New School Year Part 1

This is going to be a multiple entry blog about the new school year, my teachers, and other fun stuff. The first blog isn't going to be much fun because it'll just be me whining about the Japanese school system. Sorry!

Before I start into the specifics of my schools, my teachers, and my students, I think I’ll take a brief moment to detail the Japanese school system, which is really messed up. The way the school system works here in Japan is weird. School runs from April through March, with a 2 week break usually falling at the end of March/beginning of April. I’m fine with that part. That way, students get a break (in theory, but this is Japan, so they still come to school every day for sports and club activities), and teachers have time to chill, write report cards, etc. And in Japan the teachers do take the first week to write final reports for the year, etc. The problem I have with this school system is what occurs at the end of the first week and all through the second week.

At the end of the first week, the teachers find out if they are being transferred. That then leaves them only 1 week to go to a new school, meet the new staff, and create a whole new set of lesson plans for the school year. It’s crazy. Just because they taught the 2nd year students using one brand of textbooks one year doesn’t mean they’ll teach the same grade and from the same textbooks the next year. I had a teacher who taught using the New Horizon textbooks to 2nd year students in a neighboring city; the next year, she was transferred to my city and had 1 week to familiarize herself with the Sunshine textbooks that my city uses and with the 3rd year level of English. How do schools systems think that 1 week is enough time to plan your entire curriculum for the year? That’s barely enough time to figure out where the bathrooms are in your school, let alone to design a whole years-worth of lessons, games, etc. No wonder there’s not a lot of change in Japan – there’s no TIME to implement change. And now imagine the situation of my poor BOE guy, who not only had to do all of this, but he had to couple it with moving to a new city, learning how to cook dinners for himself alone, saying goodbye to his family, etc. Utter, utter crap.

Teachers change schools about every 3-8 years, with the average being about 5 years at any given school. They have no say in what school they go to, or even where in the prefecture they go (though they can make requests). It’s not unheard of for teachers to get moved to schools upwards of 2 or 3 hours away. Many teachers in these situations must rent an apartment in the city they teach in, live there alone for 4 days a week, then go back to live with their family on the weekend. One of my favorite BOE members was just transferred. He was really nice, spoke really good English despite not having studied it for several years, and he really adored his family. But, at the whim of the higher ups, he was transferred this year to a school 2 hours away. So now he has to live alone for most of the week, and he can only see his family on the weekends. This situation could last upwards of 3-5 years. How much does that suck?

Anyway, back to teachers. New teachers usually only stay a year or two at their first few school because the BOE wants them to get a feel for a few different schools. There are also contract teachers, who have studied their subject area and went through teachers' training, but didn’t manage to pass the final exam (which is really hard because in Japan, they only accept a certain amount of new teachers a year. So you could be a really, really great teacher and really good in your subject area, but if they already accepted 3 new teachers and the quota was 3, then sorry, but you don’t get your teaching license). These contract teachers usually only stay 1 year at any give school, though it’s not unheard of for them to stay 2.

So that’s a quick overview of the crappy, crappy system here. Next post will have a little more humor, I hope. This one was just complaining. Sorry.

This is just a post to catch up on the beginning of the school year. This is the last thing that happened before the new school year, so I'm posting it before I forget it. Not incredibly amusing, but I feel it's worth recounting because I want to brag about my sports prowess.

On Gaining Street Cred

I went to Cromartie the other day, which has never been one of my friendlier schools. The staff are usually fairly indifferent towards me, which is why I was quite surprised to walk in and hear several teacher say "Good morning!" in English (at this school, I'm lucky to get 3 or 4 teachers to acknowledge my presence in Japanese, so I was a bit surprised to hear it in English). When I went up to the 3rd year students hallway, many of the boys (who are usually quite shy, and will only nod their heads if I say hello to them) went out of their way to say hello to me and ask me how I was. Why the sudden change in everyone?

A few weeks ago, I came into the staffroom at Cromartie in the morning. The principal followed me in a minute later and said in English, "Jessica, let's play softball!" I laughed, asked him when, and he gave me a specific date. An English teacher then told me that the staff had decided that they wanted to play a staff sports game. They had decided to play softball, and one of my English teachers remembered that I liked softball, so they decided to invite me to play. I said okay, since I love softball and haven't played it in about 10 years. I figured it would be a fun game amongst the staff and that most of the students wouldn't be at school. I was quite surprised to get to school and find most of the students still there for club activities. Even better, I found out that only a few teachers were playing and that we were going to play against the boys baseball team. And the best thing of all was that I was the ONLY female teacher playing. So it was me and 8 male teachers who don't regularly participate in sports against 20 teenagers who practice baseball everyday of the year. Yea!! I love a challenge. I got incredibly nervous, not having played in 10 years, and had great fears of accidentally killing someone by throwing a ball wrong or some such thing. It didn't help my nerves that all the female teachers and a great deal of students were watching and cheering for me (literally cheering for me. Everyone was screaming my name. I was like a rock star).

Luckily, I didn't do too much to shame myself. The male teachers got together and decided that I should be pitcher (turned that one down) or catcher (also said no to that), and then they decided on first base. I was hesitant to play first, but I gave it a try, and I wasn't so bad. Every time I made a slightly difficult catch, all the students and teachers watching would scream my name. I also found out that in sports, Japanese people use a lot of English terms (people would say, "nice catch" or "nice play".). I did slightly embarrass myself batting. I struck out the first time (the boy pitching threw it really fast because he thought I was good), then after that, I would yell "be nice!" every time I got up to bat, and he threw it much slower. He felt really bad about striking me out and even apologized later. Poor kid. I never did get on base, but that was no surprise, as hitting had always been my weak point. Still, I did fairly well in fielding, and I even made one kid's days when he ran into me (short kid. Very short kid. Head about the same height as my chest. Yup. Poor guy.). The teachers, much to my surprise, whooped the butts of the students. The score was something like 10-1. And after this game, I become a celebrity at my school. My students had always figured I was smart because I speak English (doesn't matter that it's my native language - the fact that I can speak it makes me smart to them), but they didn't realize that I had some athletic skills, too. I'm just glad that we didn't play soccer or something really embarrassing like that. I would have completely shamed myself and the students would have laughed at me instead of saying hello.

Okay, so it's been nearly 3 weeks. And I'm not actually going to update today. I've come to promise an update soon. My new school year has started, and thus I have some great stories about new and old teachers, possibly the most interesting of which involves pornography. Be sure to tune in sometime in the next week for my exciting stories!