Sorry, no pictures. Just lots of words.
Well now, I've had me quite an eventful week, which makes a change. First big thing of note was the Wakayama JET midterm conference on Monday and Tuesday in Wakayama City's 'Big Ai' building (it's honestly called that - you think that's daft, the stadium directly opposite goes by the name of 'Big Whale'. Because, duh, it looks like a whale). This is the annual shindig at which every JET in Wakayama Prefecture assembles as one over two days to attend lectures, partipate in workshops, share ideas and methods in relation to teaching, make new friends, rediscover old ones and get mind-numbingly pissed in the evening. This year was a little different for me and many other second and third years however, as I was actually giving a presentation entitled 'Using Audio-Visual Technologies in the Classroom'. Snappy title, yes?
To my annoyance, I wasn't actually scheduled until the last workshop on the second day, meaning I had to behave myself on Monday night with just a few drinks and a pleasant meal at a pizzeria, rather than get recklessly smashed, stay out all hours and wake up the following morning in a love hotel. I won't mention any names...Anyway, the Monday's lectures and workshops were pleasant enough, frustrating though it was to be shepherded to individually pre-designated talks, rather than being allowed the freedom to go to the ones we actually wanted to see, as was the case last year. Hence the reason I missed the reportedly excellent ones delivered by Noel and Sean on classroom discipline and Kansai regional dialect respectively. The former I could have really done with seeing, considering what happened later in the week, but I’ll get to that in a bit…
For now, Tuesday seemed to drag somewhat, which is unsurprising considering how appallingly nervous I was. Granted, I’ve spent most of the past year and a bit standing in front of roomfuls of (young) people who expect me to somehow educate them but crucially, the people in question are non-English speakers. I was going to be doing this thing in front of a roomful of Japanese English teachers and fellow JETs. They were professionals and they would be able to smell blood. Having painstakingly set up everything on my battered laptop beforehand so as to wow the crowd with my whiz-bang AV prowess and 60 laboriously prepared bulky handouts, when the time came I was ready to begin.
I was shit.
My mouth went dry the second I stood up and having forgotten to acquire a bottle of water during the break for lunch, it stayed that way. My delivery was rambling, incoherent and shambolic, delivered at a snail’s pace because of comments made by the moderator earlier on about how the Japanese teachers had had some difficulty with the speech speed of some of the other JETs presentations. Unfortunately, I went too far the other way and spoke patronisingly as if to a class of pre-schoolers while using completely inappropriate words such as ‘impeccable’, ‘geek credentials’ and delivering some God-awful ad-libbed jokes that fell flatter than a hedgehog clamped in a vice thrown from an 18th storey window.
Thankfully, the computer decided to behave itself, aside from launching the swirly, psychedelic screensaver I’d installed while still plugged in to the projector, momentarily distracting the audience completely and painfully drawing attention to my general ineptitude. Everything else worked fine – my recording of the Wakayama High students performing the voicemail activity, the painfully embarrassing movie I made with my after school English Club imploring the year’s new intake to sign up and the ambitious PowerPoint presentation of my family, which featured several video clips. The latter seemed to go down especially well, with my father’s brief filmed rendition of the opening bars of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor even getting a mention from the generous, unfailingly efficient Canadian JET and conference organiser Genevieve during her closing ceremony speech after the whole sorry ordeal was over. By all accounts, my laptop gave a far better presentation than I did, though some people were good enough to say some very nice words to me after the event, which I thank them for. I then proceeded to get slightly drunk in the Irohanihoheto (nightmare to order a cab from, or did I make that joke already)? bar next to JR Wakayama station and headed, to my enormous relief, homewards.
To Wednesday then, and a day at my designated special needs school, Kii Cosmos. In a dramatic break with tradition, I’m actually going to indulge in a spot of ‘own trumpet blowing’ by mentioning the kid whose name I can’t remember (which alone probably invalidates all of what follows and helps put my Mother Theresa rating at around 0.02) that I helped during a morning cooking class. Now, the kid in question (who shall henceforth be referred to as Ryu because I have to call him something and it’s the only Japanese name I can ever remember, thanks Streetfighter 2), like many at Kii Cosmos, suffers from a severe mental disability that leaves him unable to form sentences and perform basic motor functions. I have no idea as to what his condition is, as very little English is spoken by Kii Cosmos staff.
