IrishOboe

Sorry I didn’t have time to sift this into separate posts. Gambate (fight)!

I haven’t gone into Tokyo often, but I’ve made up for it in the past two weekends. After going to the Kodo concert on Saturday I got an email from Fred inviting me to Costco (in Tokyo) the next day. I couldn’t refuse and though I was sad that we got back unexpectedly too late for me to go to Bible study, I was happy to have a last run at Costco. Of course I love Japanese food, but having real dark bread, bagels, baked beans, cereal, granola bars is such a lovely luxury!

It’s been busy at school for the past two weeks mainly for two reasons. First, the first exam period was May 24-26 and though I did all my oral exams for OCI in class the week before, I had to type up the grades and take care of stragglers, which is often stressful because it means dealing with the students who don’t care so much and will skip out on appointments and generally make life difficult. Also the mid-point goals for the projects for the third years were due and it was my first taste of what they really meant by their project proposals.Some submissions were wonderful. One girl made an English brochure for her favorite tourist spot complete with pictures, drawings, hours and everything. I liked the project because it was her creative idea, she made all the English for it, and she turned in a neat, finished product (two pages of the planned four). I also got some not-so-great submissions. I came face-to-face with one fundamental difference between the Japanese educational philosophy and Western educational philosophy. They’re not so different as you might think, but where Westerners are focused on achieving some definable goal, the Japanese are more concerned with process. This is very evident in their traditional arts and party accounts for why kyudo is both sport and a kind of dance with every movement pre-determined. It also explains why I’m still not allowed to shoot an arrow . . . But back to the main point, many students didn’t just turn in an outline of their reports but turned in all their notes and rough drafts (if they could even be called that). To me that’s extra junk I have to keep track of, but for their other classes the teachers ask for their notes so they can look at the process and make sure the student paid attention and did their homework. There is value in looking at the process, but I feel that if the end product is good then the process is irrelevant (but this is coming from a girl who could never do math problems the way they were “supposed” to be done). This idea of “putting in your time” as opposed to working towards a goal leaves me alienated from the Japanese in terms of education at least. Their thinking helps explain what I observed on class on May 23^rd, but it still leaves me completely baffled. On that day I’d seen the class more than any other class and since it was the day before exams I offered to let them use the time to study for their tests. This gave me a chance to see how they study and perhaps by now I shouldn’t be shocked, but I was. The students sat silently at their desks working in their notebooks. Maybe that kind of study works for history, so I was curious and went about the room to observe their work. I found them all doing almost the exact same thing. They looked at their English vocabulary list (which had no apparent theme or connecting element that I could see) and they wrote down the first word about ten times in a row then did the same with the next until their notebook was full of random repeated words. Curious, I went about the room testing the effectiveness of this method. I went up to one student and took his notebook and asked “What does __ mean?” picking a word that he’d written ten times only three words ago. The student didn’t even have enough familiarity to beg for time to think. He just flatly said he had no idea. To another student I pointed to a word and asked how it is pronounced. Painfully she tried to sound it out. After testing the effectiveness of their study in this way and coming up short it seemed to me evidence enough that they should be taught some more effective study methods. However, they’ll turn in their notebooks and get credit for going through the process and most of them will do okay on the test because it tests neither listening (that happens in an unrelated test) nor speaking. Now they have twenty more words that they know they should know but know in their gut they have no knowledge of at all. When I questioned why they studied English silently I was told “They’re afraid to speak in front of their peers” and some other such statement that made no sense to me. If any Japanese teachers read this, I mean no offense. All the teachers I know are sincere, but there’s a gap that seems unbreachable between my idea of education and what’s valued in the schools. I haven’t been any more successful in actually teaching any English so I can’t point fingers in any self-righteous manner. I just can’t help wondering.

