Some of you have asked me what a typical day is like for me at my schools here in Japan. Now that I've been here for a while and have adjusted to my new world here, I sometimes forget just how different it is here. Well, I'll start from the beginning and you'll see what I mean. Since I spend four days a week at the Junior High, I‘ll focus on my daily routine there.
I usually arrive at school between 8:00 and 8:15am. (This also happens to be the second time the town chime rings in the morning. Yes, you know you're in the countryside when your town uses public chimes to tell people what time it is!!) Before entering the school, I remove my outdoor shoes and slip on my indoor shoes. All of the teachers bring their own shoes because the vinyl slippers provided by the school are floppy, uncomfortable and impossible to climb stairs in. Then I slide open the door to the teachers' room and call out ‘Ohayo gozaimasu!!" to all of the teachers who have probably already been at the school since about 7 or 7:30am. The teachers' room is basically just a large, open room with three double rows of desks. All of the homeroom teachers sit with the other teachers of their own grade and I sit with the Gr. 2 teachers. At the front of the room are the desks for the administration people and the principal and vice-principal. Behind their desks is a partition, behind which is a small kitchen, a smoking lounge, and the principal's private office. The room is very bright with large windows that are often wide open in both hot and cold weather. There is no central heating in the school and the only heaters are a couple of large kerosene heaters (hence why the windows are left open) in the teachers' room. They haven't been turned on yet. (Oh and did I mention that there is no air conditioning either? This makes teaching in the humidity of September a real pleasure too). All of this creates a very open, albeit noisy working atmosphere, and oh yes, no privacy either. I enjoy it though. The teachers are really friendly and although many of them are shy to talk to me because of their lack of English, they are all very kind to me and full of praise when I try out my crappy Japanese on them. I work with five English teachers who have all been really great and supportive of me. They give me a lot of room to try out different things in the class (I get to make my own lesson plans) and give me a lot of valuable feedback. My only real frustration is that because I don't speak Japanese and the teachers are really busy all the time, sometimes they forget to tell me things that maybe I need to know about and it's easy to feel a little left out at times.
The school itself is a very plain three and half level building and everything is a creamy beige colour, making the school look rather dull and dirty all the time. I have no idea why they purposefully choose to make their schools look like this. The only real plus that I can see is that the large windows do lessen the need for using flourescent lighting. The bathrooms are pretty basic Japanese squat style toilets and you have to change your shoes again and wear ugly plastic slippers (pink ones for the women) to go to the can. I am becoming an expert on squatting without peeing on myself. However, one of my elementary schools has just installed a beautiful Western toilet just for the ALTs (me) that I like to call the Captain Kirk toilet. Captain Kirk toilets can often be found in nice Japanese restaurants, hotels and some private homes. Once you sit down on one you may not want to get up again. The toilet is electrically wired, meaning that the seat is heated and you have a wide array of bidet options available to you, including settings just for women. Ahhhhhhhh, luxurious!!
Now onto the classes. After a brief homeroom, first period starts at 8:40. I leave the room with my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) and we head to the class which we will be teaching together. The students have their own classroom that they stay in and each grade is on a different floor. So the students remain in the classroom while the teachers move from class to class. The students all wear uniforms that are exactly the same for each grade except for their slippers which are colour coded according to grade (gr.1-yellow, gr. 2.-green, gr. 3-blue). The boys' winter uniforms are all black with a stiff, straight collar and made of stiff polyester. They are fashioned after Prussian military uniforms and have large brass buttons all down the front. The gr.3 boys like to hike up the bottom of the pants and wear them like long shorts. They call it ‘Japanese style'. The style of the girls' uniforms is the same all year round; navy blue polyester navy style sailor blouses with pleated skirts. With this they wear plain, white, calf-high socks which they keep up by applying glue to their legs. Both the boys and the girls wear their gym strip underneath their uniforms at all times, as they have to change several times a day and change together in their classroom. In addition to this, the students' bikes are almost all identical, and even their bags and their outdoor shoes are exactly the same. I know this uniform stuff sounds a little crazy, but I swear that I am not making it up. It was a little weird to get used to at first but I think that it has something to do with emphasizing the group atmosphere in the school and minimizing any differences that exist between the students.
