More than anything else I encountered in Japan - the mountains, the ancient shrines, the breathless cities - my students made me the happiest, and interacting with them is what I miss the most about my life there. My students were also perhaps the most surprising thing I encountered, the thing that made me think and question my assumptions about Japan each day I saw them.
When envisioning Japanese high school students, many people - myself included - have an image of quiet, studious, hard-working little adults. We think of them as serious and mature, wise beyond our own society's children about the importance of learning and being productive citizens. We think of kids who attend their normal schools all day only to finish their evening at a juku, or cram school; what is more, I don't think we ever stop to question whether this lifestyle is something that they enjoy. We wax idealistic about how wonderful our schools would be if they had these kinds of students, ones who are unnaturally talented at math and science, ones who memorize facts with ease and have no greater goals than to do finish all of the extra credit homework and get 100% on their midterms. It would be great, we say, if our kids could be so focused.
Not everyone, of course, has this image of Japanese students, but I would say it's pervasive in our culture.
* * * * * * *
Upon first meeting my students, I was struck by their shyness. They purposefully avoided me, bustling by in small groups that kept a safe distance. I caught them sneaking looks, giving me the once-over, assessing what kind of intimidating threat I posed to them. The teachers explained their behavior this way: "they don't know you yet." This surprised me, but as I got to know the students better, I realized that it was so. When they didn't know me, they were shy and fearful; when they got to know me, they became affectionate and open and outgoing.
Even after they knew me, they didn't always approach me when they saw me. Instead, I heard them talking loudly about me amongst their friends - "Oh, look." They'd point. It never occurred to them that I, standing across the street, could see and hear them; it never failed to surprise them when I waved and yelled back.
* * * * * * *
I met several students in Japan whose appearance fit our stereotype of quiet and studious. My best friend taught at the number-two high school in our area and his students were extraordinarily hard-working and almost entirely focused on their school life. Not only did they take numerous difficult courses and study with single-minded determination to master the material they were given, they participated in clubs after school for hours a day. The clubs were no joke: just like at my school, they demanded the commitment of serious time and effort, with hours of daily practice, including weekends and school holidays. After the clubs, they attended juku or had tutors, and later they studied.
I met some of my friend's students early in the year - all around 16 years old - and I was immediately struck by their soft-spoken geniality; they were smiling, pleasant, conversational, sweet. They were friendly but shy, good-natured, and unerringly positive. In a word, I would describe them as utterly innocent. Their well-practiced English was polite and earnest, and they were quiet but bold in their pursuit of language practice and curious questioning. In another word, I would call them mild. These students were book-smart beyond their years, but had the street-smarts and passion of soft-spoken 10-year-olds.
* * * * * * *
My students, on the other hand, did not attend the second-best high school. The attended my high school, which is on the lower end of high schools while still classified as "academic", meaning that they aim to go to college. Many of them do continue on to college, but not to the schools that my friend's students aspire to. Instead of the big-name national universities, they tend to go to low-grade local universities or two-year trade schools for things like design or cosmetology. That is not to say they weren't interested in being successful - they put the same amount of effort into their after-school clubs, spending hours a day on baseball practice or learning calligraphy or practicing tea ceremony. They threw themselves completely into what they committed themselves to do - hobbies, friends, sports.
The major difference I noticed between my students and those from my friend's school was their collective personality. Bright and earnest though they all were, they were not necessarily the most studious of people. They were more interested in asking me questions about myself and where I came from, in Japanese, than in learning English. They loved to joke and tease - with each other, with the teachers, with me.
My students weren't bad kids - there were other schools that had bad kids, the ones who fought and caused trouble, who dyed their hair and wore makeup and modified their uniforms, who skipped class and threatened teachers. Japan has its share of bad students, and the inability of the schools to discipline them by removing them from class makes the problem much worse than it is in the United States. The stereotype we have of safe schools and disciplined students is absolutely not based on the reality of school life in Japan.
No, they weren't bad kids; they weren't the best students, but they didn't go out of their way to cause trouble. Their uniforms were standard, and their skirts weren't hiked up, even if the boys did like to sag their oversized pants a little. They teased the teachers good-naturedly, but there was an undercurrent of obvious respect - as if the teachers were big brothers and sisters rather than arbitrary authority figures. Of course they misbehaved, just as high school students will do anywhere, but they did so in an earnest and somewhat innocent way. I never saw them do anything with genuinely cruel intentions.
