So, I spent the last few days in a conference about effective team teaching with a few hundred people, including one of my Japanese coworkers and her mother, who moderated for my group and gave me a ride to the conference. My coworker’s seventh graders are struggling to remember the vast majority of the course content, and their grades are about as low as one could imagine.
On the ride home, we had an interesting conversation. Having some experience with programming and web design, I offered to build a web site which the students could use to study outside of class, hopefully helping them to improve their test scores, making life easier for the teacher in the process without any effort on her part.
She wasn’t sure if it would be OK for me to do that. I clarified that I didn’t plan on using any class time for my project, and that it would consist solely of me giving the kids a web address which they could access in their free time, outside of school. Entirely optional. Nobody’s forced to do anything–those who want it would have another resource outside of paper handouts that their teacher gives them based on an outdated textbook.
She said that she was afraid that students would somehow write in rude comments that others could see, to which I replied that it would be read-only, consisting of flash cards, audio and video. There would be no message board or any way for students to input messages.
Dead silence.
The three of us had previously chatted about differences in Japanese and western (specifically American) methods of communication, including how foreigners struggle to understand what Japanese people are really thinking (since what they actually say is often vastly different, and the listener is left to read between the lines). I tried, as best I could, to understand where they were coming from, but it was really tough. I was willing to use my own free time to provide a solution for the struggling children, one which cost the school no time or money, and which was completely optional. I told them that, from my western perspective, it was really hard for me to understand why anybody would ever oppose something that was so apparently harmless yet possibly beneficial.
Her mother chimed in. Students in our town, she said, are not all rich. Many of them do not have a computer. Not all of those who do have computers have internet access at home. By offering a learning resource that is accessed online, she said, we would be giving preferential treatment to those who had money, further widening the gap between them and the students whose families had little money.
I was blown away. First off, anybody can access the internet for free at libraries and local community centers. Furthermore, what is more important–the feelings of a few students or the students’ progress? At worst, nobody learns anything from the web site and everybody’s grades are the same as they were before. Realistically, some of the students would improve at least a little bit due to focused, technology-based learning resources, while those who don’t access it get the same poor grades. Are feelings so important that we can’t even say, “Hey–check out this website in your free time,” after class is over?
Baffled, I did my best to describe my feelings on the matter, wondering how on earth these kids would ever learn if more effective teaching methods were being passed over because they didn’t want to offend the poor kids. I phrased things as tactfully as I could, but received no response for the next few minutes.
Having just come from a seminar in which workshops were dedicated to dealing with breakdowns in communication due to culture differences between Japanese and foreign teachers (which I felt was a bit pointless as I got along just fine with my coworkers), I couldn’t help but feel the irony of my situation.
I changed the subject soon after, but not before my coworker told me that there was almost no technology involved in teaching the children at that school. There are no computers, no projectors, no televisions, and no other electronic devices in the classroom, outside of a CD player. Nothing but a dusty old chalkboard and some desks. Each class used to have a TV, but my school opted to remove them after some people in Tokyo got killed by falling TVs in the last big Japanese earthquake. Learning consists of worksheets and workbooks, with no interactive multimedia to speak of. This is not by design, as the Ministry of Education understands the place for technology in the classroom and, as such, sent every school at least one 60-inch smart board TV/computer–which was subsequently locked in a room to collect dust. Strangely, each staff room also received a huge flat screen TV which has only ever been used to watch baseball.
This is my last year teaching in Japan. We’ve decided to move back to the US at the end of July. There are many things that I will miss about Japan–the people, the food, the architecture, the clean and beautiful surroundings, the language–but I will not miss Japanese bureaucracy and the insistence upon sometimes outdated traditions. I won’t miss the lack of clothes dryers because people like hanging their clothes. I won’t miss having to wash dishes by hand. I’ll certainly not miss the awkward silence caused by my inability to read others’ minds because they’re unwilling to communicate what they actually feel.
In other words, I’m excited to be going back to America. I know we Americans are a bit rough around the edges, but I like that about us.