While the main purpose of the schools is academic, the same as ours, there exists a strong cultural purpose in the Japanese school system. For example, once a week, the students attend their moral education class. I still don't know exactly what this entails, but it seems that perhaps Japanese parents are not always to be trusted to teach their children proper social behaviour so the school is responsible for making sure that the students learn how to be good Japanese citizens. There is also a strong sense of belonging and even ownership created in the homeroom classes of the students and rather than separating the stronger students from the weaker students, all of the students are encouraged to help each other out in the classroom. Unfortunately, this means that some of the stronger students may not get a chance to be sufficiently challenged and shine and conversely, the weaker students may not get all of the help and attention that they may need. But on the other hand, the students are given a strong sense of responsibility for their education and for their classmates. In each class there is a class leader whom the students vote for and who plays an important role in organizing the classroom and the student's activities. When we begin a class, we start with the aisatsu or greetings which are led by the class leader. No class begins without them. (Leader: "Good morning, everyone!" Class: "Good morning, [student leader's name]" Leader: "Let's begin today's class!" Class: "Yes, let's!!" Everything is a group effort, you know.) There are about 36 students in each class and they all sit in paired rows, girl/boy; girl/boy. Japanese boys and girls, especially in JHS, are shy to socialize with each other, but the teachers, at least in my classes, are always trying to encourage them to talk to each other. Sometimes their efforts work, sometimes not.
I have to admit that I had some preconceptions about the Japanese school system that have turned out to be not quite correct. First of all, I had the impression that in Asia, students are basically lectured to and that students are not really encouraged to ask questions or god forbid, correct the teacher if they make a mistake. Well, this is not entirely so. While rote memorization is certainly the most standard fare here, the overall classroom atmosphere is a lot more casual than I expected, especially with regard to the relationships between the teachers and the students. The students enjoy chatting with the teachers, even teasing them sometimes and the teachers seem to feel a greater sense of personal responsibility for the students. Eventhough there is a counsellor at my school, the teachers are the ones who the students usually go to with their personal problems. I also somehow expected discipline in Japan to be stricter than in Canada. While discipline is important in Japanese schools, the manner in which it's exercised here is softer compared to Canada. In the West, we rely heavily on external pressures to make students behave, but here in Japan, the students seem to be encouraged more to think about how their behaviour affects the rest of the students. The Japanese feel that every child has a right to an education. Therefore, students in Japan are never expelled or even sent to the principal's office. A good example of how discipline works here is an incident that occurred last week that was brought to the attention of the entire school in an interesting manner. After lunch, while everyone was still in the lunchroom, one of the administrators told the entire student body about an incident where a boy had vandalized a girl's bike at school. While the name of the boy was not mentioned, the victim had to talk in front of the whole school about having her bike vandalized. For the most part, I would have to say that their seems to be fewer disciplinary problems in Japan than in Western countries. My students can be frustrating and annoying sometimes but they never get out of hand.
In the West, there also exists the common assumption that most Japanese are very shy and reserved and not very open about expressing themselves. Well being around young Japanese students has shown me that while I think that they are perhaps less mature than Canadian students of the same age, this naivete also brings out a greater deal of openness. While I expected that Japanese people would be more reserved about touching others, especially members of the opposite sex, Japanese kids are definitely less shy about touching than Canadian kids. I often see boys holding hands in the hallways and even sitting on each other sometimes. And while Western countries are still reeling from the recent exposure of sexual harrassment going on between teachers and students, here there seems to be less awareness of this issue. I don't know if it's because they have fewer problems with this here or if there is less direct recognition of it, but the teachers and students here are fairly open about expressing affection for each other and the teachers don't hesitate to touch their students. It leaves me with the feeling that most of the teachers here genuinely care for their students a great deal, not just as students, but personally as well. I also forgot to mention that the teacher's room is not off limits to the students. The students are free to enter anytime (although they have to bow and say ‘excuse me' first), so the teachers are pretty much accessible to them at any time.
