It\u2019s a little hard to give you all an update on my CIP since the school has been on break for the\u00a0last few weeks. Instead, I\u2019d like to talk about my observations of Japanese high school life and\u00a0the high school system, since I can go into more detail in an English blog post.<\/p>\n
I wish I could sit in on (and understand!) some of the non-English language classes, if only to see\u00a0if their as boring as people tell me they are. I know I already mentioned this in my last blog post,\u00a0but it really shocked me when I asked my high schoolers what their favorite subjects were, and\u00a0they looked at me like this was an inconceivable notion. They truly don\u2019t seem to enjoy any of\u00a0their classes, and the kind of system that shuts people down like that is pretty concerning.<\/p>\n
Though, of course, I\u2019ve heard equally bad things about the American public education system,\u00a0so I should really stop judging the Japanese system. Growing up, one of my childhood friends\u00a0was too smart for the classes he was in, and his boredom and frustration caused him to just give\u00a0up on doing schoolwork altogether, until he had terrible grades when really he should have\u00a0had amazing ones. But the thing is, people like that, in the U.S., can get a second chance. He\u00a0eventually wound up at community college, got a 4.0 there for two years, and transferred into\u00a0UC Berkeley. Frankly, he saved a ton of money on tuition for the first two years, and now he\u2019ll\u00a0get a degree from a world class university. Not too shabby.<\/p>\n
People here don\u2019t seem to have those kinds of chances. There\u2019s not a lot of room for alternative\u00a0paths. It makes me think about the Ghibli movie, Whisper of the Heart, where the main\u00a0character, Shizuku, decides not to focus on schoolwork and to pursue her dreams instead. She\u2019s\u00a0lucky enough to have parents who encourage that kind of thinking, but even so they warn her\u00a0that she will have no one to blame but herself if not getting the right test scores ruins her life\u00a0from then on. And her sister gets angry because she believes that you only get options in life if\u00a0you play by the rules\u2014only by getting into a top notch high school will the main character have\u00a0multiple doors open to her.<\/p>\n
On another note, one other thing that really took me aback was the discovery that the class with\u00a0whom I\u2019ve interacted the most, a group of middle school girls whose English teacher is actually\u00a0an American guy from Wisconsin, is considered the advanced\/special English track class. That\u00a0surprised me for two reasons. First, honestly, they didn\u2019t seem that much better than some of the\u00a0younger students in the normal track. They knew more vocabulary, but they practiced talking\u00a0about nearly the same things as the younger kids. Maybe that\u2019s not something to be blamed\u00a0on them, but on the course syllabus and the rigidity of the way the Japanese education system\u00a0teaches English. Second, the girls had always struck me as extremely cheerful and outgoing,\u00a0almost to the point of obnoxiousness (like I said, discipline in the middle school section is pretty\u00a0lax) but it turns out that they, as a class, are kind of outcasts at school. During a break between\u00a0classes, most students flooded the hallways, chatting with friends at lockers or visiting friends\u00a0in other classrooms. But these girls all stayed in their one little classroom, talking to each other.\u00a0When I asked one of them why they did not also go out into the hallways, she told me that they\u00a0don\u2019t really have other friends. Very sad!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It\u2019s a little hard to give you all an update on my CIP since the school has been on break for the\u00a0last few wee … \u7d9a\u304d\u3092\u8aad\u3080