The best laid plans of mice and men…

I could spend this post griping about how my spring vacation plans blew up in my face and I didn’t even get out of Honshu, but I won’t.  I’ve spent sufficient time in mourning over that loss.  I will say I’m very happy for my family, and for my friends the Matsumoto’s in Kyoto, for without them I really would have been a mess and had nowhere to go.

I am indeed a very lucky person.

That said, this spring vacation was spent in the warm confines of Kyoto, resting and getting an early peek at the cherry blossoms in Osaka.

Perhaps the unofficial word for the month of March would be ‘plan.’  Or, perhaps it is just that I am standing closer and closer to a new starting line in my life, and planning has become more a necessity than an option.

I managed to plan my spring and Golden Week vacations.  I didn’t plan, mind you, for my spring vacation to self-destruct, but so be it.

I also didn’t plan to meet a good friend– someone who I’d forgotten about for two years because I’d mistakenly thought she’d moved to Sendai.  She’s helped restore my faith in Japanese young people, or at least proved that some Japanese young people in Akita actually care about what goes on outside Tohoku and outside Japan.

I didn’t plan to consider The Ohio State University for law school, although I applied there.  Given the circumstances I plan to go there now, though.  And the more I read about it, the better I feel.

I plan to do a lot more in my dwindling days here.

Invading my Wallet and Privacy

If I walk with an odd limp this week, it’s because my wallet is several pounds lighter now having gone through the car examination (車検) experience.  The good news is that I feel as though I came out on top of the whole ordeal.  My previous two vehicles were virtually un-shakenable. 

There was The White Blight, which sounded like a jet engine flaring just before take-off whenever you tapped the brakes.  The side mirror was held on by electrical tape.  It was listed by Claire Leary as “The most dangerous car I have ever been in.”  I wear that badge or pride with honor. 

Then there was The Maroon Balloon, my cute little K-car with a turbo engine that hummed like a golf cart but moved like a white plate car.  It became un-shakenable when the frame of the car actually snapped while I was driving it.  It also had a nice 6CD changer music apparatus which I remember fondly.

Now I have The Green Machine.  An nice Subaru Impreza that is actually big enough to hold people and safe enough to drive them somewhere.  Minus a few dings, it’s actually in good condition.  The car salesman attempted to sell it to me for 30万, a pretty penny which I didn’t have.  The 30万 price tag came with the assumption that he would do the car examination for me at the time I bought it (October).  The car examination was in March.  I politely informed him that paying for a car exam six months early was crazy and if I accidentally totalled my car (or, say, the frame should snap in half while I was driving it), I’d be out a lot of money.  I said I’d take of the car exam myself and got the car for 10万.  The Green Machine passed 車検 yesterday with flying colors and only (ONLY?) cost me 9万.  Still expensive, but much cheaper than the 30万 price offered by my car dealer.  It was still certainly cheaper than buying another car.  Score.

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I also finally had another ‘first’ in this country last week.  I was finally stopped by a police officer.  I wasn’t speeding.  I wasn’t even in my car.  I wasn’t harrassing a group of innocent Japanese women or defacing public property.  I was walking down the street.  I was asked for my passport several times– to which I instead produced my Japanese Driver’s License and, eventually, 外人Card.  While I would have rather engaged the officer in a friendly discourse on how incredibly undemocratic it is to just stop a random white person on the street and ask for their papers, the 99% conviction rate and horror stories of arrested foreigners encouraged me to think again.

I simply stuck with some snide comments: “Japan must be a really safe place if you have the kind of free time to just stop people on the streets.  Must be really boring for you, huh?”

I’m glad my Japanese has progressed to the level where I can say these kind of things and not worry about something getting lost in translation and me being thrown in prison.

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On a lighter side of things, I attended the most efficient graduation ceremony ever on Sunday.  It was a graduation I actually wanted to go to (perhaps the perk of having 14 schools is the liberty of being able to pick).  It was over fast and I got to wish off a group of 3rd years who won over my heart and actually worked hard to be friends with the foreigner.  Some kids actually cried at my last class and there were plenty of hugs and photos taken at graduation.  They’re a group I’m gonna miss.

