School Life (The Nerdy Side of C.O.G.)

Finally got around to this one.  Hopefully it provides a more rounded view of what I do here day to day, along with some gee-whiz-they-do-different-things-than-we-do moments.

School in Japan is a much more all-consuming part of a kid's life than it is in America.  I leave at 4:00 most days, but many of the students stay long after me, until 6:00 or 7:00, with club activities every day.  They come in on most weekends as well.  Also, with a summer break of only a month, school is close to year-round.  My classes have been pretty floored when I tell them American kids get three months off for summer break.

The teachers also stay at school incredibly late, often to 7:00 or later even if they're not running a club activity (in fact, the kids often run clubs and sports practices by themselves).  To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what they're working on; I've heard from other JETs that they have to deal with a ton of possibly unnecessary administrative work.

The office.

A big change that I had to get used to was that there is one large teacher's office, and the teachers move between classes instead of having their own classroom.  The kids remain in the same room for the most part, except for specialty classes like art or music.  While there is a secretary's office, there is no front desk--this means that insurance salesmen and other solicitors can just walk right into the office and leave their advertising materials for teachers.

The salesmen, of course, walk around in small borrowed slippers.  You have to remove your shoes to go into most buildings in Japan.  I have a cubby and a special set of work shoes that I change into every day, and the kids have the same (in fact, they all have the exact same brand of shoe to go along with their uniforms).

I work exclusively in a team-teaching situation.  That is to say, I am never in class without a JTE (Japanese Teacher of English (this is the acronym used by the JET (Japanese Exchange and Teaching) program; while it's a little awkward sounding, the alternative is Japanese English Teacher, which of course would be...JET. (The Japanese overuse acronyms as much as I overuse parentheticals))).  In high school, other JETs have more autonomy, which I often wish I had.  Junior high English classes are taught mostly from the textbook and focus primarily on rote memorization and dialogue recitation.

This is a huge problem I have with the junior high English curriculum, which is nationwide.  When I ask my kids "How are you?", they all answer "I'm fine thank you, how are you?" in a clipped, incorrectly inflected way.  It's pretty clear they often just know the sounds and not the meaning of the words.  They are taught to expect one correct answer to every question, which is a terrible way to learn a language.  I don't know enough about America's public middle school language curriculum to make an educated comparison, but this system is less than ideal.

Every JET's experience over here is different, just as every area and school is different.  Some people have 20 schools in rural areas that they have to bus to, only seeing a school every couple months, while some have one school that they devote all their time to.  I have two schools, and I move between them on a roughly month-long block rotation.  I teach three or four 50 minute classes a day out of twenty classes over three grades.  This means I never see a class more often than once a week.

My desk, with "Sweet Home Chicago" lyrics and guitar close at hand.

I always have to work whatever I want to do into the JTE's lesson plan.  They arrive at my desk with an idea (or I go to them) and ask me to fill a certain amount of time, which can vary widely from teacher to teacher.  I am usually in charge of finding a fun activity to do or something otherwise different from the strict grammar instruction.  Sometimes I think of something on my own, and sometimes I search online for activities.  Sometimes I am just used as a tape recorder, the JTE prompting me to repeat words and phrases for a native accent demonstration.  Those are my least favorite classes, but luckily there haven't been many of them.

Like every school, every teacher is different, and it's been an interesting experience getting to know the 11 different teachers from my two schools.  Communicating with them is sometimes difficult, because of both English level (much lower than I expected in some cases) and cultural differences.  As the Japanese tend to state intent and problems indirectly, it's hard to know what they expect of me.  Mostly it's been trial and error.

Usually, the first class with each group of kids is a self-introduction lesson which I came up with over the summer.  I printed off lots of pictures from home, brought in my Colorado flag and a map of the US, and I walk them through a little bit of my life.  Over time, I worked out a way to get some English practice in along with the cultural stuff.  For instance, after showing pictures of my family, I had them repeat "Mother" and "Father" and then I worked on pronouncing the "th" sound.  I did this by sticking out my tongue and biting it to emphasize what your mouth does with the sound, then trying them to do the same.  Trying to get a full class of Japanese kids to stick out their tongues was often one of the hardest parts of my lessons.

Japanese students are, by and large, much more shy than American students.  This is problematic for language learning, as it's difficult to figure out what they know if they don't speak.  Often I've discovered they know a grammar point very well, but completely clam up when I ask them about it.  One of the ways I tried to get everyone loose was to teach them a song.  At the end of my self-introduction, I taught them the chorus to "Sweet Home Chicago" after explaining that I went to Chicago for university and that I play guitar.  Some classes had a hard time, but some got really into it as I played and sang along.  I'm going to try to do a lot of teaching through songs, as my experience learning and teaching French at camp taught me how effective that can be.

The kids also tend to be scared of being original, in my experience.  It's possible that this is just a function of them being middle schoolers, but I think it's more pronounced here.  For instance, to review "-er than" and "the -est", I had them draw their own superhero or monster and give it an age and a height, then told them to compare with other students' superheroes and write comparative sentences.  Many kids just didn't get it when I told them to draw their OWN superhero, not Pikachu or Doraemon or Anpanman (all anime characters).  Even a couple of the JTEs had trouble with the concept.  I also tried a Mad Libs activity to practice a dialogue sample and to illustrate sentence structure that the kids eventually enjoyed but had a really hard time with at first.  For instance, to demonstrate what a noun was, I wrote things like "school, bike, ocean" on the board.  The JTE explained in Japanese, but still many kids wrote down "school" or "bike" or "ocean" in the blank instead of their own word.  I hope I can stretch their minds a bit in this way while I'm here.

I think the way I'm having the biggest influence is talking to the kids outside of class and just being a big tall white guy that doesn't speak Japanese.  A lot of my educational power right now comes from my novelty, so I may adjust some of what I do as the kids (and teachers) get more used to me, and I to them, as the year goes on.

I hope this serves as a good start to understanding some of the differences here.  Please let me know if you have more specific questions or comments--sometimes it's difficult for me to know what will be the most interesting to people back home, I hope we can keep up a conversation of sorts.