I have Sundays and Mondays off. Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday I work at our privately owned school in Gokiso. Although Tuesday I travel to Anjo which is about a two hour train ride from the apartment, the schedule mirrors that of Gokiso. Only Fridays must I leave the comfort of our No Borders curriculum to brave the storm of Takasaka youchien.
In America we generally begin school between the ages of five and six. By Japanese standards your children have already withered at that time and should have been stuffed into matching uniforms, taught to sing in unison and line up in proper order by the age of three. That’s on average. There are schools who will accept children at the age of two.
This is not preschool. No Borders does offer preschool English, but by no means will we expect your two-year-old to line up alphabetically. We barely expect them to be able to form words in Japanese, let alone English. If Shino cannot finish her lunch, we won’t make her sit for an hour and a half with spinach stuffed in her cheeks until she swallows the last bit. That’s just not the way to treat children, let alone babies or toddlers.
Yet, I have seen little three-year-olds cry at Takasaka youchien because they didn’t understand where to line up. Their teachers will yell at them, “Why can’t you do it? Look at everyone else! They can do it!” I have watched students sit stoically, faces bulging with their most despised food in either cheek. I have secretly stowed broccoli away in a napkin and taken it home to dispose of so that the teacher would have no evidence to convict little Ozora of such a heinous crime.
By my standards, these expectations are ridiculous, but this is not my country. These are not my rules to make. As a foreigner I understand that by choosing to live here, I also choose to abide by conventions that might seem odd or even wrong in my culture, (even if I might rebel once in a while by helping one or two kids get rid of a couple of veggies). And so, every Friday, I bike the mountain up to Takasaka.
It is, literally, a mountain. “Taka” in Japanese means “high” and “saka” means “hill.” To an Iowan, this means, “a mountain.” My bicycle has no gears. Eat your heart out, RAGBRAI. By the time I get into the school, I’m hot, grumpy and sweaty and have been verbally harassed by at least twenty kids at once within the first two minutes.
I should mention that I was featured in the school newsletter not but two weeks ago. A lovely color photograph of me was included amongst the other teachers, (a photograph taken upon one of those hot, grumpy, sweaty occasions that makes me look unbelievably fat), along with a short description of the things I’m “all about” these days. When they asked me to write a response to the interview question, I wrote a thoughtful comment in Japanese and even had Tetsuya check to make sure it sounded just the way I wanted. The translation goes something like:
Q: What are you “all about” these days?
今はまっているはなんですか。
A: These days I play guitar. I have fun playing the songs I’ve been playing since I was young.
最近ギターを弾いています。若いころに好きだった曲などを弾いて楽しんでいます。
Q: What was your dream as a child?
子供の頃夢はなんですか。
A: When I was a kid I always wanted to travel to Japan. Now I am so glad that this dream has become a reality.
子供だった時、いつも日本へ旅行したかったのです。今ではその夢は現実になってきて、とてもうれしいです。
However, underneath my incredibly unflattering picture were three simple words, “Guitar and Travel Japan.” As if this wasn’t insult enough, as I looked at my job position description, I realized that they had labeled me not as, “English Teacher,” nor “Teacher from America,” but literally, “The Foreign Teacher.” According to that I could be teaching the kids how to speak Hindi. Or I might be hosting an international colloquium on species diversification and the effects of global warming. Either way the kids would be getting a hell of a lot more out of class than what I’ve been offering.
At Gokiso, kids from barely age two to three get an English lesson from ten in the morning to two-thirty in the afternoon and kids from ages three to eight get an hour and forty minute lesson at least once, (most twice or more), a week. Morning kids at Takasaka get twenty minutes every four weeks or so. After school kids have it better. Forty-five minutes once a week. Still, there’s not much retention.
So what’s “The Foreign Teacher” to do? I go, I serve my time once a week, they take loads of pictures of me with the kids, (do God knows what with them), and I teach twenty minutes of “What’s your name?” “How are you?” “How’s the weather?” and “I like strawberry!”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s the system I disagree with. The kids are great. I go home with pockets full of treasures. Origami hearts, acorns, flower petals, rocks… all of the things precious in this “line up, eat everything, color in the lines with the right color” kind of environment. All I can do is be myself and give them a little chaos in their otherwise over-organized Japanese-school-child lives.
In America we generally begin school between the ages of five and six. By Japanese standards your children have already withered at that time and should have been stuffed into matching uniforms, taught to sing in unison and line up in proper order by the age of three. That’s on average. There are schools who will accept children at the age of two.
