Osu Junior High School

My second school is much smaller than Aojima, with less than 300 students. To get to Osu, I take the train from Shizuoka to Fujieda as before, then I take a 15-minute bus ride south from Fujieda Station to the school. There are only two English teachers at Osu, one who studied at a university in Scotland and thus, has a cute Scottish accent. He is quite a clown (he goes out for smoke breaks in between classes and I still wonder if it’s just cigarettes that he smokes), and likes to interrupt my lessons to talk about himself and interject jokes. One day, after I’d explained the rules of a game to a class of seventh graders, I emphasized, “No English—Japanese only!” and he followed with, “No Japanese or I’ll kick your ass!” I’m pretty sure none of the students understood what he said, but they could probably tell from the look on my face that it was something inappropriate…

As there are just three homerooms per grade at Osu, I only gave my introduction nine times. Since then, over the past three weeks, I’ve taught “Hello, nice to meet you,” “My name is _____,” and “I like/don’t like (sports, subjects, and food vocabulary)” lessons to the seventh graders; “You look (emotions)” and past progressive tense lessons to the eighth graders; and passive versus active voice lessons (with town landmarks vocabulary) to the ninth graders. It was emphasized in training that the team-teaching dynamic would vary at every school and with every teacher, but so far, all my teachers have pretty much stepped back and let me run the show, jumping in to make comments or to elaborate/clarify in Japanese, if necessary. This makes more work for me, in a way, but as it is I have plenty of prep time to burn, and I find the experience more rewarding this way as well.
So those are the specifics, easy to convey. A bit more difficult is describing how different schools in Japan feel to me compared to those in the U.S., and what the pros and cons of such contrasts may be. I don’t mean to make hasty generalizations, especially given my limited experiences; I’m basing my thoughts on Japan off teaching at only two schools, and my views of secondary education in the U.S. merely off what I recall from being a student and from stories of friends who teach K-12.

So, what’s the difference? First, it is glaringly obvious how much education is invested in here, by numerious parties. Parents pay for uniforms, the students' books and school supplies are glossy and taken care of, and the school facilities are basic (no technology, surprisingly) but well-kept. When I was a student, teachers tended to have their own rooms and students traveled from room to room for classes; in Japan, students have one homeroom where they stay for all their regular subjects (besides music, art, science lab, home economics, and P.E.), and the teachers travel around instead. It's a pain for the teachers to drag all their materials around each hour, but as a result of this arrangement, students are given a sense of ownership of their room. They even eat in their homerooms; a few class representatives retrieve the food and supplies from the main kitchen, then the students serve each other and collect all the dirty dishes and garbage to be whisked back to the kitchen after the meal. There are no janitors (and no janitors' salaries to pay); every day there is scheduled cleaning time between lunch and recess. For fifteen minutes, to upbeat music playing over the intercom, everyone at the school (including me) grabs a broom or rag, refills bathroom supplies, empties garbage cans, cleans the chalkboard erasers...whatever sprucing is needed. This is brilliant, because of course if students know they're responsible for their own mess, they're more concerned about keeping the place clean to begin with, or at least not trashing the materials and workspace. Overall, there's a respect for school property that I recall as severely lacking in my schools growing up:

School buildings tend to be three or four stories, the windows are often wide open, and there are no screens; however, I am yet to see anything or anyone exit a building via window. I walked into an eighth-grade classroom and students, unsupervised, were carefully using razorblades to cut out syrofoam blocks for a class art project. And students may be unsupervised at many times throughout the day, oftentimes during recess, cleaning time, individual reading time, and club practice. Sure, they screw around, get completely off-task, and chaos ensues, but no one is injured and nothing's been destroyed. In my middle school any combination of the above would have guaranteed disaster! Five seconds without a teacher present and someone's backpack would've been tossed out the window, someone else would've been bleeding, and the art project probably would have taken some perverted turn for the worst.

So I wonder if these students are too docile...sometimes I look at them in their snappy navy-and-white sailor uniforms and think, "Don't you just want to do something bad?" But I have seen them silly, screaming in excitement, and at times clearly irritated by one another...like I mentioned, there can be chaos. But it is always blanketed by a layer of respect for teachers, property, and so forth. Sure, there are some rules I'd consider excessive. But at least students have greater potential for learning when their classmates aren't abusing resources and disrupting the process. Wow, I sound like a real rule-follower here...I've got to admit, though, as a teacher I am being truly spoiled by having such great students.

This week, I head for the hills. My third school is in the foothills far northeast of Fujieda, in Okabe, a village that was just recently absorbed under the Fujieda Board of Education umbrella. I am very excited to see what Okabe is all about—on the schedule I was faxed, looks like I will be going hiking on Tuesday and jumping rope on Wednesday.

Photos: ninth-grade classroom, teachers' room, students' entryway