How to Kill Your JTE

All you need to know are two syllables: Juku.  The very mention of the Japanese cram school system (塾) has an interesting way of disettling English teachers in the public school system.  It’s odd, really.  Whenever juku comes up in conversation, most of my English teachers act more uncomfortable than if I had suddenly decided to talk about Nanking or attempted to deny Hiroshima had ever happened.

In my first year as an ALT, I was actually scolded for teaching students the English term we have for juku– cram school– in class.  I was never given a good reason as to why.  Agreed, ‘cram school’ conjures an image of studying hard merely to put things into your short-term memory banks the night before a test.  It’s not a very flattering image, but you’d think the Japanese would like the implication that even their youth ‘cram,’ work hard, and do overtime for the good of themselves and the country.   Perhaps the JTE was afraid the students would misprounce the ‘r’ and claim they were going to clam school– leaving all foreigners scratching their heads as to why so many Japanese work so hard to understand the complex world of shellfish.

Long story short, I was instructed that we shouldn’t teach the term ‘cram school,’ we should just teach the term ‘juku.’  An exclusively Japanese word for an English class.  As an English speaker, ‘juku’ means nothing to me.

To tell the truth, I don’t think ‘cram’ was the problem.  The problem JTE’s seem to have with juku is the ‘school’ part.  School is their domain– it’s where their authority and power, and respect, rests.  American teachers get very little respect, unless they earn it.  Growing up, I had teachers I respected (Mr. Smith, Mrs. Biehl, Mrs. Groat), but I certainly had teachers who I didn’t respect whatsoever.  Japanese teachers (especially in a small community), are more like minor celebrities and are imbued with deferential respect, whether earned or not.  They don’t have to do anything to get this respect, save for passing the teacher’s examination which, in fairness is quite hard.  Still, their respect and status is anchored by being an actual teacher in an actual school.  Cram schooling, however, doesn’t have this ‘exclusive club’ feel to it, though plenty of instructors have had exposure or perhaps even taught in the public education system.

The reason my teachers react to the discussion of ‘juku’ as though they were a vampire and I was holding a crucifix to their face is because ‘juku’ serves as a reminder: they have competition.  The tax-payer funded impossible-to-fire public school employee has to deal with competition.  And the competition is winning.  My ‘juku’ kids outperform non-juku kids hands down.  Even in first-year students, it’s easy to tell which kids are going to a cram school within the first month.  They know how to study, they know how to take tests, and the know how to learn.

I have never seen study skills, or study suggestions, taught in a Japanese public school classroom.  The kids seem to get the same vanilla advice in nearly every school– write lots of random words down in your notebook, copy sentences ad nauseum from the textbook, and you may learn English.  Of course, some students actually buy into this, and find themselves shocked and frustrated after a year goes by and the still know next to nothing.  This sort of thing is something only possible when it’s impossible to lose customers.  You can’t drop out of compulsary education, and you can’t change schools unless you move.  A teacher can get away with doing almost nothing.

A juku teacher has to produce results, and has to get the kid learning– the juku teacher has customers, paying customers, who can choose another cram school quite easily.  In the real world, money talks.  In the public school world, the money is guaranteed, so why bother?  You’ll catch more hell by not keeping up with your paperwork or managing the club correctly than if you do no more than lecture about English grammar for ten minutes and then pass out a worksheet.

Juku, by its very existence, highlights the shortcomings of public education here.

(Small disclaimer: I do have some great English teachers who do go out of their way to help students learn, and how do their best to give every kid a shot.  I can’t say whether or not they’re in the majority though.  Public school teachers also have to deal with: the PTA, adminstrators who think they know how things should be taught, kids who don’t want to be there, ridiculous kinds of paperwork, and all sorts of other hogwash that comes with a public institution.)