今学期私は京都文教中学校と高校で英語を教えるCIPをしています。京都文京学園は東山三条の近くにあります。私は自転車で東山三条の学校に行けるから便利なCIPだと思います。実は、先学期早く起きて三条通でに自転車に乗っている時、いつも生徒がいっぱいいるので、私は怒って、「なぜ私のことをじゃまするのか？」というように感じていました。多分、私をじゃまをした生徒達と私が教えている生徒達が同じと思います。皮肉ですね。
とにかく、CIPに三回に行った事があるけど、二回だけ生徒と時間を過ごしました。最初の日エス先生のホームルームの生徒に自己紹介しました。前に準備していなかったから、どんなことについて言おうか分からなくて、色々なことを説明しました。普通の自己紹介のほかに、ハワイの文化を教えました。たとえば、ちょっとフラをしたり、ハワイ語の発音を言ったりしました。ハワイに興味がある学生が多かったです。反対に、私のことに全然興味がない生徒もいたかもしれません。
私のCIPは病院でのボランティアです。「にこトマ」というプログラムで私は病気の子供と遊んだりし、子供にあげるためにいろいろなカードと他の物を作ったりします。「にこトマ」の名前の意味はにこにこトマトということです。毎週、木曜日に私は病院に行っていろいろなことをします。「にこトマ」の誕生日は二月の終わりですから、先週に誕生日のために子供の病棟を飾りつけました。
先学期から「にこトマ」に参加している人は私とサムさんですが、今学期からはマリさんとジュリさんとジュミさんも参加しています。子供が遊ぶ部屋にはボランティアは二人しかいられないから、時々私は子供と遊べないので、他のボランティアをしている日本人とクラフトをします。だんだんボランティアをしている日本人と知り合いになってきましたから、今少しカジュアルな話し方をよく使っています。中高年者の女の人と友達になりましたから、毎週私は「にこトマ」に行くのを楽しみにしています。
ペンシルベニア大学のマーティン・パトリシアと申します。トリシアと呼んでください。先学期日本に来ました。だから、先学期のCIPと今学期のは同じです。私のCIPは「ぜんりゅうじ」という幼稚園で英語を教えることです。その幼稚園は祇園からすごく近いです。普通は、毎週火曜日１２時から１時ぐらいまでシャン・マクシさんというKCJSの学生と一緒に２０１のバスで幼稚園に行きます。私たちは先生にいろいろなことを手伝って差し上げます。例えば、昼ご飯の時、先生に皿を渡します。皿を渡した後で、子供と一緒にご飯を食べながら、私たちは子供に簡単な英語を教えます。食べた後で、子供たちと一緒に遊びます。子供たちはとってもかわいいです！子供と話す時、プレーンフォームを使います。（先生と話す時、敬語を使います）。他の例は、昼寝る時、子供が寝るまで、子供たちにトントンします。トントンした後で、いつも腕が疲れします。腕は痛みますが、このCIPは面白くて、楽しいです！
毎週火曜日に二時間、日本語の授業の後で、善立寺保育園でボランティアをしています。私がそこに着いた時（だいたい十二時）、子供たちは昼ご飯を食べ始めまていす。それで、私は子供たちと一緒に座って昼ご飯を食べます。ご飯を食べながら、子供達はよく私に質問をしたり、友達の事を言ったり，すごく楽しいです。昼ご飯の後で、テーブルと椅子を拭いて先生を手伝います。片づけた後で、子供達と一緒に遊びます。一時ごろ、子供達の昼寝の時間になります。そして、私は子供に「トントン」としてあげます。
私が相手をしている子供達はだいたい四歳ぐらいなので、日本語を喋ると、強い関西弁を使って、速く話します。それで、私はよく途中でわからなってしまいます。一方、先生と話すと、私は必ず敬語を使います。でも言葉より、先生たちはよくジェスチャーを使って私に指示をしています。
子供達は元気いっぱいなので、毎回保育園へ行くと，私もすぐ元気になります。
私は京都の上京中学校で英語アシスタントをしています.上京中学校は同志社大学の近くの公立校です。初めてＣＩＰで上京中学校へ行ったのは一月二十三日でした。前口先生が私を上京中学校へ連れて行ってくださいました。中学校では、英語の先生と副校長と話をしました。それ以来、週に一度そこに行っています。英語の授業では、生徒の前でモデルとして英語のテキストや、単語リストを読みます。そして、生徒の質問に答えたり、勉強のゲームをしたり、生徒とインタビューの練習をしたりします。
中学校でボランティアすることは実りあることだと思います。生徒の英語の興味を深めつつ、日本人と交流できます。そして、日本の教育や社会について学んでいます。
So…My CIP. As a quick summary, I have koto lessons once a week with Gabri in Yamashina since we both live relatively close to each other. Thankfully, Gabri’s host mom is friends with Imoto Sensei, our teacher, so that made planning a bit easier.
