'Sensei' - Students (i)

You trained in teaching adults, right? And you have an undergraduate degree? Fantastic. None of that matters. With possibly the exception of someone who did a full degree in English language, your CELTA and your chemistry degree don't carry much weight around here. The people you teach will be almost entirely driven by market forces, and the majority of big organisations make their money off of education to children. And I'm not talking high school or even junior high school, I mean proper children. Elementary, kindergarteners. You see, there's an awareness that Japanese people are hopeless at foreign languages, and this is a stereotype that is well founded. Much in the same way that the English and Americans usually only speak English, the Japanese are similarly mono-lingual, but for different reasons. We tend not to learn foreign languages because the whole world uses English to communicate, so wherever we may go we can generally get by. For many young Japanese people though, they seem almost entirely focused on their perceived future within the confines of their own shores, and have little desire to put the effort in of learning a language for the purpose of a couple of holidays abroad. And even if they were to go, two of the more popular destinations, Guam and Hawaii, both have extensive facilities and materials for Japanese nationals who choose to grace those places with their presence. Admittedly, this attitude is far more common amongst Japanese men than women, and of course you will occasionally glimpse the odd linguist who happens to be a man, but these people are the exception to the rule. In my six years of teaching I can count them on two hands.

For teaching EFL, we can broadly divide a teacher's experiences with students into three groups: children, teenagers and adults. I'd like to use a few case studies to illustrate general observations, starting with the youngest, and getting older.

i. Ryousuke

Teaching children is the single biggest differentiator with teachers in Japan. Do you love it, tolerate it, or despise it? I fell into the final category, with the occasional class I didn't mind. I was blissfully unaware of this before starting, thinking that children were fine, and I'm sure Japanese kids would be better behaved than English ones. In answer to those assumptions I was completely wrong, and partially wrong, in that order.

In my very first year of teaching, I was at an English conversation school, or eikaiwa. I made the epic trek across the barren wastelands of the Nagoya suburbs to a small supermarket with a travel agent, CD shop and my English school attached. There I had the pleasure of meeting some genuinely charming characters, and to date the best very young student I've ever met. At only four, she had taught herself basic English communication, was more competent than some of my high school students, and even became visibly irritated when we referred to Japanese characters by their Japanese name, when an English translation was available. Great student. Sadly, she wasn't my student.

My lot on those gloomy winter afternoons would be a bunch of six year olds, two of whom simply burst into tears when they saw me. Yes, at a towering five feet and four inches, with skin white as snow and hair a disconcerting shade of light brown, (I was often asked if I dyed it), truly I can imagine I was a fearsome sight to behold. Also, there was a boy who would be a thorn in my side for the next year, Ryousuke. I'm sure he made it his veritable mission to sabotage every game and exercise we did. Any good intention I had when starting for the day turned to ash when he would run in, knock over another child, ignore his powerless mother's pleas to 'be a good boy today', and jabber at me incessantly in Japanese, when I had only the most elementary understanding of the language. The only three words I ever heard him say in English were 'I am Ryousuke'. Like the eponymous raven in Poe's haunting tale, he would use this phrase to answer any question enquired of him, from 'what's your name,' 'how old are you,' 'do you like apples,' to,

'Tell this soul with sorrow laden if it shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore?'

Quoth the Ryousuke: 'I am Ryousuke'.

So in this age of no corporal discipline, how then is a teacher to instruct his charges in the proper consequences for disruption? Additional homework? Ignored. Send him out of the classroom? Yes, but that only works as long as the school staff don't notice. You see, if he spends too long out of the class, and reports this to his parents, they would - rightly - see that the whole enterprise is a waste of time, and pull him out of the school entirely. Although this would be an answer to my heartfelt wishes, it would harm school profit margins, and thus they quickly usher him into the classroom, instructing him to be a good child. His response to which, I'm sure you will have already guessed: 'I am Ryousuke'.

As an aside - with hindsight I now begin to wonder, who was this prophet, this veritable Jeremiah, named Ryousuke? His responses, although singular in form, were they not profound in depth? After all, when all questions directed to him were about his very being, (for such was the depth of our studies), is not a response with his name the best kind? When chided to be a good student, surely his response was not ignorance, but a rebuke to the one cautioning, a message that is to say, 'What is this madness of which you speak? I shall not meekly sit and learn, no! For I am Ryousuke'.

Regardless, after much contemplation, I eventually settled on the following strategy. Our class was a presentation class. In other words, once every five weeks or so, the parents, (well, mothers; this is Japan, so fathers are in the office, where they belong), would come in to watch a short recitation of what their little cherubs had learnt. It was left to our discretion how much to help students that struggled. So, after a number of these presentations I told them that henceforth I would not be helping at all in the presentations, and that I would simply be sitting with the mothers at the back. Yes, this did result in some awkward presentations, but none quite so much so as poor Ryousuke.

With six months of not listening to a word I had said, a presentation came that summarised what we had studied so far. So, the mothers came, sat down at the back of the class, and I chose a cushion just next to Ryousuke's mother. She greeted me with her traditional, 'I'm so sorry about my son', and me with my 'Me too'. When Ryousuke's turn came, he could answer the first question with nary a tremor to his voice: 'What's your name?' But as it continued, he stuttered, and stumbled over snatches he had caught in lessons, unable to give one coherent answer beyond the first, in contrast to the other six students who were able to answer pretty much perfectly. His mother's knuckles turned white as they gripped her skirts, her molars ground audibly, and the other children started looking awkwardly at one another, and I finally felt the distinct satisfaction of a job well done. Thank you, Ryousuke. You didn't let me down.

Ryousuke was never a model student even after the berating I heard from his mother on that fateful day, but he did improve slightly. I wish I could say she took him out, acknowledging a profound waste of time and money, and leave the rest of us to work in peace, but our problems seldom just disappear, in the classroom or elsewhere.