Playing Basketball at Ni-Chuu

Ni-Chuu is the nickname of my second school. Its full name is Iizuka Dai-Ni Chuu Gakko. Chuu Gakko means "junior high school" in Japanese. While working at Ni-Chuu, I decided I wanted to play basketball with the school's basketball club. I had played one time with the basketball club at I-Chuu (Iizuka Dai-ichi Chuu Gakko), the first school I began work at, and I wanted to try out some hoops with the Ni-Chuu kids. I asked the English teacher if I could play with the team, and he said "Of course, let me ask the supervisor and I will be back." After coming back from the gym, he told me he would take me back to the gym so I could meet the club members. As I walked through the gym doors, I saw a group of seven junior-high age girls in basketball clothes walking up to meet me. They all circled around me and gave me these nice, big, simultaneous bows, and then I stood there feeling confused as to what I should do next.

The fact is that Ni-Chuu doesn't have enough coaching support for a boys basketball team, so, in my case, I could either choose to hoop it up with these girls or politely say no. I decided do have practice with them, thinking I could just join in on their drills or games and play some easy ball after a days teaching. It pretty much worked out this way during my first practice with them, so I felt pretty good about saying I would come back to play with them again. Well, the next time I played with them, the supervisor happened to be at an important baseball game for the local pro team around here, the Softbank Hawks. I walked into the gym again, and the girls gave me their usual greeting of respect of bowing, and I stood there again feeling awkward. "Nani-o shimasu ka?" one of the girls asked me...(What are we going to do?) "Lets play basketball," I said, really hoping they would just go into their normal routine like the last time. In fact, they started to do one of their usual drills, but during this I realized that they should have been doing some better warm-up drills, liking working on lay-ups. So, I taught them a new lay-up drill, and also showed them how to work on their reverse lay-ups. After this, I taught them other drills, thinking they would really be helpful for them when it came time to scrimmage. I ended up leading these girls through a 2 hour basketball practice.

I felt some stress during this practice because I knew I could teach them some great new things (not to mention some of their shooting forms were pretty shabby looking), but I also knew that they had a supervisor, and I didn't know much about his openness to me teaching these girls new things. I did know that some of the English teachers I'd been working with acted conservatively in the classroom, and were very "by the book" in the way they taught the class. Allowing creativity to flourish definetely is not a high priority in their classrooms. I'd say this is a trait that is more or less general to all of the English classes I've seen so far (for example, I know at least four English teachers from two different schools who have taught students ranging from ichi nensei, or 7th graders, to san-nensei, 9th graders, to answer the question "How are you?" with nothing but "I'm fine, thank you. And you?") - but it really does depends on the teacher. I think its also relevant that I am living in a semi-rural area as well - so maybe classes are taught differently in the heart of Tokyo?

Anyway, I hadn't worked with the basketball supervisor, Hano-sensei, and so when he came back the next day, I asked him if it was ok that I was teaching the girls new things (my Japanese at this point amounted to me pointing at what the girls were doing and asking - is this ok?)... He understood my question, and said back to me in Japanese "Its ok, please help me..." This really was quite a relief for me - but I have to admit I still felt a little funny teaching these girls how to bust a spin move on the court the next day.

I'll be back to that school in another 8 weeks, and I think I'll be leading some more practices at that time...