My students - my kids - were still children, of course, and they were lost in their own small words of friends and family and school life and their own varied interests. They did not think about the big picture any more than any 16-year-old student would. Immature and innocent, they came across as terribly sincere no matter if they were enthusiastically saying hello, gossiping a little too loudly, sulking and refusing to answer my questions in class, or chasing their friends down the hall. Most of all, if I'd describe my friend's students as mild, I'd describe my own as colorful. Colorful, animated, and brimming with an earnest energy - whether being good or bad, well-behaved or passive-aggressive, always amazingly, emotionally, expressively human.
* * * * * *
How to win over the students? As I began my time as an Assistant Language Teacher at my high school, I felt a deep desire to be accepted by them, to be involved and included and ultimately respected not just as an authority figure and a knowledgable person, but also as one of them. I was conflicted by this feeling: as their teacher, I should maintain a distance, maintain my "game face" at all times, and maintain their respect for my position relative to them in the school hierarchy. It may sound overly cynical, but in such a structured society as a high school - especially one in the overly-structured Japan - I had the distinct sense that it was important to maintain an idea of who I was. And who was I? A teacher, no longer a student. I found myself in a position that warranted more automatic respect from others than I was used to.
As a teacher in Japan, one has to remember to be on one's best behavior at all times. This includes not only time spent in school, but outside of the class as well. If a student or teacher or parent sees you around town, doing something that sets a bad example for the students, you will certainly be spoken to by the administration. We, as teachers, were expected to set a good example and be role models no matter where or when we encountered students. This even included trivial offenses like jaywalking; I had to remember to be careful about this, as a veteran jaywalker, because I lived only a few minutes' walk from my school. I regularly saw my students around town and always tried to put on my most cheerful and friendly face for them.
Still, I wondered why I felt that I didn't want them to just come out of their shells and talk to me, but actually like me and respect me as a peer. And then it hit me, the obvious answer: I still felt so much more like a student than a teacher. At 22, I was not much older than my 15-year-old students, and obviously I was much more accustomed to the role of a student, accustomed to blending in with a group of other students like myself. I was not used to being looked up to as a teacher, or even simply being identified and ejected from the group because I was no longer a student. This worried me; the students were close to my age, they were fun, we got each other's jokes. I liked their personalities. And I found it much more difficult than I expected to mentally put myself in a position "above" them, the position of someone who should correct their bad behavior and tell them what to do.
In my heart, really, I was still a student. I identified with the students, not the teachers, and I felt a strange rush of nostalgia when I was with them. The nostalgia was for my own time in high school, for my eccentric friends and ready acceptance and desire to learn, for my strange dreams and narrow hopes for my life. I was taken in by the students with their sense of humor, their cliques, and their small daily dramas. I had to constantly remind myself: I am here to teach and to connect with the students on that level, not to fit in with them and try to impress them. If anything, I was there to impress them as a teacher, as someone to look up to, not someone who could potentially fit into their own group.
It was as if I had been thrown there alone, and was caught between the two worlds of adult and high school: too old to be a student, and too young and foreign to fit in with the teachers. I was given much less respect than I deserved by my coworkers, who saw me as being on the same level as my young students, and yet the students saw me as being too much in a position of authority. They were as shy and hesitant with me as the teachers were dismissive. Now that I look back on it and try to see why I felt the need to be accepted by the students and not necessarily by the teachers, I am quite sure that I instinctively saw the students as an easier group from which to gain respect and affinity. They were the group more like myself.
How, then, was I to do this? As the year went on and the students were still shy and hesitant, I discovered through trial and error my three-pronged attack: pop culture, making an idiot of myself, and losing my fear of getting physical with them if necessary.
I will address the third point first. My readers may be wondering what I mean: was I wrestling my students? Far from it. I watched one of the more popular teachers in my grade throughout the year, who was not much older than myself. She was loved and respected among the students. This teacher took on a role with them that seemed more akin to a big sister - someone intimate and friendly with the students, but also someone to be respected as a serious source of authority. Besides her fun and joking personality, what else was unique about her that caused the students to see her this way? I began to understand when I saw her dynamic with them for what it was - they teased her mercilessly, and she teased them right back. She pretended to be annoyed sometimes when they were teasing, but she showed them that it rolled right off her back and that she could dish it out as well as take it. The act of teasing them back seemed to demonstrate that she took them seriously enough to play along for a while, but then could tell them to settle down and stop when it was time to do work. And, surprisingly enough, they listened to her for the most part.