After four fifty minute periods, it's 12:30 and it's time for lunch. Every student in Japan is guaranteed a hot meal everyday and the school lunch is in fact another form of education for Japanese students. The lunches are dropped off ready to eat, but the students are responsible for dishing out the food and setting the place settings. To do this, they don white smocks and masks and are impressively well coordinated in order to get everyone sitting and eating quickly. Everyday I sit with a different class (the students are not allowed to choose where to sit, they must sit with their class). Before we can chow down, one of the students steps up onto a small stage at the front of the lunchroom with a microphone and comments briefly on the nutritional content of the day's lunch and leads everyone in clasping their hands together and saying "Itadakimasu!", meaning, ‘I (humbly) receive'. Japan is a land full of people with well- developed culinary tastes and therefore has fabulous cuisine. However, the mediocrity of school lunches seems to be a universal problem. Usually I'm too hungry to care too much, but I don't find the meals to be especially nutritious. Japanese cuisine offers so much in the way of healthy fare, but very little of it ends up in our school lunch. Lunch usually consists of some kind of soup or stew, a bowl of rice (often the only truly good thing about the school lunch), some weird and often rubbery meat product (squid on a stick, anyone?), a side dish of some kind of shredded vegetable and mayonaisse salad and a glass of milk. Oh and did I mention that almost everything has bacon in it, including the salad? If you go to a Japanese restaurant, you will rarely find much pork on the menu, but now thanks to the school lunch, I find myself eating more bacon than I did in Canada. The only lunch that everyone actually looks forward to is when we get to have curry rice. The worst, though, is bread day, when our usual bowl of rice is replaced by big slabs of sugary white bread. UUUGGH! Fortunately though, I will soon have a brief respite from the horrors of school lunch as they have promised me that they will be making a Canadian school lunch sometime. They asked me for some typical Canadian foods and at the time, the only things I could really think of were pancakes and bacon (I could do without it though) and chili. So we'll see what they end up serving us!! After lunch, I cruise the hallways to harrass the students and get them to speak English. It can be a little tough at times, as most of the students are either too shy to speak in English or simply do not understand very much. Usually when I talk to them, the standard questions they ask me are pretty much the same: Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like so and so sensei? Do you like natto? (Natto is a sticky, somewhat smelly food made of fermented soybeans that is very healthy and sometimes served at school lunch. Many foreigners hate it, but I think that it's not bad). But at least goofing off is a universial language and I like being able to relate to the students not just as a teacher, but on a more casual friendly level too. I do have a few students who are a little more proficient and adventurous with their English, but that's usually because they go to English juku.
That is another interesting aspect of the Japanese educational system. It is not taken for granted that all students will go on to highschool and there are many different types of highschools that are designed to accomodate the varying abilities and goals of the students, whether they be academic or technical or whatever. What this means is that the students have some choice as to where they would like to go to highschool, but they are required to pass entrance exams for the highschool of their choice, which are supposed to be pretty brutal. So the students study, study, and study some more. Probably more than half of my students spend at least four or five hours per week (usually on the weekends) to go to a juku school. Juku schools are private institutions that exist simply to help students cram for their entrance exams and usually cover all subjects. However, there are many that just teach English. I have several friends here who run private English jukus.
After lunch, there are two more periods, the last one ending at 3:30. So after a long day do you think the kids are ready to go home? No!! After the last class, the students have cleaning time. While bizarre instrumental music is blared over the PA system, the students are required to clean the entire school. They clean the classrooms, the hallways, the bathrooms and even the teachers' room. Again this is not just so that they don't have to pay for a janitor (the school does have a custodian, by the way). Cleaning time is considered a vital part of the education system here. While, granted the school doesn't end up being as clean as it could be, I think that it's a great idea. It teaches the students to respect and take care of their school and increases their feelings of ownership and responsibility towards the school. The students say that they hate it, but I think that they benefit from it. After cleaning time, the students are required to attend a twenty-minute homeroom and then it's time for club activities. In Japan, club activities are not optional. Every student is required to belong to a club which usually involves staying late after school and sometimes coming to school on the weekends. So needless to say, Japanese students are very, very busy. And so are the teachers. They usually stay at school everyday until around 7 or 8pm or even later during testing times. They demonstrate a very high level of commitment to their students. I have to admit, being an ALT is a lot easier than being a regular teacher. I usually leave work anytime between 4:30 and 5:30 and while I do do some work at home, my workload is nothing compared to the other teachers. So I try to help out as much as I can; lately I've been making listening tapes, conducting speaking tests and marking compositions written by the students.