After my initial participation in my CIP, which consisted of two lessons and a rather informal concert in the space of one week, the pace of koto lessons has certainly slowed down. The next planned concert isn’t until sometime in February, yet Imoto Sensei has already chosen a song for us to play by then. I’m not sure if that means that we are only going to be practicing this one piece for the next few months, or if we play this one until it is as good as it is going to get and we get additional songs. I’m hoping it is the latter, or else I will not be very amused by the time February rolls around.
As for the actual lessons themselves, they are so-so. First of all, I have no memory for Japanese formalities, so I am always at a loss for whatever phrases are expected out of my mouth at the beginning and end of every practice. Perhaps I will remember one day, or I should just improvise whatever I think sounds appropriate. Continuing on, Sensei reminds me very strongly of my childhood piano teacher, and I have a feeling it’s because I feel like I’m being treated like a child when I make a mistake or can’t understand exact details of whatever she says. (Oh, the fate of every person who can’t speak the local language.) I likewise respond by acting like the child I’m being treated as by being as uncooperative as possible. Really, there is just something about Japan that brings out my worst character traits. Anyhow, I am again grateful that Gabri is there to handle the situation with her superior Japanese language skills and social grace while I seethe in the background until I start feeling magnanimous again.
Nevertheless, Imoto Sensei is certainly a character. Because I didn’t bother learning how to ride a bike until coming to Japan, I was practicing my biking one day and I happened to be in her neighborhood since she lives about five minutes away from my house and I was familiar with that area. She must have seen me almost run into a neighbor of hers on my bike as I was turning the corner of her house, since the next thing I knew, she was making me do laps around the neighborhood and critiquing me on how good my left turns and right turns were. She also invited me to accompany her and her husband to a Buddhist ceremony at a shrine on a holiday instead of having koto lessons, so that was nice. Overall, Imoto Sensei is probably a rather generous person who very much means well, but can’t help trying to correct mistakes or weaknesses.
As for the involvement part of the CIP, I do feel like I am literally more a part of the community. I get greeted on the street by the Ojiisans and Obaasans that saw me at the mini-concert at the temple and having Sensei so close makes my world seem a little smaller.
For my CIP, I volunteered at Bazaar Cafe, about a three-minute walk from Doshisha Imadegawa campus, on Thursdays, Fridays, and on a couple special occasions. By volunteering at Bazaar Cafe, I was able to glean some interesting insights into Japanese society, culture, and communication.
One of the most obvious things that sets Bazaar Cafe apart from other cafes is the fact that it is staffed primarily by minorities and volunteers. My co-workers were immigrants, sexual minorities, recovering and former alcoholics, and people with developmental disorders, all of whom Bazaar Cafe offered a community space and a chance to work for a salary. Talking to these people made more concrete the discrimination they face, their hardships in finding work, and, for some, the need to conquer cultural and language barriers. Having said that, their work at Bazaar Cafe illustrates that various kinds of minorities can be productive workers, support one another, and form strong ties with the local community. For example, through one of the Filipina volunteers at Bazaar, I was introduced to the larger Filipino community in Kyoto, whose meetings and events I have attended almost every week.