The other thing I saw her do with regularity was smack students in the head. This is going to sound outrageously bad to most of my readers, but I would like to emphasize that this was far from corporal punishment. This was done to guys twice my size, the ones who wouldn't quit talking or goofing off when the teacher was talking. She'd walk up and down the aisles, keeping herself close to the students, and would nonchalantly whack a guy in the head as she passed by. The other students would snicker, the guy himself would laugh. This threw me when I saw teachers doing it - other English teachers I taught with would push kids, whap them with the textbook, give them a smack in the back of the head. None of it was hard enough to hurt, but just enough to establish a dynamic of the teacher physically joking with the students.
Halfway through the year, somehow I got up the courage to give this a shot myself. The result? They loved it. Or rather, they loved me after I started picking up their desks to move them (they never wanted to move into groups on their own), after I physically pushed them where I wanted them to go, after I whapped them on the heads when they weren't paying attention. I once stopped a spitball war with a single reprimanding glance, an arch the eyebrow, and the soundless form of "DAME" (bad). It surprised me more than seeing the other teachers do it. After all, why should my willingness to smack or push students make them love me? But from that day forward, the students became infinitely more friendly and intimate; they joked with me more, they called hello to me in the hallway, they came to visit me in the teachers' room. In class, they listened to me, with more attention than they ever had before; they didn't act up as much, and when I got firm with them and told them to quiet down, they were more cooperative than in the past. I never really understood what went on there, but it was a correlation that I simply couldn't miss.
Making a fool of myself in front of them went right along with getting physical. In class, I was asking them to do some fairly silly things: talk loudly in front of others, make mistakes, answer questions incorrectly, ask their partners stupid questions, make silly lists on the blackboard, compete in dumb English games as groups. I will freely admit that most language-learning activities are idiotic, and make the participant feel like they've somehow been had. In the interest of learning English, I lost my inhibitions at some point during the year and made a point of being as exaggerated as possible when doing demonstrations, reading passages out loud, and showing how to pronounce a word. I stuck my tongue out and exhorted the class to do the same. I shouted at them when they weren't repeating things to me, or when they wouldn't answer questions in a tone louder than a whisper: "WHAT??" Their shared giggles and shyly acknowledged amusement went a long way in helping the students lose their own inhibitions, to become comfortable in my class. Perhaps even more importantly, it helped them become comfortable with me both in and out of class - after all, if I was willing to make mistakes willy-nilly in Japanese, if I was comfortable with shouting and running and acting in their class, I would hardly be the person to criticize them for saying hello or testing out a newly-learned English phrase or just to tease their friends in front of me.
After the students began to get comfortable with their pushing, punching, shouting English teacher, the way was open for me to wow them with pop culture references. Doing this wasn't too difficult; I simply demonstrated some knowledge of pop culture that they also knew. Between my foreignness and my status as an "older" teacher, many of the students obviously did not expect me to watch the same TV shows, listen to the same music, and enjoy the same activities that they did. They gasped when they saw me at the local karaoke place on Friday nights, yelling out Bon Jovi lyrics with my friends. They suddenly became my best friends when they heard me talking to another teacher about last week's episode of Pride, a TV drama about ice hockey. And the pop culture reference that got my students' respect and interest more than any others? Rappers. I could talk to my boy (and some girl) students for the longest time, without even using any real Japanese or English, by just naming rappers' names that I liked. They'd counter with their own. I'd try to think of someone related. And repeat, for fifteen minutes at least.
My advice to the English teachers of Japan, then, would be to act crazy, push the students around, and watch TV dramas every night of the week.
* * * * * *
One day, at the beginning of the new school year in April, a few of my former students came by in the teachers' room. When they got bored waiting for another teacher, their first instict always told them to come and bug me. Not that I minded - I missed them after they had progressed to 11th grade from 10th, and I only taught the new 10th graders. Nearly a year of working with the students, despite how little I saw them in-class, had found them a place deep in my heart, and my spirits rose every time they wanted to talk to me in the hallway, in the teachers' room, in the supermarket or riding past each other on our bicycles in the evening. The new 10th graders just weren't the same.
