-sensei had a point. Not necessarily about us looking up kanji we don't know--but I did find that the kanji I remember the best from HIF are the ones that I wrote over and over again in my essays. Writing the essays really helped to reinforce the writing and meaning of kanji that I might otherwise have relegated to my short-term memory only.
Project Work
And, of course, we come to the infamous HIF "Project Work." I was a little concerned about this going in, having heard from past HIF-ers that it became the bane of everyone's existence (so much so that HIF contemplated scrapping it altogether), and the actual project work was both not as bad and worse than I had feared.
Without getting into the politics of certain group members' willingness to work (or not), I had good group members and a topic that I was interested in (looking at inter-cultural (mis)communication between host families and their host students). In that respect, the project work was enjoyable, and I had fairly high hopes for it in the beginning. However, theory and practice proved to be two very different animals.
As the semester wore on, I think everyone discovered that we had less time to devote to project work than we had expected, and as other things took over our time, we all fell behind the schedules that had once seemed so easy to accomplish. The result was that the projects began to seem like nothing more than busy work, to be gotten over with as quickly as possible; and those few who wanted to use the project in connection with thesis research--and thus actually trying to do a good job of it--quickly became overworked and overstressed trying to fit it all in. By presentation time, most people had stopped caring.
Host Family
Living with the host family was definitely one of the best parts of HIF (tons of delicious Japanese food aside). Especially compared with living alone now, when I spend so much time thinking/speaking/reading in English, or simply not speaking Japanese--living with a host family provides an invaluable experience, for several reasons. Especially for someone like me, who had never been to Japan before, having a host family around to explain things and talk to, and generally make me feel at home, went a long way toward easing any homesickness I might otherwise have felt. I had a bit of a different family from most other HIF-ers, as both my host parents worked (in most families the mom stayed at home), so I didn't get the intensive conversations that some other students had with their host mothers. But my family was extremely friendly, and I was able to spend lots of time with my siblings, Sae and Satoshi, so it was an extremely enjoyable summer.