But all of this work doesn't mean that there is no time for fun at school. Today, for example, we were on a special schedule, so after first period there were no classes, only student council meetings. So I was left to just sit in the teachers' room (boring!), until a Gr. 1 student came in with a letter he had written (with some help, of course) inviting me to come to his class later this morning to take part in a ‘festival' that they had arranged. I wish I had brought my camera!! The students had set up different booths with different activities all centred around the most important and ubiquitous thing in my town: kaki. Kaki is the Japanese name for persimmons (remember I mentioned them before). Well they are everywhere and you can't escape them. (I always get a big bag of them everytime I visit one of my elementary schools. One of the teachers must also be a farmer). So this was a kaki festival featuring kaki lassis (quite delicious actually), kaki jack o'lantern carving, kaki weight guessing, kaki key chain making and even a short play about kaki. While the kids could use a few acting lessons, they put a lot of thought and effort into their festival. One word that seems to encapsulate the overall attitude that Japanese students take towards their school activities and that one hears over and over again in Japan is ‘Gambarimashoo!' ("Let's do our best!").
So just like in the West, I think that the Japanese educational system has both it's good points and bad points, but overall, I'm really enjoying teaching here. The students are a real pleasure and it's a great feeling when the students tell me that they enjoy my classes and we have some real communication together. While the language barrier is tough sometimes, it provides me with an ongoing challenge to find different ways to capture the students' interests and to communicate with them. I hope that I haven't rambled on too much about this, but I hope that you all find it somewhat interesting. I can honestly say that every day is different here and whenever I get to spend time with the students, it is never boring!
Mata ne,
Yanagi-sensei
I usually arrive at school between 8:00 and 8:15am. (This also happens to be the second time the town chime rings in the morning. Yes, you know you're in the countryside when your town uses public chimes to tell people what time it is!!) Before entering the school, I remove my outdoor shoes and slip on my indoor shoes. All of the teachers bring their own shoes because the vinyl slippers provided by the school are floppy, uncomfortable and impossible to climb stairs in. Then I slide open the door to the teachers' room and call out ‘Ohayo gozaimasu!!" to all of the teachers who have probably already been at the school since about 7 or 7:30am. The teachers' room is basically just a large, open room with three double rows of desks. All of the homeroom teachers sit with the other teachers of their own grade and I sit with the Gr. 2 teachers. At the front of the room are the desks for the administration people and the principal and vice-principal. Behind their desks is a partition, behind which is a small kitchen, a smoking lounge, and the principal's private office. The room is very bright with large windows that are often wide open in both hot and cold weather. There is no central heating in the school and the only heaters are a couple of large kerosene heaters (hence why the windows are left open) in the teachers' room. They haven't been turned on yet. (Oh and did I mention that there is no air conditioning either? This makes teaching in the humidity of September a real pleasure too). All of this creates a very open, albeit noisy working atmosphere, and oh yes, no privacy either. I enjoy it though. The teachers are really friendly and although many of them are shy to talk to me because of their lack of English, they are all very kind to me and full of praise when I try out my crappy Japanese on them. I work with five English teachers who have all been really great and supportive of me. They give me a lot of room to try out different things in the class (I get to make my own lesson plans) and give me a lot of valuable feedback. My only real frustration is that because I don't speak Japanese and the teachers are really busy all the time, sometimes they forget to tell me things that maybe I need to know about and it's easy to feel a little left out at times.
