Squeaky Wheel

There are approximately 450 students at the school where I teach.  And I, at some point or another, will teach them all.  They are split into three grades of 150 students each, and I do two-week rotations through each grade.  Even though I’ve already been at it for six months now, I still only know a fraction of their names.  And when I feel like I start to get to know a student a little bit, it is another four weeks before I will see them in class again.  Now, if I was the only teacher in the classroom, or even the main teacher with an assistant, it wouldn’t work.  But I am the assistant; I am there to supplement and aid the main teacher.  It’s a weird place to be, and it has taken some time for me to even figure out what my goals at work should be since my goals cannot be the same as a normal teacher.  That being said, I do feel that my job is important and I make a significant contribution to my students.

But this isn’t a post about my goals as an assistant; I want to focus on that fraction of kids whose names I somehow remember.  Why do I remember them?  Why do they get my attention in class?  Why are there still students that I greet in the mornings that I do not remember ever seeing before in the school?  What does a student need to do to make sure he/she gets the attention he/she needs from the teacher? 

First of all memorable students (not surprisingly) are the trouble makers.  This makes sense.  Their names are the first ones to be learned, and their images get burned on your mind from all the stress they cause you.  But hey, I remember them.  I remember what they are good at and where they struggle.  During class I always have an eye devoted to them, mostly to make sure they aren’t getting into trouble, but along with that comes a greater attention to how they are doing academically and otherwise. 

The next group of memorable students are the brown-nosers.  These students are well behaved, active in class, and always ready to go above and beyond to prove to their teachers how happy and grateful they are to learn.  No one likes a brown-noser, but the thing is, it works.  You do get noticed, and remembered.  Maybe brown-noser is a harsh term, but it will have to suffice for what I am trying to get at.  These students make their teacher’s life easier and maybe even more rewarding.  And the teacher will remember that. 

The third group for me gets remembered because they remind me of something else in life, maybe they have a familiar face, maybe their mannerisms match those of someone else I know, who knows.  They don’t really have any control of this, but they stick out in some way, and usually this way is particular to me.  And they get noticed.  And since I remember them, I want to keep track on how they are doing.  Week after week I want to check in with them, and the only reason they got lucky enough was because of something interesting in their appearance.

And then there’s the rest of the kids – the ones that get forgotten, fall through the cracks, left behind, whatever you want to say.  It is hard for me to admit that kids like this exist for me, but when I consider that I will only spend three months out of the year teaching these 450 kids their existence is unavoidable.  In class I try to look at all the kids’ faces and see which ones I can immediately identify, if not by name then at least by “oh, that’s the one I sat next to at lunch last week.”  So many kids here fall into this category.  They don’t cause trouble, but they don’t particularly find any joy in learning English either.  They turn in their homework, repeat their exercises, and get lost amidst the trouble makers and the brown-nosers.  The squeaky wheel gets the grease, eh?  I do my best to watch out for all the wheels as much as I can, but the student that demands attention is the one that will get attention.  It isn’t fair to the other students.  And it isn’t fair to me, either.  I want to know all my students, but it looks like this might be as good as it will get.  In six more weeks the school year turns over, and 150 of those students I was trying to get to know will move on, and 150 new ones will come in and take their place.  Maybe I’ll be able to do better with the new batch.

English Camp!

Tamura is a special place for students to learn English.  I think you would be hard pressed to find another part of Japan with a student-to-ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) ratio as high as the one here.   As such, we can do some things here for students that you wouldn’t find in other parts of the country.  One of these things is English Camp.  English Camp is a two-day program that all the sixth graders in the town get to experience.  All students begin studying English in middle school, so one goal of the camp is to give kids a little bit of a head start in English study.  We also want the kids to start having fun with English, so we play a lot of games and crafts, and teach a little lesson about the most important American holiday (at least in the mind of a sixth grader), Halloween.  Yay candy!  Another goal of the camp is for kids to get to know students from other schools – when kids go to middle school, much like how we do things in the states, students from various elementary schools are combined.  We group students together that will be at the same middle school next year.  So not only are kids getting a head start on English and having fun at the same time, they are also meeting new friends and forming relationships they can look forward to next year.  We ran a total of four camps over the past two weeks, one for each of the middle schools in town. 

