Juxtapositions

Place close together for contrasting effect. Monochromatic mentions.

Today I had two classes back-to-back that epitomized the highs and lows of my teaching experience in Japan thus far. The first class was my 6 年生 with the Home Room Teacher who led class. 6先生 is a lovely lady who tries hard to keep under control a very unruly classroom. Some of these kids could have been the inspiration for Battle Royale. They are absolutely wild and rarely reigned in. Most of the kids are fine and some of them are really terrific. All of them are bored out of their minds. As am I. Here's why.

6先生 is a great lady and I'm sure she is a wonderful teacher of Japanese subjects, and without a doubt, a tough chick who can stand up to the pressure of dealing with the last year before kids leave elementary school for the soul-crushing stage that is 中学校. And she speaks English fairly well. But I think she might be stuck in the books, probably for the logical reason that books are very important and textbooks help you gauge where you are. But we've been where we are for three lessons now. We have done the same activity three times. The kids get it. They don't need to work on this topic any longer. They understand and they are bored stiff, because they understood it the second time around.

The worst is yet to come, I fear.

The book comes with a DVD which contains dreadfully annoying chants by over-enthusiastic-sounding-disney-show-turn-aways. The text of the chants is at best, repetitive and at worst, so condescending to ones intelligence, one wants to slap the TV screen (which is a touch screen, so I'm not sure what that would do).

By the way, I AM the human tape-player. I say what she wants me to say, when she wants me to say it. I repeat it six times if that's what she tells me to do. I try to use different intonation each time or I think my soul would slip out while I'm saying, I CAN play BASEball. I CAN'TTTTTTT SSSSki. I speak slowly enough. I look at the kids and listen to the kids and many of them are like, what's the big deal? Didn't we already do this? We get it.

So for our fourth lesson on the same topic, she wants me to play the infuriatingly cheery chants on the DVD. We might possibly have a student-riot on our hands, and I will be heading the assault on the antiquated barricades of pre-WWII Japanese educational philosophy.

Enter 5年生.

My 5th graders go back and forth between trying to decide they are too cool for school and still enjoying the process of an elementary education. But by and large, they all participate and they are all quite genki about whatever I ask them to do. For the next three lessons, we have to learn shapes; not just square, rectangle, circle, triangle, but also pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, octagon, and diamond. This is because we will be giving a demonstration class in a couple of weeks and so we must needs teach to the test for a couple of lessons. That's okay. I can cope.

We played games.

First we went through pronunciation, because none of these poor kids has ever seen a word with more than two syllables. I never even used the word 'heptagon' before preparing for this class. And if you know any Japanese at all you know that consonants and consonants never never never appear side-by-side in any word (all syllables are consonant-noun pairings, with the noun coming last - this is why when you tell Japanese kids to say "book" they reply "boo-ku"). I did my best just to keep them engaged with over-pronunciation and a totally enthusiastic personality. I LOVE phonics! Keep up the good work! How many sides does it have? We played a sit down/stand up game that turned out to be a pretty big hit, which is nice because I just made it up on the spot (not to say it was an original idea, but it wasn't in my lesson plan. My best ideas usually aren't in my lesson plans). 


Then we talked about size. Small, medium, large. I used pictures of a cartoon character who can morph himself into different types of animals of different sizes. They freaking loved it. After class, they all jankened (rock, paper, scissors) for the flash-cards. I had matching sets of animals, buildings, and nature to show small, medium, large, and we played a run-up game to match the picture to the size. Two rounds, one with the matching sets, and one where we had to think a little more and mix-match the sets. Had I been planning better, I would have made that round, Big Bigger Biggest! but it didn't occur to me until half-way through. But I wanted it to be more challenging. And they seemed to love it. 


Class flew by. 


6th year took about fifty-hours (thank you, Brandon!) and 5th year was over and I never once looked at the clock. 


I am trying to think of a diplomatic way to suggest some other games into our 6th grade curriculum. Anything to get out of the rut and get the kids into it. Anything to make them not hate English, or not be bored to death. Anything for ME not to be bored! Education can be fun. It should be fun. We all learn best when we play challenging games.