About
I’m a high school English teacher in Nagoya, Japan. This October 2009 blog entry gives an overview:
- Meito High School as seen from my apartment balcony
I guess I haven’t written much about my day-to-day teaching life yet. Initially, I found it hard to characterize because it feels so fragmented compared to last year. I see 12 different groups of students over the course of each week. 8 of those groups I see only once. These are “general majors”—high school students whose focus is not English. They are designated by letters (1A, 1B, 1C, etc.), so previous American teachers have referred to them as “the alphabet soup classes.” Because I see them so seldom, it is hard to learn their names or keep track of where each class left off. There is one group of students who, because of class cancellations and infrequent meetings, I have still only seen four times—though I have been teaching for nearly two months. The three groups of “English Majors” I see twice per week (one group per grade—high school in Japan being three years long, starting at the equivalent of the U.S. sophomore year). And I also have a group of four students in my public speaking elective, which meets three times per week.
It’s tough to talk about my experience as a teacher here generally—I work with some students who know a lot of English, and some students who know almost none. There are some groups I know well because I see them often, and other groups who still feel unfamiliar when they walk through the door. Some are extremely studious and motivated—particularly first-year students—while others seem distracted. My third-year (high school senior) students are completely consumed by their upcoming college exam, and they seem to have little patience with homework for other classes. They are good kids, but mentally a few of them have already checked out of high school.
My class sizes are small (no more than 22 students), and unlike many other teachers at Meito, I am always teaching in the same room. In Japanese schools, generally speaking, teachers move from room to room, while students stay in the same room. But, perhaps because Meito wanted to accommodate its visiting American teachers, Ron and I have classes that come to us. Also, almost half of our teaching day is planning periods— this is fairly standard for Japanese high school teachers, and I must say that I like it.
That’s the general shape of things, but I guess it still doesn’t give you a picture of the day-to-day reality. So, though it may be way more detail than anyone really wants to know, here’s a snapshot of what I did yesterday:
7:30: Walked from apartment to Meito (5 minutes). Took off shoes at the door and switched to slippers. Deposited street shoes in my personal cubby (#40) in the massive shoe storage area at the door. I ordered my “bento” (school box lunch) in the office—410 yen. Greeted students (many of whom are already at school studying) and colleagues with Ohayo Gozaimasu (good morning). When a male speaker says this phrase, it often shortened to something that sounds more like “zay-massss.”
7:45-8:40: Finished planning the day in the teacher office. At Meito, all the teachers spend their off-periods working in a big communal office, complete with green-tea dispensing water cooler.
8:45-9:35: A musical bell sounds across the campus and lets everyone know that school has begun. I taught my speech elective. We did a warm up where the students had to give a short speech in English to their teacher about why they forgot their homework, then went to the computer lab and worked on outlining and researching the persuasive speeches they’re working on.
9:45-10:35: Taught my third-year English majors. We started out by talking about gerunds and doing some exercises from the textbook, then did some conversation exercises where they had to interview one another about their zodiac signs. We spent the last twenty minutes talking about Halloween—I showed them some pictures from Halloween in the U.S. and a short national geographic video clip on the history of Halloween, and then we played a game that involved practicing imperative phrases and eating candy. Homework was to write about whether they believed in ghosts in their English journals.
10:45-11:35: Planning period. Graded journals and made copies of worksheets.
11:45-12:35: Had lunch with another teacher in the office and practiced my Japanese while she practiced her English. (My Japanese is much, much worse than her English.) Mostly we stuck to simple topics—food, what we did on the weekend, holidays. One teacher, fluent in both Japanese and English, noticed this and jokingly suggested “The American and Japanese health insurance systems” as our next topic. We took him up on it—I didn’t pick up many specifics, but I learned enough about the Japanese system to know that it’s probably better than ours.
12:35-1:10: Met with a third-year student and gave her a mock-college entrance interview. Many students have to complete college interviews in English, so they’re eager for practice.
1:15-2:05: Team-taught an English essay class. I don’t have to actually plan for this class—I’m just the token native English speaker who grades all the essays.
2:15-3:05: Taught one of my “alphabet soup” classes. We went over the homework, then played some games where the kids had to practice the different forms of “can” in English (could, couldn’t, can’t). One of them involved collecting signatures from classmates in a timed race, and they seemed to like it.
Scavenger Hunt: A: “Can you run for 5 kilometers?” B: “Yes, I can.” A: “Please sign here.”
3:15-4:30: Hosted my English / German “language club”. Every teacher at Meito is strongly encouraged to run at least one “club,” and this is mine—we practiced a few German phrases, then watched a kids’ movie (Holes) in English and talked about it.
Language Club
4:40: Left school and walked to the dentist for a check up on the wisdom tooth I had pulled yesterday. The total cost of the extraction was the equivalent of US $21. The same procedure in Seattle would have probably been over $300.
Evening: Went for a run, made dinner, studied some Japanese.
A standard work day, I guess—though the schedule changes, and every day brings a new twist. It still feels like everything is in flux here, and my teaching life still hasn’t really taken on a consistent shape. But I’m enjoying it—good kids, helpful colleagues, and lots of opportunities to learn and grow. Loneliness and homesickness still lurk around the edges of things, creeping in during quiet moments, but nothing I can’t handle so far.