Anyway, to get back to the mid-point projects, they took a while to grade because while good projects are easy to grade, projects that haven’t had much effort put into them take time and effort to grade. I ended up giving a number of very bad grades (though 30% is passing in Japan) and I typed up and explanation for every student. On class Friday (June 2^nd) we passed back the projects and some students were a bit shocked, but we managed to explain satisfactorily enough why they deserved the grade they got and what they can do to improve in the future. I told students that if they got a bad grade it means I believe they have the ability within them to do a much better job. Some students fought hard with me to say they simply couldn’t do better because English was so hard for them, but I fought back with sincere conviction that they were selling themselves short. In the end, nearly everyone did good work on their projects that day. I dare to hope that by holding them to a standard rather than letting them get away with bad they will learn more of what they are capable of. If students continue to work hard in class like they did Friday then I’ll have some great finished projects to look forward to!

The second reason why it was busy at school was because I’ve heard from my successor! I’ve written here the equivalent of about a 15 page word document about school and life in Japan. That’s why I’ve been writing a lot recently, but not for my blog! I’m excited that she seems to appreciate the kind of work I’ve done at the school and is willing and excited to continue it, especially the English Free Zone. It seems much more real that I’m leaving now that I know who will take over my job. It is sad indeed, but fortunately, or unfortunately, I’ve been having little things happen at work that make me glad to be leaving. It’s nothing that couldn’t be worked out if I stayed another year, but the idea that I’m just leaving the problem behind sadly appeals to the lazy coward in me. I’m getting tired of dealing with immature high school students. Mostly I love them, but when I get a glimpse of their feuding ways because they bring it into the classroom I have little patience for it. It’s not something I’ll miss, that’s for sure. Many students respond to my class and have fun doing the projects I’ve assigned, but many also refuse to lift a finger and so cause pain to themselves and us. I don’t care if they get a zero, they know what I expect and I won’t play policeman. At the same time, isn’t it just easier to do a little work in class and get it done then frantically trying to put something together at the last minute and beg for another chance outside of class? *Sigh* I’m a terrible procrastinator, too, so I guess I shouldn’t complain . . .

One last bit of school related events and then I’ll get on to the other half of my life. Because next year students will be able to pick any school in Yamanashi to go to the TV networks are doing reports on all the school. They called Shirane for an interview with the principal and to request a time to video a class. For reasons that I still don’t understand, they always seem to pick Team Teaching for this. Why they pick a class that is least representative of all the other classes and one which nobody seems to cares about or takes notice of is beyond me. Still more baffling is why they pick a class taught by a teacher whose style derives from a completely different set of values and is free from the normal constraints of pre-determined curricula and who will soon be replaced by another teacher who will have her own entirely different way of teaching. How is this at all representative of the school? So there’s a gaijin at Shirane – that’s the case for every school! Whatever, they can video me, I don’t care. However, due to some mass confusion it turned out to be a minor disaster in my book. I can take the embarrassment, nothing rides in it for me, but I feel bad that they school might not have got the footage they wanted. I feel more disappointed that I had them visit my favorite class. I love them because they are genki and respond to me. I can tell when they understand and when they don’t. They laugh and participate energetically, but I should have known that would change in from of the camera! Rather than laughing at my jokes (I know they got it – all the other classes I did the lesson with did) I saw them politely suppressing the laugh as they sat ram-rod still with dead serious faces. I said “It’s okay, you can laugh” and to their credit, a few did (see they understand me!). However, they were unwilling to screw their faces up in confusion and ask their neighbor for help if they didn’t understand my instructions. That left me out to dry because I depend on that for knowing when to move on and when to clarify. I won’t go through details, but suffice it to say the observation totally altered the class and not in a good way in my opinion. So not only did they not get good video, I lost an hour with my favorite class! Silly me, I should have known better.

Life outside of school: I have one? I should really choose my line of work carefully because I tend to get wrapped up in it. This has certainly been one heck of a learning experience. Let’s see, oh we did have a lovely ladies lunch at school, but that’s still school . . .