With respect to communication in the context of volunteering/working at a cafe, I found that Japan is actually quite similar to the United States. For instance, it is considered common sense and courtesy in both cultures to say “excuse me” when going around someone, or “sorry” when you have bumped into your co-worker. Further, I got free food for lunch during volunteering (as did the others), and I usually waited to be offered food instead of asking for it directly. Basically, in terms of interacting with other people, I think I acted the same way at Bazaar Cafe that I would have in a similar establishment in America. One notable difference I did notice, though, was that the native Japanese have a greater sense of status and age. While the other foreigners with whom I worked never deliberately varied their levels of politeness, the Japanese workers and volunteers used different language when talking to me, as opposed to our supervisor. Working with foreigners allowed me to compare the language patterns of native and non-native Japanese speakers.
All in all, working in a cafe allowed me to have real conversations with real people in the real world. And though CIP was sometimes an added stress at the end of the school week, I definitely appreciated this opportunity!
“I am most definitely not a comic artist.”
If you’d rather see an entertaining Youtube video like to read my first post regarding this CIP (in Japanese), please gently click here at your leisure.
For those of you not in the know, finding this CIP became series of trial and terrible, spirit-crippling errors. For a country well-known for its specialty in comics and animation, an affordable, accessible, and personally appealing manga classroom proves to be especially difficult to stumble upon. My first insight: two out of three really isn’t that bad.
Lucky for me, after wading through the train lines to Osaka and the despair of reading and writing far too many e-mails riddled with keigo, I managed to find myself at the Nijo Art School, a small and warm classroom taught at a teacher’s home where students of all ages are pretty much free to pursue their own area of interest, ranging from oil painting to sculpture to comics.
I’m a slow learner, but I did eventually come to some realizations about classroom culture.
First, Japanese workshops and classrooms take their jobs very seriously. At every school I interviewed, the instructors were not only intent on finding out exactly what you want to study and practice (even going so far as to ask you which manga artist you want to draw like!), but they were also concerned with whether or not you aim to take the class in order to prepare for your application to a full-fledged art academy. These classrooms are more than that private tutor you had for the piano back in elementary school. There is no such thing as a casual class you take for fun, just to learn – even the smallest of classrooms is all about getting you to past that test for that art academy, first and foremost. If I’ve learned anything from this experience, it’s that Japanese culture seems to be very focused on the end goal – it is always up, up, and onwards. While that sort of diligence and intensity is impressive, I did at times find it very wearisome to be unable to find a manga class that was not geared towards a final exam, and the atmosphere can initially be very intimidating when you want a more relaxed experience.
Secondly, I discovered a surprising dynamic to the student-teacher relationship. This may be a solely personal experience, but when I encountered problems with my CIP (wherein I was suddenly spending too much time working on realism rather than the comics focus I wanted), my Japanese teacher was very adamant that I had a right to question my art teacher and request that I get back on track. While in America I definitely had a friendly rampart with all of my teachers, I never dreamed of challenging their directions – if Mr. Huggett said that we were going to draw spheres from different angles for three weeks straight, then by golly, I would suck it up and slave over those spheres, quietly muttering under my breath and occasionally grinding the B6 pencil into the paper to express the blackest depths of my discontent. I’d assumed that it’d be the same for the Japanese student-teacher relationship, wherein you do not question your educator’s methods. Yet it seems that if those methods interfere with the straightest line to the end goal, especially if you’re paying ￥17,000 a month to go once a week for only three hours, you have every right to ask to get back to business. Unfortunately I still have reservations about requesting such a thing of my teacher, so I’ve spent a lot of time drawing redundant things rather than learning how to make comics, but it was interesting to find out that I do, indeed, have that communication option, whether or not I have the pluck to use it.
Finally, I’ve learned that everyone gets their time. My teacher always managed to pinpoint the faults in my drawing, and subsequently always managed to explain how I was to fix them, either through gestures, tone, drawing by example, or a combination thereof. He didn’t let me get away with anything, and had no issues with focusing squarely on a single student for twenty minutes, or running over time rather than rushing his critiques. Although Japan has been criticized by Americans for its strict educational system, the fact is that they are far more serious and effective about helping individual students reach their full potential than they are given credit for. Although Japanese culture may be more about the group than the individual, another underlying philosophy is that the stronger an individual is, the stronger the group itself becomes.
