Seminar Bound

I'm off to Hiroshima for a week long seminar as part of my graduate studies. Since I'm doing a distance course especially for teachers working in countries like Japan, the professors come to Japan once a year for real classroom learning! I'm kinda looking forward to the break from life in Nyuzen. And I'll get to meet a lot of people also doing the course. But I'm not sure if I'm looking forward to the seminar itself. The topics include: structure and meaning, words and meaning, methodology and grammar, a corpus based syllabus, text and context, prototype theory and the grammar syllabus, metaphors at work, and typological universals. I haven't a clue what any of it means now...hopefully I'll be a bit smarter this time next week!