Day one of camp was always a little awkward to start.  Kids can be shy, especially when you put them in a group with a crazy off-the-wall American.  But we would always get over that quick enough.  Camps had anywhere from 70 to 170 kids, and we would break them into groups of 15 or so.  We started the day with simple introductions and then played some ice breakers and name games.  It’s fun being in a new country doing these sorts of games because they are all new to the kids here.  I’m used to kids being bored with ice breakers and name games back in the States, because they’ve seen them all already.  Kids over here are hesitant at first, but they get really excited about these games once they understand the rules.  I wonder what Japanese ice breakers look like, or if they even have an equivalent for that over here.  Some students did teach me a Japanese version of Red Light – Green Light a few days ago; they were excited to learn the American variant after teaching me how the Japanese play the game.  After ice breakers we would have to come up with our team name.  We gave each team a list of adjectives and a list of nouns.  They would pick their favorite from each list and combine them to make a name.  This led to some interesting names.  This year English Camp got to see the Big Bananas, Pink Monkeys, Dangerous Underpants, Cool Tigers, and Rainbow Kings, among others.  After choosing a team name students would have time to make a team poster.

The second part of day one was the infamous shopping game.  Each team was a different store (pet store, candy store, school supply store, etc.).  We took time to teach the vocabulary of what each store sold, and then we taught a simple shopping dialogue.  After some practice, we let the kids loose in our makeshift strip-mall, half the kids manning the stores, the other half trying to buy all the items on their shopping lists with the fake money we provided them.  It was a fun game, and a good way to get kids speaking English.  When we would teach the shopping dialogue, most of the students would be really nervous to try and practice.  But the chaos of the kids running around trying to get to each store provided the perfect cover for students to try the dialogue without being afraid of making mistakes.  I’m pretty sure everyone had it down by the end of the day, even the students that had been terrified to speak in English at the start of the day. 

Day two was all about Halloween.  At the start of the day we would have plenty of supplies set out and the kids would get busy making masks and decorating candy bags in preparation for the afternoon’s Halloween Party.  After all the sequins and stickers and pompoms and markers were cleaned up, we would spend some time practicing writing the alphabet; most students already knew the alphabet, but it was good for them to practice, and there were enough students that didn’t know much about writing letters that it was a worthwhile time.  But after lunch came what most of the kids would say was the highlight of camp: The Halloween Party.  All the teachers got dressed up in costumes and paraded around the students, with another teacher and myself giving energetic introductions of each costume.  We had a couple cowgirls, some Barbies, Pooh and Tigger, and I was (of course) Pikachu.   After the parade we would take some time to explain what happens on Halloween in the States, and then we got into a massive jonken (rock, paper, scissors) tournament.  Let me pause here at say a word about rock, paper, scissors.  It is way more popular over here than in the States.  Students are playing all the time; teachers will play with students sometimes to determine how big a homework assignment will be; they have different things you say depending on how many times you throw the same thing (e.g. both throwing rock, both throwing paper).  People take it pretty seriously over here.  Anyway, that to say that a jonken tourney in Japan holds a lot more excitement that a rock, paper, scissors tourney would in the States.  After that we would play one last large group game before ending camp.  That would be sharks and minnows, if the space allowed.  Again, here is a game that is old hat to any kid in the States, but is brand new to the kids over here.  Needless to say, they have a lot of fun with it. 

After the Halloween party we conclude the English Camp.  A quick note on meetings or programs in Japan: formality and structure is highly valued, even when working with 12-year-olds.  Before and after each section of camp it was imperative that someone would announce that we were officially starting or officially ending.  At the beginning of day one each teacher would have to give a brief introduction and say how excited they were about camp.  At the end both teachers and students would get up and say something about their favorite part of the camp.  There is a particular way to do everything in Japan, it seems.  Sometimes as an American the Japanese way seems strange or even inefficient, but what can I say?  When in Rome…

So we did it.  English Camp 2012 is done!  And this weekend comes the celebratory retreat to a nearby onsen, which you will probably be hearing about in a future post. 