May 24^th Miwako came over for another Japanese lesson and afterwards we went to play basketball with her friends. I hadn’t played basketball since high school, or possibly middle school when Heather and I played with Mike our neighbor. It was a lot of fun but it was revealed to me that I never understood the fundamental rule of double dribbling. I thought it mean you couldn’t use two hands (which is true), but I didn’t know that after you hold the ball with two hands you can’t start dribbling and go on again you have to pass the ball. How could I watch so much basketball (I was a fan of the Bulls at one point) and never have noticed that? I hope that helps some of you who mistakenly ascribe to me some amazing learning ability to feel superior in mental prowess!

In case you needed another reminder that the world is small, there was a guy we played basketball with who lived in Orlando for a few years. It turned out he was at UCF when I took classes there in high school. Creepy!

Oh, I also find it of interesting note that the Japanese separation of the sexes has had more of an effect on me than I thought. While I can treat my students the same because of the teacher-student role and I can teat gaijin the same because it’s like socializing in America, I found myself suddenly shy and uncomfortable making conversation with the guys at basketball. I realized I’ve had very little interaction with Japanese guys my own age. My excuse was that I was already on uncomfortable ground (doing something I know little about with experienced people), I was the guest (sort of speak) and there’s always the ever present language barrier. Of course it didn’t help that the girls set their stuff up near one wall and hung out at breaks there and the guys did the same at another (just like high school!). In any case it will be interesting to see how I’ve changed when I come back to the states. I hope there aren’t too many negative side effects!

I took the day off Friday, May 26^th because my grades were done and it was the last exam day so I had no classes. It was wonderful to use the morning to get stuff done, then in the afternoon I went to Leslie’s place in Tsuru so we could go to a concert by the Vienna Boys Choir! I had happened to hear they were coming and Leslie got tickets for us. Why they chose to come to Tsuru, a little town in the little known Yamanashi prefecture I don’t know, but come they did! Leslie met me on the train on her way home from work and we hung out at her place for a little before walking to the concert. She lives in a lovely narrow valley between to mountain ranges and it’s much more in the country than Ryuo is. We enjoyed the concert no the least because the boys were so adorable! The first half was mostly classical and wow, their German pronunciation was impressive ;) The second was mostly audience pleasers, though the general Japanese public is not familiar with musicals. It was so funny to watch them sing some Japanese pop tunes complete with Janglish, for example “I believe in future.” The audience loved that. By some confusing we ended up with tickets at the front, which we felt guilty about because we were very visible to the boys. We both felt that they looked at us many times and at point later in the concert we turned around and noticed that the whole audience was very visible, which is normally not the case. We know how distracting it is to be the only white face in the sea of Japanese faces, and we weren’t exactly the most expressionless audience members either! Oh well, they did a great job despite our efforts to distract them.

I truly did enjoy them, but I couldn’t but help to be a little disappointed. Their vocal ability was amazing, both individually and as a group. They were pure, in tune, beautiful, technically able, and obviously capable of hard work since they put together a whole two hour program. The directors style worked wonderfully on traditional German folk tunes, but is unfeeling, mechanical style just killed the other pieces. He was so focused on technical precision that the music rarely came to life. I know the boys could do so much under proper guidance! Ah me, I should never have gotten educated about music it spoils so much!

That evening we made fajitas together, including the tortillas! It was lots of fun and it tasted so delicious! For me and Mexican food, absence makes the taste buds grow fonder!

We shared a slow Saturday morning together and I enjoyed playing her electric piano. How I miss fooling around on a piano! We went into Kofu together for Bible study and church. It was a lovely time!

Sunday morning I took the bus into Shinjuku (Tokyo) for the first time. It was easy, fast and cheep. Yippee! There I met Makiko, who I’d met at the concert at the Crystal Museum. We took the subway together to where the Marin Marais festival concerts were. We attended a lecture, some of which I understood (especially when accompanied by demonstrations) and listened to the first concert in the balcony. It was enjoyable, but not as moving as the one gamba player I saw at the early music festival. In fact, due to lack of sleep and food I had a hard time keeping my eyes open in the second half to my shame.

