School's Out

It's Thursday July 11, 1991.
I'm totally exhausted. I hit the snooze button on the alarm clock twice and then sit in the bathroom for 30 minutes. I don't shave - I'm more mentally tired, I suppose, otherwise I would  care what I look like. I still manage to look better than I feel, but it ain't easy.
At Nozaki Chu Gakko (Nozaki Junior High School) my first class with Nagashima-sensei is cancelled--too few students due to a swimming event.
Good. Period 2 with Nagashima-sensei is spent watching parts 1 through 6 of a video for our New Horizon English text book. It's boring for me. I can only imagine what it must be like for the kids!
Periods 3 & 5 are with Ishihara-sensei (Noriko). She's about my age, reasonably pretty and has a boyfriend, but likes me for my honest advice re: men and women. Like I knew anything about that before August of last year when I finally lost my virginity here in Japan to my then-girlfriend Ashley (from Georgia).
Our classes are more interesting and we play games with the students. in fact, it's always a game.
Period 6 is CLUB activity time. Since I'm not directly involved with a club at this school, I pick one. I go out into the 31C sun and play softball with the girls softball club for 50 minutes. Fun!
Then it's clean-up time.
This is something every school does everyday. No janitor's that I'm aware of. Just the students who are each responsible for different parts of the school.
I don't have to clean-up and certainly don't volunteer. I do enough of that back in my apartment - which is usually spotless.
Instead, I head back outside and work on my tan. If you've never seen me, I'm already brown, what with being of Indian descent. Uh, dot, not the feather.
I find a ball and toss it up in the air and then do mock wind-ups as though I'm a baseball pitcher. It amuses the students - perhaps too much as they get yelled at by the teachers to stop looking at me and to keep working. Oops! My bad!
After school clean-up... it's again CLUB time... so I go and play softball again for another hour. These girls are good. I got struck out once, but pounded one over the fence for a homerun. They seemed impressed that I could hit one like that... as I was told no one had ever hit a homerun of this pitcher before. Geez... give the girl a break. She's 15. I'm 26 and I can hit a ball very well. I led my softball men's league in homeruns two years in a row before coming to Japan. We didn't have fences... so the trick was to hit it long enough for it to get to the road and then let it roll!
I help the team out by hitting the ball around to each position. I'm only surprised that I'm whacking the heck out of the ball at half power and that I don't get blisters.
When club is done, I say my goodbyes to all the teachers. Nothing fancy. I'm glad that everyone seems happy that I'm back for another year. 
I head home on my bicycle (it's about a 30 minute ride, and I don't mind that I'm not getting a ride, because it's nice out.). I try to make myself dinner, but Matthew and then Ashley call. Ashley invites herself over for dinner on Saturday night, which excites me, because it means another opportunity to try and re-seduce her. Just like old times! I guess she likes her toes being sucked. No one taught me that... or maybe I read it in an old Penthouse magazine.
I go my English Conversation class... it's just okay. We break up into groups of three and talk.
I go home and do some laundry, vacuum and do the dishes. The place looks nice and neat again, which makes me feel good.
A nice neat place is for others to think I'm neat. Generally, I like clutter.. but here, I'm reinventing myself. So I'm anal-retentive neat. I've also cultivated a new ideaology whereby I don't stop doing what I'm doing until I'm done. It's something I still do in 2011.
I watch the video of the 1991 baseball All-Star Game held in my home town of Toronto. If I was back home, I'm sure I would have been there for that one. But if I was there, I wouldn't have been able to play softball with a group of high school girls... in Japan.

Somewhere hitting a homerun,
Andrew Joseph
Today's blog title is by Alice Cooper, who just so happens to be playing 30 minutes west of Toronto on the 17th of May 2011 at the Hamilton Place Theatre. SUMMER

Be True To Your School

Just a short one today. I've been writing for nigh on 73 days straight - not including this. Frankly, that scares me - but it's well worth knowing that I have wonderful readers from around the world reading this - or perhaps they are preparing a court case for me slandering them. Again, it's never my intention to offend.

We've all heard that the Japanese students are very studious. It's true. Sort off. Just like in any culture, there are some kids smarter than others, and there are some kids who study more and study better than others.

