10st Months

People go on and on about the state of English education in Japan. The Japanese pour so much money into private English conversation classes, English conversation books, video games….etc. Not to mention people like myself hired by the local governments to teach in public schools. Students are exposed to a lot of English, but the subject is approached like a math subject and students are rarely encouraged to express their own thoughts in the English language. There are people who write much better about the subject using specific studies and research, so I probably should not speak too pretentiously yet.

Anyway, what I am trying to get at is a particularly frustrating episode of “This is too difficult for the students, Scott-sensei”. Instead of automatically assuming that someone is as dumb as a rock, I usually try to give my students the benefit of the doubt when making worksheets or activities. I think back to what I did in my Spanish class in middle school. (Admittedly, all I can really remember is throwing books out of the window and getting Maria, a fluent speaker of Spanish, to finish my homework.) I had a worksheet, which oddly enough required the students to use the day’s grammar point to introduce members of their family. This was deemed too hard. This was not the teacher’s fault…perse. As I gave the activity a second look-see, I quickly realized that this activity would take at least 3 classes to finish. (In Japanese school time, that’s a week) English isn’t taught as something to use but something to memorize and regurgitate onto the university entrance exams that rule the Japanese society. Keeping that in mind, we designed an activity perfect for the class, a memorization drill requiring neither a working knowledge of the English language or an ounce of creativity.