At the end of the concert we were told we couldn’t sit in the balcony for the second concert because the Emperor and Empress were coming. This was stated in such a matter-of-fact way I had to clarify. The Emperor and the Empress of Japan? Really? How often does that happen? How many concerts happen all the time all over Tokyo, and they’re coming to one I’m going to? How cool is that?

Sure enough, as we left the hall between concerts we saw all their body guards dressed in black suits with black earpieces looking serious and important. I felt like I was in a movie. Okay, so maybe little things entertain me.

The second concert was more entertaining because of variety and a crazy French guy speaking in Japanese between numbers. Apparently he does a Japanese TV show. At points I found him distracting and lacking in sensitivity or appreciation of the musicians, but they audience loved him. I particularly enjoyed watching the Baroque dancer. I’d never seen Baroque dance before and it was so interesting to see elements that are similar to classical ballet. Of course ballet has roots, but I never though of where it came from. The Baroque dance looked much like any other folk dance in its relative simplicity and constant repetition, its costume being close to the clothing of the time, and its physical element not yet being stretched to the limit. How interesting!

Sure enough, during intermission the Emperor and Empress of Japan came and we all stood up and clapped and they gave very elegant, small bows and waved that famous important wave. Well, there you have it, ladies and gentleman!

After the concert I had to go right back and catch the bus home, which was much nicer than having a long train ride home. The bus takes a little over two hours and the train takes at least three. One hour makes all the difference, trust me!

The next day (Monday, May 29^th) I was due for a long run and I planned to go about six miles, which is about a mile more that I’ve ever gone before. It felt great, though, and I was so close to a bridge further down the river that I decided to all the way to it. My estimate was a little off, though and I ended up going a bit over seven miles! It was very exciting because not only did I reach way past my mark for a long run, I felt good the whole run (I went a bit slower than usual), and afterwards! That was exciting, unfortunately the next day my knee hurt, so I guess I did overdo it a little. My knee is fine now, though, and I’ve just been doing easy, short runs. I ran to the park the other day was doing my “plaxercises” and pushed myself too far on the monkey bars, too. I was on the last rung when my callous ripped! Ah the memories from homeschool days. I should have known better.

Wednesday (May 31^st) at my Japanese lesson I formed a complex sentence using a grammar point I learned last week plus some stretching of my imagination and it turned out to be perfect! Now, I know that’s not most important and communication is all I aim for, but when I aim for correct grammar it’s exciting when it is. What was the sentence? “While I ride my bike to school I listen to music.” No way my students can form that sentence in English correctly except for an exceptional few. Then again, there might be little chance of me forming it correctly at any given moment as well.

Thursday and Friday have little to report because due to the inspiration of my mom and sister I finally started tackling email, which is the bane of my existence. I had 550 emails in my Inbox waiting to be dealt with and I only started the gmail account a year ago. In dealing with about 75 emails a day for three days I managed to get it down to 400. Nothing else got done, however . . .

Saturday, June 3^rd I had great fun at Hippo Family Club because I’d been studying hard. I performed the telephone call portion of the Hippo Goes Overseas story in Japanese and German, and though they were impressed with the German because they aren’t very familiar with it they were thrilled with the Japanese! I was happy they understood me, because sometimes I can’t understand when they do a skit in English. The great thing about the Hippo meetings is that we all inspire each other. I was originally inspired to really learn a skit by watching them perform, and now they’re inspired by how much I learned in a short time. I wonder how effective it would be to try to do the method on my own. If I prove to myself that I can still find the motivation then I’ll want to buy the tapes with more languages. I’ve been amazed at how much of the French, Korean and even Chinese I’ve been able to pick up just listening to it half and hour a day with hardly any effort at all!

Happy Pentecost! May God’s power be upon you to do His work!