I was not one of those kids who studied. Ever. I got by on my phenomenal short-term memory and ability to write incredibly small cheat notes and hide them under my watch. 

In Japan, the kids there go to regular day school for what seems like an inordinate number of days per year. In Canada, there were always a couple of PD (professional development) days off, along with a few national and provincial holidays. Factor in a two month-long summer break, two weeks off for Christmas, one for March Break, and in the grand scheme of life, we didn't have to do a lot of school. I used to go to school at 9AM and leave at 4:17PM or numbers there about depending on what level of school I was in.

Here in Japan, in Ohtawara-shi, Tochigi-ken, I spend four days a week at one of seven junior high schools within my rural city. On the fifth day, I rest at the OBOE (Ohtawara Board of Education) office and write letters and short stories and filled in my diary entries and put out my Wonderful Rife for the monthly Tatami Times newsletter for AETs (Assistant English Teachers) in the province. 

Hardly a tough life. It was a wonderful rife.

But let's take a look at an average year for the students at one of my junior high schools here in Ohtawara. Take a look at the first scanned image at the top. Going monthly, you can see how many days the kids have school. Remember, they have five full days, Monday to Friday, and a half-day on Saturday. There are club activities every school from maybe an hour before class to two to three hours after school. And remember... the teacher's need to be present, too.

If we add up all of the school days, you'll notice that grade 7 (Year 1) students have 229- days of school. With Grade 8 (Year 2) and Grade 9 (Year 3), students being in school for 230 and 221 days of school respectively. Comparatively students spend 1206, 1212 and 1162 hours in school for grade 7, 8, and 9. And no, that does not include any club activities like singing, music, baseball, kyu-do (Japanese archery), judo,kendo (Japanese fencing), soccer or tennis. There's also cooking and chess, tabletennis, science, math, English and drama clubs.

Neat, huh? I'm not saying that the Japanese are smarter than anyone else. If nothing else, Japanese television has proved that to not be the case. However, what it does offer is a chance for students to get a leg up on the competition.

Having said that, I'll end for today and let you know that the next blog will be about something called cram school. 

Sometimes, it's good to be a gaijin.

Somewhere teaching, 

Andrew Joseph

Today's title is by the Beach Boys: BE TRUE TO YOUR SCHOOL

Another Brick In The Wall

[Blog Note: When you see a coloured word in any of the entries, feel free to click on it. I have attached links to photos, videos and to sites that can provide more background information. As well, if you click on a photo, it will enlarge. And, if you glance at the bottom of any blog entry you'll see LABELS with a lot of words after it - clicking on one will call up all of the entries where that word is listed - for reference, of course. Okay. On with the show, this is it]:

The next few days were spent driving around the city to visit the seven Junior High Schools (Chu Gakko – chu meaning middle, gakko meaning school) I would be teaching at: Nozaki, Chikasono, Wakakusa, Ohtawara, Sakuyama (see photo), Kaneda Kita (Kaneda North) and Kaneda Minami (Kaneda South).
Anyhow, my first visit was to Ohtawra – the largest of the city junior high schools and the closest to my home – roughly 10 minutes away by bicycle.
I wondered why on Earth they were taking me to school in late July, but soon realized that the place was packed with teachers… and students.
Here’s the deal. In Japan, the school year begins in April and ends in March. Similar to a “March Break” in North America, there is a series of National holidays called Golden Week at the end of March thru beginning of April. There’s also a 5-week long Summer vacation in late July thru the end of August, along with a week off for an Autumn break and a two week break akin to our Christmas vacation called the Winter break.
So… what the heck were the students doing hanging around the school? Apparently they were there for club activities.
While students attend school Monday thru Saturday (Saturday is only a half-day), after school activities last between 4PM - 6PM. Okay, that’s kind of cool, but why were they at school during their summer vacation – and, more importantly, what the heck were the teachers doing here?
Back in North America, it truly is “no more teachers, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks”!
According to Garp, the students want to do their club activities, and their parents don’t want them hanging around the house unsupervised – juvenile delinquency, ne (eh). The teachers are there because the students are there, and look after the club activities pretty much between 8AM and 6PM.
Y’see in Japan, the teaching profession is, unlike its Western counterpart, a respected one. Should a student get in trouble after school for say shoplifting at the local department store, guess who gets called? That’s right – the teacher. Not the parents.
Teachers are not only responsible for the general education of the student, they are responsible for their upbringing.
More information: the junior school curriculum covers Japanese language, social studies, mathematics, science, music, fine arts, health, physical education and English. English is not learned until Grade 7 – and in many failed cases, not even then. Students are also exposed to industrial arts and homemaking – depending on the sex of the child.
So, what is a club activity? It could be kyudo (Japanese archery – nothing better than arming a teenager!); softball (for girls); baseball (boys); soccer; track & field; tennis (girls); kendo (Japanese fencing - again, nothing better than arming a teenager); swimming (if the school has a pool – only Sakuyama had one in my town); music, singing or judo. If there were any more, I never got invited to join them, and so I don’t know. Once you join, you are there until you graduate. I'm unsure if the pattern holds true through high school.
In Japan, no one fails a class. You join the school together and no matter how well or badly one does, you graduate together. Of course, there’s still the need to take a test to get into the proper high school. Depending on your test score, you might get into Ashley’s top-rated high schools, or perhaps one that caters to the technical studies – say electrical or auto mechanics. Then there’s farming followed by barber school. Of course, this does NOT mean that all barbers or farmers are stupid. For some it’s a family business choice, and for others it just might mean they aren’t good at taking tests. Heck, with my short-term memory problems (ie, inability to remember names), I’d be sweeping up after the barbers. More on the pressures of junior high school testing – and Juku (private extracurricular study schools) later.
Anyhow, students of 30-35 kids are part of a homeroom class, and wear badges denoting their school and homeroom – that way the police know which teacher to call!
So, between judo tosses and kendo blows I met the English teachers at each of my schools. While all were pleasant people, with a few exceptions their English-speaking skills were not the best. Grammatically they were technically sound, and knew more than I did – as evidenced by this blog. Heck, I never claimed to be an English teacher.
Japan may have realized the spoken language problem which is why in 1987 it began inviting native English speakers to serve as assistants to the Japanese teachers of English.
That first year saw a total of 848 AETs assistant English teachers). I joined up in 1990 when there was about 1,500 of us. By 2002 it peaked to 6,273 AETs. At least it shows that they are serious… and that I didn’t wreck the program. Budget cuts and the hiring of teachers privately through low-paying agencies has cut into the JET (Japan Exchange and Teaching) Programme.
I was paid ¥3.6-million (yen) a year. Holy crap! I was a multi-millionaire once! How did I blow it? Essentially it was about Cdn $36,000. Not bad for a punk out of school and at the onset of a recession. That was another reason my father told me: "Get thee to a nipponery" – to badly paraphrase Shakespeare.
So… would you like to know what Japanese teachers make? One man – Mr. Inoue - a teacher at Ohtawara Chu Gakko had been teaching for 20 years and was making the equivalent of Cdn $30,000 - which he considered very respectable.
Twenty years experience? Responsible for 30+ kids at school, club activities and after school discipline? How is that fair? Apparently in Japan, the teachers are expected to eat the respect that they earn. It’s really quite fulfilling. $30,000 – that’s like school in summer. No class. Except that they have school in summer here. Now I’m confused. That was such a good joke. I stole it from Fat Albert.
I was embarrassed, but Mr. Inoue (Inoue-sensei) rationalized that they needed to pay us foreigners a lot to get us to come. Sure, but what makes the Japanese teachers stay? Mr. Inoue thought about that for a moment, scratched his head, took a drag of his cigarette and muttered in pretty good English, "I have no bloody idea."
Having seeded doubt, my job was complete for the day.
Although I was told by individuals at JET to never share my rate of pay with the Japanese (they recognized a blabbermouth when they heard one, I suppose), I only remembered it 19 years later. And it's too late. I already wrote it down five paragraphs ago.
Sorry for the lack of knee-slapping buffoonery, but education is why I was in Japan, and it’s also why I’m writing the blog – for you and for me.

Somewhere, school’s out for summer – but not here,
Alice Joseph
Today's title is by Pink Floyd.