The title is a mouthful, I know, but here are a few musings.
When I first walked into the center’s office, there was a major problem. Whenever I write, no matter the language, I tend to perfect my language so that I say what I want to say with the necessary eloquence. In English, it works out ok, because I can speak the language, but the problem I had was that the director of the activity center had a preconception that I was more skilled at Japanese than I actually was, which made it slightly awkward when talking about what I would be doing and what the center does. But we managed, somehow, to come to an agreement that I would come once a week on Wednesdays.
My first day, I was scared, to be honest. The staff had put the fear that I wouldn’t be able to understand anything into me, but it actually turned out well. We had talked about Zainichi Koreans in class a little bit, so I understood their background, but it was just nice to listen for a change. In class, it’s stressful for someone like me who is normally taciturn to always be speaking. I generally prefer to listen and to act than to speak, because I never was very good at gathering my thoughts in English even. And I really like going, because it’s nice to hear stories about their lives, especially since they would be much different than the average person in Japan. Sometimes they mix in Korean, and then I’m lost, but it’s a curious situation, because I’d really like to learn at least how to read hangul. I generally help out and clean after they leave for the day, and I’ve enjoyed the experience greatly. I’d like to continue going next semester, even if it isn’t for my CIP.
As a CIP, it’s not very exciting if you look at the logs. When you do the same things over and over, most people wouldn’t like it. But it’s fun to connect to a past generation with whom I share almost nothing besides the fact we breathe. You learn things you wouldn’t otherwise, because the weight of experiences and memories shape each person differently. In some ways, I’m following down an analogous path; even though I was born in the US, I’ve never quite felt right at home, even if I speak the language well and interact in society. If I opened my mouth half the time to my peers to say what I wanted to say, rather than what should be said, I’d imagine people would be maybe a bit surprised, such are the differences I hold. But I’ve rambled for a bit, so I’ll finish with this: In such a place, home is where the heart is. Times change, places change, people change, so in such a world, those closest to you are the walls which support you.
Although I started my CIP thinking I would be teaching English, I must admit very little English-teaching has actually been happening. Instead, I am more of an active participant-observer in the early education process of children in Japan. Back in the United States, I had also been very involved with educational- volunteer activities as well, so being able to compare US style early education with Japanese style early education has nonetheless been an enlightening experience.
From observing these two different settings, I’ve come to some preliminary conclusions about the educational styles and societal differences between Japan and the United States. For one thing, US schools appear to adhere to a much more rigid schedule. Lunch begins and ends at a certain time, even if a child is not finished eating. In Japan, every child must finish eating every grain of rice, therefore, lunch only concludes once every individual has finished. From this observation, it also appears that Japanese early education also emphasizes a much more balanced diet where food is more highly valued; children must say grace before and after a meal, and must finish eating every grain of rice. These two actions are not seen in my US observation at all.
I also noticed a lot of differences in regards to scolding styles in both countries. For example, Japanese children seemed to be punished a lot more for failing to follow proper etiquette – such as incorrectly setting their dishes. One time I also say a child being punished for dropping a plate – something I would only call an accident. However, in the US observation, children were being punished more so for inappropriate behavior – such as speaking too loud, leaving their seats, or not standing still in line. Honestly, I have yet to observe an incident of un-orderly conduct in the Japanese pre-school, which I find very surprising.
Something in common between the two schools though, was the fact they both appeared to be teaching children the value of individual responsibility from a very young age. For example, both American and Japanese children were expected to clean up their own trash after finishing their meals – whether it be throwing away the leftovers or putting their plates away in their appropriate locations. It was only after successfully completing this task that both children were rewarded with recess activities.
However, these observations might not be an entirely accurate reflection of differences in educational styles because of the inconsistency in outside factors. For example, the US observation took place at a public elementary school in a relatively poor area; the Japanese observation took place at a private pre-school in a relatively affluent neighborhood. A better analysis would be to observe more US and Japanese educational settings to flesh out a more accurate comparison.