This is not preschool. No Borders does offer preschool English, but by no means will we expect your two-year-old to line up alphabetically. We barely expect them to be able to form words in Japanese, let alone English. If Shino cannot finish her lunch, we won’t make her sit for an hour and a half with spinach stuffed in her cheeks until she swallows the last bit. That’s just not the way to treat children, let alone babies or toddlers.
Yet, I have seen little three-year-olds cry at Takasaka youchien because they didn’t understand where to line up. Their teachers will yell at them, “Why can’t you do it? Look at everyone else! They can do it!” I have watched students sit stoically, faces bulging with their most despised food in either cheek. I have secretly stowed broccoli away in a napkin and taken it home to dispose of so that the teacher would have no evidence to convict little Ozora of such a heinous crime.
By my standards, these expectations are ridiculous, but this is not my country. These are not my rules to make. As a foreigner I understand that by choosing to live here, I also choose to abide by conventions that might seem odd or even wrong in my culture, (even if I might rebel once in a while by helping one or two kids get rid of a couple of veggies). And so, every Friday, I bike the mountain up to Takasaka.
It is, literally, a mountain. “Taka” in Japanese means “high” and “saka” means “hill.” To an Iowan, this means, “a mountain.” My bicycle has no gears. Eat your heart out, RAGBRAI. By the time I get into the school, I’m hot, grumpy and sweaty and have been verbally harassed by at least twenty kids at once within the first two minutes.
I should mention that I was featured in the school newsletter not but two weeks ago. A lovely color photograph of me was included amongst the other teachers, (a photograph taken upon one of those hot, grumpy, sweaty occasions that makes me look unbelievably fat), along with a short description of the things I’m “all about” these days. When they asked me to write a response to the interview question, I wrote a thoughtful comment in Japanese and even had Tetsuya check to make sure it sounded just the way I wanted. The translation goes something like:
Q: What are you “all about” these days?
今はまっているはなんですか。
A: These days I play guitar. I have fun playing the songs I’ve been playing since I was young.
最近ギターを弾いています。若いころに好きだった曲などを弾いて楽しんでいます。
Q: What was your dream as a child?
子供の頃夢はなんですか。
A: When I was a kid I always wanted to travel to Japan. Now I am so glad that this dream has become a reality.
子供だった時、いつも日本へ旅行したかったのです。今ではその夢は現実になってきて、とてもうれしいです。
However, underneath my incredibly unflattering picture were three simple words, “Guitar and Travel Japan.” As if this wasn’t insult enough, as I looked at my job position description, I realized that they had labeled me not as, “English Teacher,” nor “Teacher from America,” but literally, “The Foreign Teacher.” According to that I could be teaching the kids how to speak Hindi. Or I might be hosting an international colloquium on species diversification and the effects of global warming. Either way the kids would be getting a hell of a lot more out of class than what I’ve been offering.
At Gokiso, kids from barely age two to three get an English lesson from ten in the morning to two-thirty in the afternoon and kids from ages three to eight get an hour and forty minute lesson at least once, (most twice or more), a week. Morning kids at Takasaka get twenty minutes every four weeks or so. After school kids have it better. Forty-five minutes once a week. Still, there’s not much retention.
So what’s “The Foreign Teacher” to do? I go, I serve my time once a week, they take loads of pictures of me with the kids, (do God knows what with them), and I teach twenty minutes of “What’s your name?” “How are you?” “How’s the weather?” and “I like strawberry!”
Don’t get me wrong, it’s the system I disagree with. The kids are great. I go home with pockets full of treasures. Origami hearts, acorns, flower petals, rocks… all of the things precious in this “line up, eat everything, color in the lines with the right color” kind of environment. All I can do is be myself and give them a little chaos in their otherwise over-organized Japanese-school-child lives.
1 comment:
wow, do I ever know what you're talking about. See if you can convince the school to let you guys make sock puppets. You can teach body/face parts and secretly give the students the opportunity to be completely creative! I did this activity with my kids when I worked at an eikaiwa and they loved it! Just give random materials, a sock, even a glove and say "go!".
Now working at the highschool, it's the same controlled environment. To break away from this, my awesome Canadian boss suggested that we let our students do whatever they wanted as long as it was 2 minutes in English. For the most part the students just did boring self-intro speeches BUT there were a few who actually stepped outside the cage and did something fun!
We need to hang out soon! I'll definitely come to you BBQ!
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