Andrew's Japan Blog: A Day At Work - Now With 60% More Alligator!

Hello everyone!

It's been a while and I apologize. Because work has kept me so busy lately, I thought it was only fitting to write about it this evening. I will write about it in three parts, and intersperse pictures I've drawn of Alistair for my students.

Part I – The Daily Schedule

School starts at 8:30 every morning, so I get up at 7:30 and make myself presentable before making the 15 minute walk to my school. Usually I pack my own lunch, but I can always buy lunch from the cafeteria or the bakery across the street if need be. Then at 4:15 I can go home, provided that there isn't a club activity or speech contest prep I need to help with. Usually I manage to get home between 5 and 6 pm at which point I usually cook, do dishes, wash the laundry, and study Japanese.

“But Andrew!” you may say, “What does your daily schedule look like while you're at work?” Truth be told, I'm still not entirely sure. I remember seeing numerous videos about Japanese schools in my formative years, and between the matching school uniforms, group exercises, and students cleaning the classrooms I got the impression that the schedules would be just as regimented...but now it seems I was wrong.

While the Senior High School at my place of work is fairly regular and predictable, the Junior High (where I teach the bulk of my classes) is not. To start with, the Japanese schools have many special events- culture festivals, open school days, sports days, etc. The school board is also mandated to give students a certain number of hours in each class, so if students miss a specific class because of a special event, the entire schedule has to be rotated to restore the balance. This re-balancing can be so severe that one day a section of my students had three classes of English (non-consecutively).

Things get harder for the Assistant English Teachers (AETs) because we do not attend every English lesson our students have. It is up to the full-time teachers to decide when they need us. Unfortunately when they're just as thrown off by the schedule as we are, we might only get a few minutes notice before a class starts that they need us. It is, as one of my friends says, crazy making.

At this point I think I should say that I don't blame any of the teachers I work with for this problem, because I get the sense that they're just as stretched thin by the constant shuffling as we are. Also, they've been super understanding when I give them panicked looks, hold up a stack of papers that need to be graded, and whimper.

Part II – What is it You do in Class Anyway?

As an AET my role in the classroom is a mix of tape-recorder, class pet, and cultural enrichment provider. Every day class starts with the students standing, mutual bowing, and then an “Oral Drill” activity. This entails me reading a list of words and the students repeating after each one- in theory this helps the students memorize new words and learn how to pronounce them correctly. Then the students practice key phrases with their partners, usually with one of them saying the phrase in Japanese and the other translating them. Often there is a prize for the pair who can get through the fastest, and the outcome is a sudden din of English and Japanese. My job at this point is to walk around and give comment and encouragement on their pronunciation, rhythm, etc. but with all the noise from their feverish recitation for all I know they could be chanting ancient curses from Egypt.

“May your loins be as infertile as the desert sands!”

“Very good Tomoko! You're making great progress!”

Once the drill activities are done we sometimes correct homework, read from the textbook, or review key grammar on the chalk board. We just taught our first-year students the “ing” form of verbs, i.e. “Andrew is teaching!” So for one of my classes I was asked to pantomime an action while the kids had to guess and explain what I was doing in English. They guessed playing golf and eating easily enough, but when it came to dancing both parties were a little bit stumped. “Huh...what dance should I do? I don't know any dance...uh...they know the macarena, right?” Said Andrew's brain. So, to my credit, I bravely performed the macarena to the confused silence of a group of 13-year-olds. When I got to the part where you wiggle your hips and hop (which I did masterfully, by the way) suddenly- “OH! Andrew is dancing!!” And I was off the hook.

On days that I come in, I usually give some sort of presentation on culture that pertains to a reading section in the Unit. For example, the other day I gave a presentation on hospital clowns. Before that I did a presentation about Halloween (doing my best walking dead impression) and a presentation on Mongolia. Usually we ask the students questions and reward them with stickers. We've also been asking the students critical thinking questions and asking them to do some writing at the end of each one. Recently I told my second year middle-school students about the “occupy Wall street” movement in the United States. I showed them a picture of the protesters and explained briefly about unemployment and income disparities (I did not use those particular words!) Then I asked them to answer the following questions: “Is it good that these people are protesting? Will it change anything?” I thought the break-down of their answers was interesting, so I’m going to share them with you:

Of my 25 students, 17* of them said that it was good for the people to be protesting. The 7 that thought protesting was bad explained that they were worried about riots or thought that angry words don’t solve anything.
Only 16 of the students made it to the second question, but of those 8 said that protests could change things, and another 4 said that the protests would help educate people about problems. 3 students said that they would not create change, and 1 student said that it was possible for the protests to go either way.

I think it’s safe to say that the Japanese have a reputation for not wanting to rock the boat, but while I’ve been here I’ve noticed that this isn’t entirely true. The people of Japan are not living in ignorant bliss, and they do express displeasure when things are not going well. In a recent post I discussed how many Japanese began refusing to pay their public television bill after it became clear that the NHK was mismanaging the funds. There has also been a great deal of unrest surrounding the country’s nuclear energy program, although I have not seen many formal protests (as I’m sure one would find in America). The one protest I did see was a small group of elderly Japanese with signs outside of the local mall. They weren’t chanting, but they did look serious.

Anyway, I think it’s important to remember that while our countries are different, in many ways we aren’t too different.

*CNN (link here http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/18/opinion/gergen-gop-debate-occupy-wall-street/index.html) cites a TIME magazine poll that found a 54% approval rating of the Occupy Wall street movement among Americans (compared to my students 68%).

Part III – Kids do the Darndest Things

Again, and I can't stress this enough, Japanese kids are still kids. While they may appear better behaved and shy than their American counterparts, they have plenty of mischevious moments.

For example my ESS club students might try to hide Alistair while I'm out of the room, and then giggle at my expression of mock horror. Another student, when asked to write a continuation of an Aboriginal Kangaroo Myth, drew a picture of two Kangaroos copulating. This caused some worried conversations in the office between the AETs, as this particular exercise was supposed to be compiled and then put up for the parents to see.

In another instance I found the Senior ESS club turn into a semi-interrogation about what Andrew-Sensei thought an attractive woman's qualities were. We had a brief moment of thought after complaints that men only liked women with attractive faces and thin bodies- I asked them what they found attractive in men. “Handsome face, and a nice body...oh...” They also asked me if I condition my hair- and yes, for the record, I do.