This group of kind of delinquent but well-meaning boys came over to me, asking as many questions as they could fit into each breath - what are you reading, wow look at these rings, can I keep this, what is this, is that gloomy the bear, why do you have karashi renkon on your keychain. With these particular boys, it never really ends. Finally, the ringleader decided to ask me if I live in teachers' housing, and if so, where. I told him, and then he and his friend started giggling uncontrollably. I never figured out why, but then he asked me to repeat where I lived a minute later. I told him again. He had a strange and intense look look, like he was conducting an experiment. He said a different Japanese phrase, wanting me to repeat it. I did. Finally, another town name. He did an almost-jump, sort of straightened out from surprise, and said, "whuaaa... fustuu ni." (Lit, "Whoa, like normal.") He and his friends seemed momentarily impressed, but by this point had grown bored of tormenting me. Without another word, they went off in search of other victims.
Amidst all my frustrations in learning Japanese, rare moments like that, most often with my students, remained with me. That particular boy spoke with so much slang and dialect that I often could barely understand a word that came out of his mouth. There I sat in the teachers' room, beaming with the glow of my own language-learning ego when my speech was deemed "normal-sounding" by a kid who spoke such "authentic" Japanese.
I only wished that I could impart the same sense of satisfaction in language-learning to my students; the ones who screamed "HEY!" on the street, who told me they'd beat up my boyfriend and that I should avoid the convenience store at night because "dangerous" kids like them came there - they were not the ones who would study English to be able to talk to me. They spoke Japanese to me regardless of whether they knew I could understand it; they expected me to meet them, not to make the effort to meet me.
My favorite students may have entirely lacked any interest in using English at all, no matter the purpose. Still, I could never stay frustrated at the sort of students who, in a mysterious fit of dedication, once went to the trouble to teach themselves themselves to yell to me across the parking lot, "Say hello ... to your mother!"
* * * * * *
As the year went on, I came to have a sixth sense for which students would be discipline problems, and which ones I longed to stay with all day. I knew which homerooms were the best to teach - outgoing, intelligent, and up for anything - and which ones would be sullen, quiet, and resist every attempt at making English fun or engaging. Nearly all of the students called to me in the hallway, waved, smiled, wanted their picture taken with me, but there were enormous discrepancies in how cooperative they would turn out to be in the classroom, which is where it counted.
When I began the year, I looked to the quiet, studious kids for hope; they, surely, wanted to learn English and would obligingly cooperate with partner tasks, group games, and role-plays. After all, my experience with American schools was that the honor students would comply with the teacher - not out of a desire to experience something new or have fun, or even from an outgoing nature, but rather because they had been conditioned to obey people in positions of authority. If the teacher told a group of straight-A students that they had to work with a partner and complete a skit, they would do it out of a concern of being scolded or disciplined, or fear of receiving a low grade. I soon realized that this assumption was completely wrong.
One point that I did not consider was the value of in-class participation; in the United States, teachers are relatively free to include a mix of homework, tests, and participation in their grading, and many do this. In Japan, however, the only grade that really matters is one's score on the Center test, which is a national university entrance exam. In high school, students may get homework-check grades, and midterm and final exam grades, but even if a student is failing the teacher will fudge the grades to pass them anyway. The social aspect of staying with one's class is so important that it's unheard of to fail a student, even if he or she has not been doing any homework or studying and has failed all of their exams.
With this in mind, it is easier for me to understand now why the studious kids were so rebellious - in a maddeningly passive-aggressive way, mind you - regarding my class. They saw it, I assume, as an imposition on their otherwise-quiet existence; a normal class is all in Japanese, lecture-style, where the students are discouraged from participating, asking questions, or even making eye contact with the teacher. Students passively rebel: they sleep, they read comic books, they write notes to their friends. Unlike in the United States, however, they do not really get into trouble for this. They are left to their own devices as long as they stay quiet and unobtrusive.
My class, meanwhile, was as active as I could make it. To learn a foreign language, one must use it, and my sessions were the only times the students got to actively use English in the classroom. I forced them to stand up, move around, get into groups, talk to their friends, compete. The "bad" kids, the ones who didn't want to study quite so much, the ones who wanted to talk instead of reading the textbook, were typically the best students in my class: they were not so self-conscious, they were outgoing, and they would give almost anything a chance as long as it met their standards for a fun activity. They grudgingly put up with partner work, but jumped to be first when I put them into groups of friends and asked them to compete against each other by using English.