Classes at Kii Cosmos are usually composed of three to five students, twelve at the most, but in this instance only one, owing to others being absent or undergoing essential physiotherapy. The task was to make a ‘sweet potato cake’ composed of mashed sweet potato, sugar and milk, the combination of which is then placed into an oven and cooked. My job was to sit next to Ryu, talk to him and give him words of encouragement as best I could while the teacher mixed the ingredients into a plastic bag, making it easier for Ryu to have a go at mixing them himself. Oh yeah, and his mum also happened to be in school that day and was at that precise moment observing our ‘class’.
This, I have to say, terrified me because I’m not qualified in any way, whatsoever, to teach special needs education. I’ve generally taken my stints at Kii Cosmos as they come, adapting to whatever’s asked of me as best I can, which generally consists of nothing more taxing than playing the odd game, teaching some very basic English and generally being there for the students’ amusement and entertainment. Still, I had to just get on with things really and so it was that Ryu and myself ground up the mixture in the bag, with me placing his fingers in the right place to get him started and making some extremely tenuous ‘squeeze as hard as you can’-type gestures at him. That done, the teacher snipped a small hole into the bag, through which was squeezed the mixture, before being placed in little foil cake cups.
While this was going on, I busied myself cleaning Ryu’s clothes and hands of cake mix and drool with some wet wipes as his mum looked on. My words of encouragement consisted mainly of ‘ooh, “ere we go, yeah, mash that up, good stuff, there you go look, that’s going to be good once it’s out the oven" and somesuch. Alright, so he wouldn’t have understood a word. The adults in the room didn’t understand a word, but for a kid who seems unable to speak any Japanese, never mind English, it seemed the only right thing for me to do. He probably got the general gist one way or the other. At one point he actually turned to face me directly and put his finger momentarily on my nose before turning back to the middle distance as the teacher and myself attempted to keep him enthused.
The lesson over, it was half an hour before I returned to the same room for lunch, because one of the girls in the homeroom class held in the same place (it’s kind of like the form room/registration setup in British secondary schools) insists on talking to me over lunch if she ever gets the chance. While there, I got to have a few words with the teacher from before, who told me that Ryu’s mother was highly impressed with the way I’d been so careful, gentle and patient with him, and that the fact that Ryu had tried to touch my nose was very telling. According to her, he only does that with people he trusts, and that overall, she hoped I’d be a teacher at Kii Cosmos for the foreseeable future because I was very good at what I did. Blimey, now that’s what I call winging it.
Seriously though, it was really nice to hear that – all I need to do now is find out what Ryu’s name actually is and I might be able to start living up to his mother’s seemingly high estimation of me…
From the sublime to the ridculous then, the following day I was at my regular Thursday high school for disadvantaged kids who never completed their mandatory Junior High School education for a variety of reasons – usually because of instability within their family, they have some form of behavioral disorder or some other disability or circumstance that prevented them from completing it. It goes without saying that some of the kids that go there can be tough going at the best of times, though in my time here so far I’ve found that though it hasn’t been easy, I’ve been able to make a decent fist of teaching English to classes there that possess little ability and even less interest in the subject.
So, a day much like the many I’ve had there began with a class of first years, who rather confusingly are all somewhere between 15 and 19, containing around 14 students. The subject was, I seem to recall, the use of the word ‘to’ in questions such as ‘What do you want to be when you’re older?’
Armed with photocopied handouts of an activity for the students to do, I handed them out to everyone but got a rather negative reaction from the cluster of tables at the back of the classroom around which were seated four 16-17 year old-lads, who are generally quite cheeky and reluctant to learn but who’d never given me too many problems in the past. As soon as I handed the sheet to one of them, he didn’t look at it at all, but simply slid it straight into the space under the desk where the textbooks and worksheets for his other classes were kept and carried on fiddling with his mobile.
A brief bit of background here – like many others, before I arrived I naively assumed that teaching Japanese kids would be about the best introduction to the world of teaching, my mind filled as it was with the western stereotype of studious kids who are forced to work obscenely hard and adhere to class hours far longer than those of their western counterparts. They might be shy, I supposed, but at least they’d be hard workers and obedient. Well, this is certainly the case at some of Japan’s more prestigious centers of learning, but not at the places I, and many other JETs have been assigned to.