The school itself is a very plain three and half level building and everything is a creamy beige colour, making the school look rather dull and dirty all the time. I have no idea why they purposefully choose to make their schools look like this. The only real plus that I can see is that the large windows do lessen the need for using flourescent lighting. The bathrooms are pretty basic Japanese squat style toilets and you have to change your shoes again and wear ugly plastic slippers (pink ones for the women) to go to the can. I am becoming an expert on squatting without peeing on myself. However, one of my elementary schools has just installed a beautiful Western toilet just for the ALTs (me) that I like to call the Captain Kirk toilet. Captain Kirk toilets can often be found in nice Japanese restaurants, hotels and some private homes. Once you sit down on one you may not want to get up again. The toilet is electrically wired, meaning that the seat is heated and you have a wide array of bidet options available to you, including settings just for women. Ahhhhhhhh, luxurious!!
Now onto the classes. After a brief homeroom, first period starts at 8:40. I leave the room with my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) and we head to the class which we will be teaching together. The students have their own classroom that they stay in and each grade is on a different floor. So the students remain in the classroom while the teachers move from class to class. The students all wear uniforms that are exactly the same for each grade except for their slippers which are colour coded according to grade (gr.1-yellow, gr. 2.-green, gr. 3-blue). The boys' winter uniforms are all black with a stiff, straight collar and made of stiff polyester. They are fashioned after Prussian military uniforms and have large brass buttons all down the front. The gr.3 boys like to hike up the bottom of the pants and wear them like long shorts. They call it ‘Japanese style'. The style of the girls' uniforms is the same all year round; navy blue polyester navy style sailor blouses with pleated skirts. With this they wear plain, white, calf-high socks which they keep up by applying glue to their legs. Both the boys and the girls wear their gym strip underneath their uniforms at all times, as they have to change several times a day and change together in their classroom. In addition to this, the students' bikes are almost all identical, and even their bags and their outdoor shoes are exactly the same. I know this uniform stuff sounds a little crazy, but I swear that I am not making it up. It was a little weird to get used to at first but I think that it has something to do with emphasizing the group atmosphere in the school and minimizing any differences that exist between the students.
While the main purpose of the schools is academic, the same as ours, there exists a strong cultural purpose in the Japanese school system. For example, once a week, the students attend their moral education class. I still don't know exactly what this entails, but it seems that perhaps Japanese parents are not always to be trusted to teach their children proper social behaviour so the school is responsible for making sure that the students learn how to be good Japanese citizens. There is also a strong sense of belonging and even ownership created in the homeroom classes of the students and rather than separating the stronger students from the weaker students, all of the students are encouraged to help each other out in the classroom. Unfortunately, this means that some of the stronger students may not get a chance to be sufficiently challenged and shine and conversely, the weaker students may not get all of the help and attention that they may need. But on the other hand, the students are given a strong sense of responsibility for their education and for their classmates. In each class there is a class leader whom the students vote for and who plays an important role in organizing the classroom and the student's activities. When we begin a class, we start with the aisatsu or greetings which are led by the class leader. No class begins without them. (Leader: "Good morning, everyone!" Class: "Good morning, [student leader's name]" Leader: "Let's begin today's class!" Class: "Yes, let's!!" Everything is a group effort, you know.) There are about 36 students in each class and they all sit in paired rows, girl/boy; girl/boy. Japanese boys and girls, especially in JHS, are shy to socialize with each other, but the teachers, at least in my classes, are always trying to encourage them to talk to each other. Sometimes their efforts work, sometimes not.
