Two Weeks at Shonai

These past two weeks have been the best and worst of times for me as an English teacher in Japan. I've been working at Shonai Chuu Gakko, a junior high school on the outskirts of Iizuka. Shonai is a small country suburb of Iizuka, surrounded by some rice farms and countryside. It's about a 25 minute bike ride from my place in Iizuka.

During my first two days at Shonai the rain fell pretty heavily. On my first day I actually fell off my bike on the way to school because raindrops covered my glasses and blocked my vision. After crossing a crosswalk on an expressway, I sideswiped a pole on the sidewalk. I fell off the side of my bike to the ground and a Japanese civil service worker picked up my backpack wrapped in a plastic bag and handed it to me. I'm sure it was a sight for those drivers that Monday morning to see me wearing my all grey rainsuit and shiny black rubber boots eat it on the sidewalk with my shiny red bike. Overall, no substantial damage happened to the bike, and I was just fine. It really was a trek getting to and from Shonai everyday (especially with the hills), but for the first two days it felt like a mission.

I noticed some stark differences between the ichi-nensei (7th grade), ni-nensei (8th grade), and san-nensei (9th grade) students at Shonai. During my first day, the ichi-nensei students were eager to ask me questions in English and partipate in the lesson. In general, I couldn't have asked for better students; I've never seen such an outgoing, friendly group of kids at junior high school here so far. One class loved to sing, and they sang "Country Road" by John Denver with pretty good voices! The teacher for the ichi-nensei students I felt had a good command of the students attention, and she was very conscious of trying to help the students improve their pronounciation and intonation (like saying the word 'student' instead of 'student-o' and learning how to raise their voices slightly at the end of a sentence when they asked a question).

The ni-nensei and san-nensei classrooms had a very different dynamic, and most of the time a different English teacher. I really had some difficulty working with this English teacher. It really surprised me how poor her English speaking ability was. Often times when she would try to help the students form a sentence in English all the grammar would be mixed up. The students didn't know any better, so numerous times when I was with her she was teaching them really poor English. Also, I felt like she could have had a better command of the students' attention. At times I felt like my place in the classroom was nothing more than a mouthpiece for her lesson. During one class period, she pointed to the textbook and said to me, "These sentences, repeat after students," which meant "Can you please read these sentences and have the students repeat them after you?" I looked at the students and noticed half of them were talking while the other half were listening. I asked her, "Now?" and she said, "Yes." So, I ended up reading sentences to a classroom of students of which only half of them were paying attention. This happened to me a few times while I was at Shonai.

The two English teachers I worked with at Shonai received treatment from the students they didn't deserve. They are working within a school system that allows them little room to take any sort of disciplinary action towards the students. I don't know the half of it, but I know it made me sad to see a student take the teacher's textbook, watch the teacher get angry and throw it at the wall in frustration, and then sit laughing while a third of the students laughed as well or sat smiling.

Yet while there things that really irked me about some of the students at Shonai, I also noticed something really genuine and honest about them. They had a self-confidence and forthrightness that I didn't see that often from students at Ichuu or Nichuu. At Ichuu and Nichuu, most of my interactions with the students were marked by nervous giggles among the girls and shy greetings among the boys. At Shonai, I felt like I was getting to know the students at a deeper level.

In order the pictures are of: Shonai Chuu Gakko, the countryside surrounding Shonai the morning after 2 days of heavy rain, a freshly harvested [rice] farm near Shonai.