Firstly, the Japanese system of teaching assumes that so long as any one student is not being so disruptive as to bring the entire class to standstill, they will not be chastised by the teacher for sleeping in class, reading unrelated material (usually manga comic books), fiddling with mobiles or any other kind of distraction. The received wisdom out here seems to be, if a student wants to waste his or her time in class then that’s up to them. That there’s no point stopping the whole class in order to discipline a student who otherwise wouldn’t be bothering the others. This runs directly counter to my own experiences of the classroom during my schooldays and, I would venture, to most classroom systems throughout the world.
Therefore, I’ve had to develop an extremely high patience threshold when it comes to teaching Japanese kids. Loud talking can occasionally be a real annoyance, but I can usually count on the ever present Japanese teacher of English to help me put a stop to that. I’ve nevertheless had to get increasingly used to addressing one half of a class while the other indulges all manner of irrelevant activity, sometimes even going so far as to do homework for other subjects while I’m trying to teach them. My general way of coping thus far has been to simply stand near any offending students while talking, or else throw questions at them if they’re not paying attention. They all know that they ought to be concentrating, and if they’re confronted with it, usually they’ll stop and do what I’ve set them.
In this particular instance with the lad and the mobile though, I couldn’t help but take slight offence at his apparent outright refusal to even acknowledge my existence. Basically, I objected to the fact that this kid was seriously taking the piss. One of his friends also happened to fiddling with his mobile while another seemed engrossed in his tales of manga.
So I reached under his desk, withdrew the sheet again, and in my patented hybrid mix of Japanese and English, injected with enough subtle menace to make myself sound serious without having to resort to shouting, I carefully told him that there was only 15 minutes or so of the class left, that he could play with his mobile as much as he wanted afterwards, but that for now we were going to be studying English. With the traditional chastising teacher’s sign off of do I make myself clear?, I was done. Then what happened? The little bastard sarcastically said ‘yes sir’ and made a Nazi salute. If my blood hadn’t been boiling before, it sure as hell was now.
Fighting the urge to yell at the kid, to try and explain that half my family was German, that I’ve had to endure idiots who think that doing Nazi salutes in my direction is really funny since I was a child, and that he should either behave or get the f**k out of my classroom, I just glared at him, went back to the front and calmly carried on what I was doing for the benefit of the other 10 or so students in the room who were looking attentively at me and the work in front of them, pens in hand.
So, once class was done and my colleague and I were making our way back to the staff room, she was quite effusive in her apologies – that “The students do not like English” and that some of them are “very difficult” or have “very low ability”. Well, I’ve known all of that since I first started working there, and just briefly explained to her that what I objected to was a small number of students who clearly didn’t care at all, ruining it for the rest of the students who did. Mobile-addict, Manga idiot boy and the other kid had been talking together loudly enough, even before the Nazi business, to put me off and make teaching the rest of the class that little bit harder.
I had two further classes that day with a different teacher, who happened to be the head of the school’s English department. Before going to class, he mentioned to me something that the teacher I’d had the class with earlier had said. Apparently, she was of the opinion that it was perhaps best for me not to teach that class with her again as my approach was making some students reluctant to come to class at all. Well, this was certainly news to me – I can only guess that that either meant there were less students there that day than were supposed to be, or else that she was afraid that the kids I’d told off wouldn’t come to class again. Oh yeah, and that I hadn’t done anything wrong. That really threw me.
Firstly, obviously I had done something wrong, or else she wouldn’t have requested I don’t teach with her again. Secondly, was she proposing that because the kids took offence at me telling them off for doing something they shouldn’t have been, and may consequently be reluctant to come the following week, the rest of the class would have to make do without a native speaker in class, so the miscreants would be able to sit there and disrupt the class with impunity? Something didn’t quite add up.
As it was, my other classes that morning went perfectly well, even the second containing a particularly volatile 19-year-old appropriately called Aso. As has always been the case in the past, the students were initially slow to settle down and reluctant to get started, but after some prompting from me and the teacher, did eventually make a stab at the pre-prepared task.
I had a brief chat with the female teacher later that afternoon before she left school – I told her what I’d heard from the Department Head and explained that I would actually like to continue teaching with her, for the benefit of the majority of students who wanted to learn. I left it by saying that ultimately, it was up to her whether I went to that class or not, and suggested she think over what I’d said and tell me what action she wanted to take when I came to the school again the following week. She seemed happy with that, apologized again and reiterated the “students are difficult” line again. Well, yes, they are, but I don’t believe in writing them off as hopeless cases. Does she?
Sorry, rant over. It’s just the first time anything like this has actually happened to me since arriving in Japan and frankly, it smarts a tad.