I have to admit that I had some preconceptions about the Japanese school system that have turned out to be not quite correct. First of all, I had the impression that in Asia, students are basically lectured to and that students are not really encouraged to ask questions or god forbid, correct the teacher if they make a mistake. Well, this is not entirely so. While rote memorization is certainly the most standard fare here, the overall classroom atmosphere is a lot more casual than I expected, especially with regard to the relationships between the teachers and the students. The students enjoy chatting with the teachers, even teasing them sometimes and the teachers seem to feel a greater sense of personal responsibility for the students. Eventhough there is a counsellor at my school, the teachers are the ones who the students usually go to with their personal problems. I also somehow expected discipline in Japan to be stricter than in Canada. While discipline is important in Japanese schools, the manner in which it's exercised here is softer compared to Canada. In the West, we rely heavily on external pressures to make students behave, but here in Japan, the students seem to be encouraged more to think about how their behaviour affects the rest of the students. The Japanese feel that every child has a right to an education. Therefore, students in Japan are never expelled or even sent to the principal's office. A good example of how discipline works here is an incident that occurred last week that was brought to the attention of the entire school in an interesting manner. After lunch, while everyone was still in the lunchroom, one of the administrators told the entire student body about an incident where a boy had vandalized a girl's bike at school. While the name of the boy was not mentioned, the victim had to talk in front of the whole school about having her bike vandalized. For the most part, I would have to say that their seems to be fewer disciplinary problems in Japan than in Western countries. My students can be frustrating and annoying sometimes but they never get out of hand.
In the West, there also exists the common assumption that most Japanese are very shy and reserved and not very open about expressing themselves. Well being around young Japanese students has shown me that while I think that they are perhaps less mature than Canadian students of the same age, this naivete also brings out a greater deal of openness. While I expected that Japanese people would be more reserved about touching others, especially members of the opposite sex, Japanese kids are definitely less shy about touching than Canadian kids. I often see boys holding hands in the hallways and even sitting on each other sometimes. And while Western countries are still reeling from the recent exposure of sexual harrassment going on between teachers and students, here there seems to be less awareness of this issue. I don't know if it's because they have fewer problems with this here or if there is less direct recognition of it, but the teachers and students here are fairly open about expressing affection for each other and the teachers don't hesitate to touch their students. It leaves me with the feeling that most of the teachers here genuinely care for their students a great deal, not just as students, but personally as well. I also forgot to mention that the teacher's room is not off limits to the students. The students are free to enter anytime (although they have to bow and say ‘excuse me' first), so the teachers are pretty much accessible to them at any time.
After four fifty minute periods, it's 12:30 and it's time for lunch. Every student in Japan is guaranteed a hot meal everyday and the school lunch is in fact another form of education for Japanese students. The lunches are dropped off ready to eat, but the students are responsible for dishing out the food and setting the place settings. To do this, they don white smocks and masks and are impressively well coordinated in order to get everyone sitting and eating quickly. Everyday I sit with a different class (the students are not allowed to choose where to sit, they must sit with their class). Before we can chow down, one of the students steps up onto a small stage at the front of the lunchroom with a microphone and comments briefly on the nutritional content of the day's lunch and leads everyone in clasping their hands together and saying "Itadakimasu!", meaning, ‘I (humbly) receive'. Japan is a land full of people with well- developed culinary tastes and therefore has fabulous cuisine. However, the mediocrity of school lunches seems to be a universal problem. Usually I'm too hungry to care too much, but I don't find the meals to be especially nutritious. Japanese cuisine offers so much in the way of healthy fare, but very little of it ends up in our school lunch. Lunch usually consists of some kind of soup or stew, a bowl of rice (often the only truly good thing about the school lunch), some weird and often rubbery meat product (squid on a stick, anyone?), a side dish of some kind of shredded vegetable and mayonaisse salad and a glass of milk. Oh and did I mention that almost everything has bacon in it, including the salad? If you go to a Japanese restaurant, you will rarely find much pork on the menu, but now thanks to the school lunch, I find myself eating more bacon than I did in Canada. The only lunch that everyone actually looks forward to is when we get to have curry rice. The worst, though, is bread day, when our usual bowl of rice is replaced by big slabs of sugary white bread. UUUGGH! Fortunately though, I will soon have a brief respite from the horrors of school lunch as they have promised me that they will be making a Canadian school lunch sometime. They asked me for some typical Canadian foods and at the time, the only things I could really think of were pancakes and bacon (I could do without it though) and chili. So we'll see what they end up serving us!! After lunch, I cruise the hallways to harrass the students and get them to speak English. It can be a little tough at times, as most of the students are either too shy to speak in English or simply do not understand very much. Usually when I talk to them, the standard questions they ask me are pretty much the same: Do you have a boyfriend? Do you like so and so sensei? Do you like natto? (Natto is a sticky, somewhat smelly food made of fermented soybeans that is very healthy and sometimes served at school lunch. Many foreigners hate it, but I think that it's not bad). But at least goofing off is a universial language and I like being able to relate to the students not just as a teacher, but on a more casual friendly level too. I do have a few students who are a little more proficient and adventurous with their English, but that's usually because they go to English juku.
