Daniel Powter Has Ruined That Phrase

I realise school updates have usually been coming out at the end of the week (or at least that’s been the plan) but I didn’t have a great time today and I felt the need to vent. I hope you’ll indulge me.

One of my tasks at Ichiko is to make up oral test dialogues for the first year students. Why only first students have oral tests and why only two a year is a rant for another day. I’ve already done this once and it’s not particularly difficult. I usually try my best to incorporate English that we have practised in prior lessons. Since most of my lessons veer towards learning questions and answers this is pretty easy.

So I made up an oral test a couple of weeks ago and today it was time for the first batch of students to be tested. The first group was the Interior class and they actually did pretty well. They had the more difficult paper but most of the students managed to remember everything. Their pronounciation is largely shot to hell but one does have to lower the bar a bit at Ichiko. So far so good. Where I really started to get upset was in the subsequent class, 1-Material.

Now in case I haven’t made this clear in the past, the Material classes have the lowest English ability of all the students in the school. Oh sure, occasionally there are some capable students but by and large these are the students who can’t make it into the Machinery classes (that’s a little cruel – I don’t know if that’s true or not, it’s just how I think of the students). In other words, one doesn’t expect miracles. And yet I still found myself getting frustrated. These students had a pretty easy dialogue to remember: five lines each with the most complicated line being ‘Do you want to see a movie?’ Most of the students were able to muddle their way through but there was a sizeable minority who didn’t remember any of it. What got me angry was that I do really mean ‘didn’t’ and not ‘couldn’t’. These are not special ed kids. They can speak and read and write and do pretty much anything one would expect a 15-year-old to be able to do. While I’m certain their academic ability is nothing to write home about we’re talking about what largely amounts to a memory exercise here. A memory exercise for which they have had an entire week to prepare (and that we spent an entire lesson practising). That you don’t remember anything can only be the result of a complete failure to even try. And that was where I started to find myself losing my cool. I don’t think I work particularly hard at Ichiko but I do work. I prepare for lessons. I don’t just don’t turn up and listen to music during the lesson. I don’t talk to my friends during the lesson. I don’t eat during the lesson. Now all of this I’m prepared to accept in a classroom. Students are students and it’s hard to behave perfectly. I can accept that. But to not even try? How lazy can you be? How wrapped up in yourself can you be? How selfish can you be?

Rui and I talk at length about how selfish the children in this society are. I don’t know if that’s an entirely fair statement to make since I see such a small sample of young Japanese. Rui saw more, though, when she was working at English World and she assures me that it’s part of the way children are brought up. Regardless of whether the Ichiko students are representative of students as a whole in Japan the Machinery class is not alone in not caring about others. All the classes exhibit this quality to varying degrees. It’s something one just gets used to at Ichiko but there are times (like today) where it truly strains one’s patience.

I didn’t actually lose my cool. I was sorely tempted to tell some students to just give up. Particularly the few that said to Matsumura-sensei and I simply 分からない (‘I don’t know it’). The petulant tone with which they said it was as if to say ‘I couldn’t be bothered’. The only thing that kept me from snapping at anyone was the knowledge that it would surely not have been the first time. Given the situation they’re in, clearly it hasn’t worked. But then what to do? Just ignore this and keep bashing my head against the proverbial wall in an effort to reach them? That seems to be the ideal but it’s difficult. I found the 1-Material lesson completely sapped my enthusiasm and when I came back to my desk I spent the rest of the day surfing the net (I discovered Portable Firefox yesterday and ye it is awesome.)

On my desk at school is a calendar that CLAIR provides to JETs. It features photographs and little stories by participants about how great their experience has been. It attracted my attention today because I realised I hadn’t turned it over to June yet. Reading about the fantastic time some JET had had in Okinawa didn’t exactly help the situation. Why haven’t I had that experience? Why was I sent here? What’s the point?

To top it off, during lunch one of the students from 2-A came to the staffroom at lunch to ask for Kokubu-sensei. Only he didn’t know her name. This is his English teacher. He sees her three times a week. He has seen her three times a week for two months now. How can he not know her name? I know the answer, of course. He doesn’t know her name because he spends every English class with his back turned, talking to his friend, Yamamoto-kun (the irony that I have six hundred students to remember and can manage to recall most of their names is not lost on me). I almost snapped when he tried to explain to the other teachers what he wanted. Again, about the only thing that prevented me from yelling at him was the knowledge that it would be a waste of time. That realisation was possibly the most depressing of all.