I had one group of students that I especially looked forward to teaching. They were extraordinarily intelligent and, at the same time, extremely outgoing and positive. They joked with each other, they gave the teachers a hard time, and they still had so much of their childish innocence at 15 that they were not yet as cripplingly self-conscious as their older peers who wouldn't be seen playing silly English games with the foreign teacher. They had boundless energy that could be channeled into competitive brainstorming sessions, sentence-assembling games, and partner interviews. These students may not have been reading their textbooks so closely, nor were they the pliant listeners that one would want to teach in a lecture-style classroom. They were loud, they were rowdy and out of control, and they got into trouble. In my class, they were the perfect mix of interest in English and interest in getting a little crazy.
The classes of "bad" kids had the same outgoing attitude, but combined it with less English ability. Unlike the star homeroom, they didn't get far with the partner interviews, writing down their friends' answers in word-for-word translations or simply in Japanese. They had to have directions explained to them at maddening length before their helpless looks convinced the Japanese teacher to explain what to do in Japanese. They still stared helplessly until we grabbed their desks and started moving them ourselves. They wanted to grab me as I went by and ask me how many piercings I have and whether I have a boyfriend, and they didn't want to follow directions or do their work. Still, they would give things a shot, and even if the results weren't the best, they at least interacted and participated. They got excited when I came to their class because they perceived it as a fun break; compared to their regular lecture class, I still think we got more language learning done because I forced them to engage with it in order to get what they wanted. Their lecture was a boring speech in Japanese on English grammar, but I made them ask me in English what I bought at the mall when they saw me the other week.
Who, then, were my worst students? If the worst ones weren't those who had discipline problems in their normal classes, who could be left? Sadly, I realized on my first visit to the "special English class" homeroom that the very students who had straight-A averages and had been grouped together for their "superior" English ability were the ones that I would dread teaching the most. When I shouted "HELLO!" to the class, did they respond? Not a single voice would be raised back in greeting. They didn't make eye contact; when I called on students to answer questions, they refused to even answer in Japanese that they didn't know the answer. They looked right past me and ignored that I was even speaking to them. When I told them to complete a worksheet by asking their partner the questions in English and writing the answers, the room would be silent as they whispered the exchange to each other in Japanese or even simply gave their partner the sheet to write.
They knew, as smart kids do, that the class didn't count. They knew exactly what did count: test scores, studying, being quiet and unnoticed. They were determined to not put up with my intrusion on their strategy for working the system.
The worst experience I had with straight-A students was with a small group of them that happened to be mixed in with a normal class. I had handed out some sheets that the students needed to work on in groups, asking for the answer to a personal question from each group member in English. It was simple and not too challenging; the goal was to get the students using some English, not testing their knowledge of complex grammar or ability to spot a trick question. I had gotten some other groups started on the activity and the Japanese teacher and I walked around the room slowly, observing the groups and doing our best to prod them into staying on track.
One small group of girls was sitting in the corner, the sheets sitting untouched on their desks. They sat with a slouch and stared at the ground, not talking to each other, not making a single move to begin the activity. I knew they understood the directions; they simply didn't care. I walked over to them, got down on the ground to eye level, and explained the directions with a great deal of hand motions and demonstration. I showed them how to ask their partners a question and where to write the answer. I did an example. Then I set the paper back down on the girl's desk and asked them to begin.
Not once through this whole exchange did they so much as acknowledge that I was even present. I could feel my temper getting worse; the boys who argued with me, the girls who only wanted to ask personal questions, the students who talked over me - none of this was as bad as simply being ignored. I explained what to do again - this time in Japanese. I knew they could understand every word I said. I said very directly, "Please begin. Now. You have to do this." I said it in a way that a Japanese teacher would have. They continued to not even look at me; not one of them even reacted. I finally gave up after a few minutes, as I couldn't leave any one group of students alone for too long before they, too, would take advantage of the opportunity to stop doing their work. Each time I came back over to the girls, they hadn't moved or spoken. The only reaction I got out of them in the several classes that I taught was a smile. It wasn't a smile of acknowledgment or apology or even relief: it was a mocking smile.
It was a smile that said: I'm not going to do this, and I know you can't do anything about it because you are not a "real" teacher and this class doesn't matter.
Regardless of what anyone says about the merits of quiet, hard-working Japanese students, I would rather teach the rowdy ones than their studious counterparts any day.