This post was long overdue; sorry for that.  As you can see, though, I’ve been a little busy with English Camp the last few weeks.  And maybe a little bit of culture shock has left me without the energy necessary to bang out a new post.  That might be an interesting topic for a future post: culture shock.  Everyone experiences when they come over here, but for each person it looks a little different.  I’m still figuring out how it’s really affecting me, so maybe I’ll let ya’ll in on what it’s like.

(And thanks for the pics Ashley!)

First Day Of School! First Day Of School!

“Are we different, or are we the same?  We are different, and we are the same.”  This is the final line of one of my students’ speeches to be presented at next week’s contest.  I know it’s a bit obvious, but my time here is going to be filled with realizations of how people are different and the same.  This week was no exception.

The Japanese do school different from Americans.  For those that are unfamiliar with how education works in Japan, here are a few of the observations I’ve made so far:

• I teach in a middle school.  It contains three years of students and is the equivalent of grades 7-9 in the states.  My school, Funehiki Chugako, has five classes of about 30 students each for each grade.  These classes will stay together for all three years of their middle school experience.  These kids get to know each other well; each class develops its own sort of culture.  Already I’ve noticed a difference between the atmospheres of the different classes.  Not only do the classes not change students throughout the day, classrooms don’t change either.  Each class stays in its own room all day, and teachers are the ones that have to change classrooms.  There is one large teachers office where each teacher has a desk to do whatever prep work, lesson planning, grading, etc. he/she needs to do, and they have to carry whatever materials they need to class with them.  (Actually, a couple students will come to the office before class and help the teacher carry materials for class, but the point is that teachers don’t have permanent teaching area – it’s always changing.) 
• School lunches in Japan are really good.  Teachers and students all get the same thing, and it is really good and healthy.  At lunch time a few appointed students from each class don a special shirt, face mask, and hair net and walk down stairs to carry up lunch for their class while the other students rearrange the desks from rows into table groups.  Once this is done the appointed students serve everyone else in the class.  The students wait in their seats until everyone has been served and then let loose a hearty “itadakimas” for the feast to commence.  Each day lunch has some sort of salad/vegetable, rice or soba, milk, vegetable, and soup/curry.  Food in general seems much healthier and school lunch is no exception.  I think about gross school lunches in the states and wonder how hard it would be to get them to the state of Japanese lunches.
• Uniforms aren’t that much of a distinction in a comparison to US schools, but there is one interesting element to them.  Each class has its own color of shoes.  First year students have yellow shoes, second year have red, and third year have green.  Students’ shoes stay with them so next year yellow shoes will indicate second year, red shoes will be third year, etc. 
• Japanese schools have no janitors.  Students and teachers are in charge of keeping the school clean.  Each day at the end of class we have a cleaning period called souji.  Students put on white hats and go sit in silence in the hallway waiting for the signal for cleaning to commence.  As soon as they get the go-ahead they head off to various roles, some students cleaning their classroom, others in the bathrooms, some cleaning the teachers’ office, some in the principal’s office, etc.  Teachers and students clean together, mopping on hands and knees, pushing desks from one side of the classroom, until the job is done. 
• Extra-curricular activities look different too.  In the states you can be involved in as few or as many student clubs or sports teams as you want/have time for.  Not so in Japan.  Each student has to be in one and only one club.  You choose your club first year, and you work at that one thing your entire time at middle school.  So if you are on the soccer team you can’t be in band or choir.  This has advantages and disadvantages.  By focusing on just one activity, students get really good at that one thing.  The choir performed last week at an assembly and they sounded like they could have been a top class high school choir or maybe even a college choir back in the states.  But no boys are in the choir.  And there are only two boys in band.  The boys tend to gravitate more towards the sports clubs which means they can’t do any sort of music in addition to that.  Kids look at me surprised when I try to explain all the different things I did when I was in school.

These are only a few of the things I noticed in my first week – who knows what I’ll see after a month, a year….