That is another interesting aspect of the Japanese educational system. It is not taken for granted that all students will go on to highschool and there are many different types of highschools that are designed to accomodate the varying abilities and goals of the students, whether they be academic or technical or whatever. What this means is that the students have some choice as to where they would like to go to highschool, but they are required to pass entrance exams for the highschool of their choice, which are supposed to be pretty brutal. So the students study, study, and study some more. Probably more than half of my students spend at least four or five hours per week (usually on the weekends) to go to a juku school. Juku schools are private institutions that exist simply to help students cram for their entrance exams and usually cover all subjects. However, there are many that just teach English. I have several friends here who run private English jukus.
After lunch, there are two more periods, the last one ending at 3:30. So after a long day do you think the kids are ready to go home? No!! After the last class, the students have cleaning time. While bizarre instrumental music is blared over the PA system, the students are required to clean the entire school. They clean the classrooms, the hallways, the bathrooms and even the teachers' room. Again this is not just so that they don't have to pay for a janitor (the school does have a custodian, by the way). Cleaning time is considered a vital part of the education system here. While, granted the school doesn't end up being as clean as it could be, I think that it's a great idea. It teaches the students to respect and take care of their school and increases their feelings of ownership and responsibility towards the school. The students say that they hate it, but I think that they benefit from it. After cleaning time, the students are required to attend a twenty-minute homeroom and then it's time for club activities. In Japan, club activities are not optional. Every student is required to belong to a club which usually involves staying late after school and sometimes coming to school on the weekends. So needless to say, Japanese students are very, very busy. And so are the teachers. They usually stay at school everyday until around 7 or 8pm or even later during testing times. They demonstrate a very high level of commitment to their students. I have to admit, being an ALT is a lot easier than being a regular teacher. I usually leave work anytime between 4:30 and 5:30 and while I do do some work at home, my workload is nothing compared to the other teachers. So I try to help out as much as I can; lately I've been making listening tapes, conducting speaking tests and marking compositions written by the students.
But all of this work doesn't mean that there is no time for fun at school. Today, for example, we were on a special schedule, so after first period there were no classes, only student council meetings. So I was left to just sit in the teachers' room (boring!), until a Gr. 1 student came in with a letter he had written (with some help, of course) inviting me to come to his class later this morning to take part in a ‘festival' that they had arranged. I wish I had brought my camera!! The students had set up different booths with different activities all centred around the most important and ubiquitous thing in my town: kaki. Kaki is the Japanese name for persimmons (remember I mentioned them before). Well they are everywhere and you can't escape them. (I always get a big bag of them everytime I visit one of my elementary schools. One of the teachers must also be a farmer). So this was a kaki festival featuring kaki lassis (quite delicious actually), kaki jack o'lantern carving, kaki weight guessing, kaki key chain making and even a short play about kaki. While the kids could use a few acting lessons, they put a lot of thought and effort into their festival. One word that seems to encapsulate the overall attitude that Japanese students take towards their school activities and that one hears over and over again in Japan is ‘Gambarimashoo!' ("Let's do our best!").
So just like in the West, I think that the Japanese educational system has both it's good points and bad points, but overall, I'm really enjoying teaching here. The students are a real pleasure and it's a great feeling when the students tell me that they enjoy my classes and we have some real communication together. While the language barrier is tough sometimes, it provides me with an ongoing challenge to find different ways to capture the students' interests and to communicate with them. I hope that I haven't rambled on too much about this, but I hope that you all find it somewhat interesting. I can honestly say that every day is different here and whenever I get to spend time with the students, it is never boring!
Mata ne,
Yanagi-sensei
posted by Willow at
4:31 AM
