I’ve been at my new school for about a month and a half now. I’ve gotten used to certain things, such as commuting to work by train, having different work hours, having to convince people that OMG I know what hiragana is, and having the beginning of class taken up by tests on the bane of every person who wants Japanese youth to actually learn English: the English vocabulary books.
If the makers of the JLPT realized that giving out word lists was a bad idea, when will English educators in Japan realize the same thing? @_@ I don’t get it.
Ahem…anyway…
Sometimes things still throw me for a loop. Just when I think we’re all on the same page, I see that we’re not. It can be very frustrating, and sometimes I don’t handle it very well. Read: I state my opinions directly. I wish we’d hold the meetings in Japanese so that my ability to express myself would be crippled and I don’t end up saying things like “All humans are born creative, they just lose the ability if they’re put in an environment that doesn’t nurture their creativity.” Whoops.
My plan stands though. I’m gonna work as hard at the new school as I did at the old school. Every time ALTs rattle off all the things that are wrong with English education in Japan, I always think, “if we know the problem, why don’t we try to fix it?” There are of course things we can’t change, but anyone who believes they received a “superior” education in the West because it was focused on critical thinking rather than rote memorization should put their critical thinking to the test and find the loopholes that will allow them to teach the kids something more useful than a list of words with no relation to each other.
Sidenote: I don’t believe critical thinking trumps rote memorization. You need to memorize some things before you can think critically about them. Do we need to think critically about the ABCs in order to learn them? No. But once you have learned them, you may discover many wonderful things about them when you do know them enough to think critically about them.
On a slightly different topic, one thing that surprised me about my new school is how much older the building looks relative to my previous workplace. My current school is less than 10 years older than my previous one, so why is the paint all chipped and faded, the lockers so rusty? I also had assumed that the new school would be in better condition because it’s supposedly so much higher level academically speaking, but I guess they don’t take that into account when figuring out the building budgets. That would be a bit cruel, and it’s the sort of thinking that makes ghettoes, but since I was used to it, I was surprised by its absence.
Another thing that I found interesting was during the Sports Day festival. During rehearsals for said event, the teachers all have to go outside and watch the kids practice. Myself and so many other ALTs are always left surprised and somewhat worried about the kids’ apparent total lack of both body fat and muscle mass. This is particularly obvious on the boys, who are running around in just their gym shorts half the time. I’ve seen boys who were count-the-vertebrae skinny. And I do mean all their vertebrae. However, it seemed that at my new school, there were hardly any such students. I thought to myself, “No wonder they get better grades, they actually eat enough calories to support all their bodily functions!” ^_^;
This, in turn, made me wonder how many of the dangerously thin students were thin by choice, and how many were thin due to circumstances. Countless studies in the US say that the lower a student’s social background, the lower their grades are likely to be. But in a country were supposedly every one thinks of themselves as middle class, does this play a role, and to what extent?
Well well, I’ve no slick way to end this post, so I’ll just end suddenly like a piece of traditional Japanese music. Saku–
Lucky Hill 
RE: rote memorization “v.” critical thinking . . . conventional wisdom in the US derides the Japanese (and to a certain extent the South Korean, Taiwanese and PRC) educational models as overemphasizing rote learning at the expense of critical thinking skills . . . I think that is a simple-minded view and wonder what your experience has been (if you’ve blogged about this topic before, just point me to the post and I’ll go there quietly lol). Thanks!
I haven’t blogged in-depth about it.
I can’t really talk about the mainstream American classroom experience because my junior and senior high schools were the top in the district, so my education was, both fortunately and unfortunately, much better than what my fellow Detroit Public Schools classmates got. For what it’s worth, I think that the education I received was balanced between rote memorization and critical thinking. For example, in high school, we had to memorize the periodic table in Chemistry, which made balancing equations a lot faster. In French class, of course we had to memorize the chapter’s vocabulary, which we could then use smoothly in conversation.
These days, it does seem to me that in DPS at least, there is a ridiculous emphasis on critical thinking at an age when most children don’t even have the mental capacity to think about abstract concepts. Near the end of her career, my mother, who used to be an elementary school teacher, was trying to teach 3rd graders Economics of all things!
I’ve also read in “American Educator,” the journal of the American Federation of Teachers, that current research shows that students with more “background knowledge” do better in school. Usually this knowledge is thought to be that which is acquired just through living and getting various experiences, such as going to museums or seeing a cow being milked or what have you. But I think this is just the poTAEto-poTAHto game. Experiences are just things we have memorized! We memorize them easily because they’re visceral, but ultimately, what’s the difference in the knowledge as stored in the brain?
As for Japan, the problem I see is that they’re trying to memorize too much at a time, and not spending any time USING what they’ve memorized. Students at the school I currently work at have a book of 4500 English vocabulary words, arranged in a vague order, that they have to learn throughout the year. Mind you, these words are NOT related to the words in their Grammar textbooks, their Writing textbooks, nor their Oral Communication textbooks; and these books, of course, don’t coordinate with each other. So they’ve basically got 3 separate English classes plus this vocab book to learn, and they aren’t related to each other. Is it any wonder the students forget the overwhelming majority of this material? Is it any wonder that each time I ask “How was your test?” after they’ve taken the word test the most common answer is “Noooo!” instead of “Bad!”?
I think what plagues the Japanese school system, more than the emphasis on memorization, is that there is little creativity involved, at least not in high school. So you end up with young people who not only cannot think for themselves in the real world, they can’t even make stuff up.
Ultimately, extremes are bad, balance is necessary. But if I had to have an education system that had a bias toward one or the other, I’d pick rote memorization as long as I could still have creativity in it. If there’s no creativity, I’d go with a critical thinking emphasis.
But after all of that, I gotta admit that I have one overarching theory of education: the same way that not everyone can or wants to be a pro athlete or singer, not everyone can or wants to be a scholar. I believe that truly smart people will do well regardless of what education system you plop them into, and those who are not academically inclined will unfortunately be tortured for years until they’re old enough to say “No more!” The problems we’re having now of people who graduated from college but have no jobs and a ton of debt are results of the fallacious “Everyone should go to college” mentality, to say nothing of the problem of grade inflation. When people think of college as a place to get drunk out their minds with their friends instead of as a place of higher learning, there’s a huge problem.
…Wow…
Well, that just flew out my fingers. ^o^;