Fixing last post - about the elementary school

So for some reason my last post goofed and cut off a huge paragraph of two right in the middle of it, blending my rant on the past bug infestation with the kids I work with here (how fitting ^_<). So, sorry if there was some confusion. Let me clarify my work with the kids here:

So every Wednesday morning since school started we go to one of the local elementary schools. We were distributed to the different 6 grades, with some getting two ryuugakusei since there are 10 of us. I got 3rd grades, by myself. All the ryuugakusei and the students were in the gymnasium when we were allocated. When my name was called for the 3rd graders one of the boys jumped up and down enthusiastically, echoing back my name...can't say that was done for anyone else ;)

We basically just play around with the kids for an hour. The first week we gave jikoshoukai (self introductions) and played a little game akin to musical chairs. The second week my group had the entire gym to ourselves, we played a few games and listened to the TA play the sax (which was at an extremely high level, as most Japanese musicians are). The third week, last week, I was given a set of 7 cards, each with an animal written on it. I had to make the sound that animal makes in English, then the kids would write down what animal they thought it was, and at the end they tallied up how many they got right. Then they taught me what the accepted cry is in Japanese. From what I can recall: Frog = gero gero, Cat = nyaa, Dog = wan wan, Lion = gao, either cow or pig make the sound "buu", and a rooster says kokekoko, or something to that effect. After that I explained to them (in Japanese, of course) what kids in America do for Halloween. I don't think they really do anything here other than sell themed Kit-Kats and Disney merchandise, and it gives college students an excuse to party.

For some reason this week they don't have school on Wednesday, so four of us volunteered to go to a different school on Thursday morning instead to help out. The kids get really excited when we come, either because their happy to see gaijin or their happy that they get to play and goof off for an hour. Somethings I've noticed though are that Japanese kids are much much more rowdy than American kids. I thought they would have been very polite and docile, but nooooo, they're little monsters, these guys. Now, I usually work with kids out in the playground after school or during summer, the times, I imagine, when they let loose all their bundled up energy, so I'd like to think I've seen kids at some of their craziest hours. Yet these Japanese kids the classroom are at least 3x as worse, if not more so. There's constant hitting, badgering, running around, and screaming, all while the teacher's trying to give an explanation. I even saw one kid smack the TA quite hard in the arm and she just rubbed it and lightly scolded him. The kids will run up to the teacher and tug on her sleeve and say "hey hey teacher teacher what are we going to do now huh?" (said with extreme casual and disrespect word usage) and instead of telling him to sit back down she'll respond. Note this is from both sexes, though guys do it more often. It's mind-blowing, and I can only imagine what it's like during recess.

Now, whether or not this misbehavior stems from me being there or it's the norm I'm not sure. Probably a little bit of both. I constantly feel like I should be helping to crowd control, but then I realize it's not my place to do so and I don't know if having a guest try to help keep order in your classroom is showing the right kind of respect I want to give to the sensei. Which brings me to another good point - the teacher. Being an elementary school teacher seems to be one of the most sought-after and coveted jobs in Japan. About half of the people at my school intend are becoming a teacher and are currently taking such courses. The pay is more decent than an American's elementary school or junior high school teacher, sure, but it's wayyyy tougher to become a teacher here than it is in America. I feel like our elementary school teachers are often under-educated and not quite up to the quota as they should be. Usually if you ask someone who doesn't know what they're going to do with their life, perhaps because they're only attending a tandai (community college), they'll say "Eh, I guess I'll just become a teacher or something, I kinda like kids." You don't have to be at the top of your class to become a teacher. But here, the path to becoming a teacher seems to be full of difficult classes and tests to make sure that you're up to the task.

Yet, from what I've seen, being an elementary school teacher here is much more about crowd control than it is actually teaching. It's like running a day care and trying to teach math and history on the side (interesting note: a lot of the kanji I thought are basic were written in hirigana (the Japanese alphabet) on the kokuban (blackboard). I asked one of my friends and he said that we probably know about as much kanji as a junior high kid, if not a little more :)). Again, this could be due to my presence in the classroom, the time of day we spend with the kids (right before lunch), or a whole host of other confounding variables (oooh busting out the statistics here folks).

But, despite me feeling tired from just sitting there and observing these kids for 50 minutes, it's still a great amount of fun, and I look forward to it each week. It's really interesting to see how these kids are learning our language over their own, and so passionately, too. It almost makes it seem like some kind of 3rd-world country. Actually, the increasing usage of American words has become a big problem for Japan, because older generations aren't able to understand the younger generations as readily. In fact, one of the Japanese tutors was doing a study on it, so she gave all us ryuugakusei an anke-to (a questionaire) with a bunch of borrowed American words, asking us if we had heard them used before, understood their meaning, and used them ourselves. Most of them I was able to guess the meaning of, but maybe only about 10% I actually had heard before, I used maybe one or two, and there were a host full where I couldn't even figure out what English word it derived from.

So yeah...that's about it for my update on the kids. I'll try to take some pics when I can, but since I'm pretty busy the entire time (and also since it'd be kind of weird) I can't promise anything. I'm sure on the last day I can take pictures, but until then, I dunno.