Teaching English in Japan

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November 2007
Strength in Numbers in the Japanese School System

You may already have an image of Japanese high school students as uniformed, studious teenagers who are always at school with barely any breaks. Before I had any real experience of Japan’s educational system, I too had my own preconceptions of factory-like schools that churned out test-taking drones designed to outscore the rest of the world with number two pencils and multiple-choice answer sheets. After two months of teaching experience in Japan, these preconceptions, at least at my high school in Kobe, seem to be only half-truths. The students are indeed hard-workers, and even when they have vacation breaks, they often come to school to practice with their athletic or cultural clubs. The third-year students are especially busy, cramming for their all-important college entrance exams. But all those long hours spent studying and practicing don’t seem to bring the students down. In fact, they smile and laugh through it all. For lack of a better word, Japanese high school students simply seem less jaded than my peers and me when we were the same age.

My view of the students might be a little skewed, seeing as how the mere sight of me is enough to send students into fits of giggles. As the only foreigner at my school, I certainly stand out from the crowd, and students have likened me to Elijah Wood, Orlando Bloom, and most notably, a Greek God. My almost instant celebrity status was a little much to get used to, but now that the newness of my appearance has finally worn off a bit, there is still something else keeping the students smiling through all their work and responsibilities.

Maybe it’s the strong group unity that allows students to share the pressure of high school life so that no individual feels alone in his or her struggles. In the classroom, students stay with their homeroom group as they move from one class to the next. All forty students in one homeroom share the same academic experience. On a smaller level, group projects seem to work much better than individual assignments. Only the most outspoken students will raise their hand to answer a question in my class, but when I put them in groups, they can write whole skits together as long as no one person gets singled out. Students also have strong feelings of responsibility toward their athletic and culture clubs. Every free moment—before school, during lunch, and after school—is spent practicing with their clubs. When I come to school in the morning, the baseball team is already in uniform and out on the field, playing catch and practicing their swings. When I leave work in the afternoon, the brass band is practicing its scales to the tick of metronomes, filling the hallways with loud blasts of sound. High school life asks a lot of these students, but their tightly knit groups inside and outside of the classroom form support nets to keep them afloat. 

Group unity, however, does not always have a positive influence on students. Those who have especially good English feel the need to hold back so that they do not stand out from their homeroom group and lose the support of their peers. When a sports team loses a game, they not only lose for themselves, but they also lose for the whole school. This mentality is often present in Western schools to some extent, but in Japan, at almost every sports event I have seen and with both boys’ and girls’ teams, the losing side finishes with tears streaming down their faces. The feeling of shame that they have lost for their coach and lost for their whole school is too much to bear.

Like any educational system, Japanese high schools have their pros and cons. Foreigners living abroad often have a kind of “honeymoon” period at the start of their new cultural experience when they only see the wonderful, positive sides of everything, but after spending a year studying abroad in Japan as an undergraduate and since the newness of working at a Japanese high school has worn off a bit, I hope I can start observing my experience from all angles and appreciate the good with the bad. I’m starting to find my own place within my group of teachers, but I will always stand out as the foreigner. At least in the moments when I do stand out, I can take the opportunity to step back and observe. As I continue this column, I’ll be paying attention to those things I can see about Japanese education with a fresh, foreign perspective, and those new ideas I can learn about teaching that I could never learn from my own native environment.

August 2007

On Saturday, August 4, I will get on a long flight over to Japan where I will start my job as an English teacher at a Japanese high school with the JET program. By the time this post is published, I should be settled in my new home in Kobe. Although I hope to have a wide range of experiences both during my job and after work hours, this column will focus primarily on the experience of teaching abroad.

It hasn’t been easy saying goodbye to friends and family, but as I pack my bags and prepare to move to the other side of the planet, I can’t help but feel grateful for this amazing opportunity. The chance to live and work abroad is a rare one. These days, anyone from the United States who travels outside the country has to deal with the fact that Americans do not have a good reputation among most nations of the world.  Finding work abroad can be almost impossible unless one goes through a study abroad program or a teaching and exchange program such as JET. However, US citizens who can work abroad, especially as teachers, have a great opportunity to help improve their country’s image. 

Many Japanese people only experience American culture through movies and television.  With that in mind, it’s easy to see how Japanese sometimes stereotype Americans as large, rude, and violent people.  In addition to teaching English language lessons, I hope to teach my Japanese students about the parts of my culture that don’t make it to Japan through the media so that they have a fuller and more realistic image of the US.  America also has a skewed image of Japan when viewed through its modern technology and anime movies.  I hope I can also provide my American readers with a fuller image of Japanese culture.

As a teacher working abroad, I know I’ll have plenty of challenges to face in the classroom.  It can be hard enough to reach students in your home country, and I’ll have to work twice as hard to reach my students across the culture and language barrier.  I will be team-teaching with a Japanese teacher, and I’ll have to know when to speak up and when to simply follow the syllabus.  But I know it’s worth the effort because I have just as much to learn from my students as they have to learn from me. 

Teachers can benefit greatly from seeing how another country educates its children.  I may learn new ways to approach a lesson that I would never imagine in a US school.  I’m especially interested in the strong group mentality of Japanese teachers, the process for developing curriculum in Japanese schools, and how Japanese styles of teaching differ from American styles.  I’ll try to cover all these aspects of teaching in Japan, and I hope that both students and teachers alike can benefit from this glimpse into Japanese education.