Speech students hard at work
For my Southeast Middle School experience (September 2006-June 2009), this January 2008 blog entry covers the basics:
If you came to my blog with questions such as “where do you teach?” and “what’s it like?” I realized it might be difficult to find an answer. Between the cadavers and the forest moons, I seem to have lost my grip on reality. So rather than indulging in my usual navel-gazing, this week I will try to provide a useful picture of the environment I work in.
The Job
I teach seventh and eighth grade Language Arts and journalism at Southeast Middle School. Southeast Middle School is technically located in South Gate, California, not Los Angeles, but L.A.’s Watts neighborhood is only two hundred feet away, across the railroad tracks. The school is new, opened in 2004, and serves 1,367 students (over 1600 when you count the on-site “Magnet” school). I was hired after teaching at Gompers Middle School in Watts during the summer of 2006, and I am in Teach for America, an Americorps program that places recent college graduates in low income schools.
The Building
It’s a like a big yellow pound cake—if pound cake were cooked in the sun, made of concrete, and constructed in strict accordance with 21st century California building code. Actually, it looks great, especially when compared with some of the recent monstrosities LAUSD has produced (no offense, Central New Middle #3). It’s not as impressive on the inside as it is on the outside–the hallways are way too narrow, so pushing through kids during passing period is like pushing peanut butter through a pinhole. Still, the school stands in hopeful contrast with its inner-city backdrop.
South Gate, population 103,000, snakes along the 105 freeway, peppered with discount stores, smog stations, factories, tire shops, and Quick-E Marts that seem to specialize in providing the city’s youth with Hot Cheetoes. About twenty percent of South Gate lives at or below the federal poverty line. According to wikipedia, the city was developed in the 1920s and 30s as a blue-collar steel town. It gained a reputation as a fiercely segregationalist city during the 40s and 50s, when white street gangs roamed its borders, assaulting any blacks who dared cross over from Watts. After the Watts riots, however, the white population started heading for the suburbs, and by the 1990s, working class Latin-American families had completely filled the vacuum. The city, like my school, is almost entirely Latino—it’s very rare to meet a non-Spanish speaker. The Spanish-speaking culture is so dominant, in fact, that a few parents tell me they don’t want to learn English because there is no need—their churches, their jobs, their stores, and their media are all Spanish-speaking, so the only reason they would learn English would be to help their children with homework. I feel welcome enough in the neighborhood, but I’m definitely an outsider. There are two Native American students at my school, two Asian students, five black students, five white students, and 1,353 Latin-American students.
Southeast is a Title 1 school, meaning that more than half of our students are low-income, so we receive a small and tightly-controlled stipend from the federal government. We are also on the No Child Left Behind hit list for failing to meet our API (Annual Performance Index)—which means that our school has test scores typical of all low-income areas and is therefore targeted as “low-performing.” We are now in what is called “Program Improvement Year 2,” which means that people from the district come to tell us what our school needs to do in order to avoid punishment. This year they gave us a laundry list topped with a requirement that we do more to meet the needs of English Language Learners (ESL Students). Each year we fail to make API, we enter another phase of the program, which theoretically ends after the 5th year with a take-over by the state, or even by a private company—though I have not heard of any school at which this has actually happened.
While Southeast is struggling on paper, it is by far the strongest of the five public middle schools in our local district (LAUSD 6). The other middle schools in the area have more discipline problems, older facilities, and are much farther down NCLB’s five-year Road to Perdition. With more than 90 percent of the adults in our area at an education level of 12th grade or less, it shouldn’t be surprising that our students’ test scores don’t stack up to those of kids in Pasadena and Beverly Hills, where parents buy their third graders laptops pre-packaged with Leap Frog software.
Most of the graduating students at Southeast High (next door) do not continue to higher education. In LAUSD as a whole, only 66% of students who begin high school ever finish (compared to 85% state-wide), but the graduation rate in our local district is even lower, closer to 50%. Furthermore, according to State tests, 78% of the students in our local district are below the “proficient” level in Language Arts, and 75% are below in math (statewide: 58% and 60%, respectively).
The question “how’s teaching going?” frustrates me. It’s a little like asking “what’s your general impression of human history?” (Good? Bad? Medium?) Of course I don’t think that teaching is the only job too complex for simple characterization, and I’m sure many people feel the same way about the question “how’s work?” There are just too many shades of gray to give a definitive answer. I have problems in the classroom. My sixth period class is rambunctious and weeks behind. I haven’t adequately prepared my students for the upcoming state test. I feel isolated. Two of the school’s laptops disappeared under my watch last Thursday. Every teaching day is still pretty exhausting. But there are a lot of things going well, too. I gave an anonymous “Mid-Year Survey” last week in which I asked the students to answer questions about how the class is going for them: what helps them learn, what kinds of projects they would like to do, and so on. Almost unanimously, students like me and my class, and a few even mentioned that it was their favorite period. One kid said I was a “fun and generous man”—which provided a nice contrast to the one who said “The teacher is too serious. Always work, work, work.” You win some you lose some. But I was optimistic last week. I had the students giving oral presentations, and as my second period eighth grade class was leaving, I overheard one of my punk/rocker girls talking to her friend. She had just finished giving her presentation and, despite a few stumbles, did an excellent job. “That was fun,” she said. Her friend said that she had seemed nervous. “I know,” she said, “but it was fun.” This meant a lot to me because she is a student who had been quietly critical of me and my class during the early (fascist) months, but who now seems completely invested.
So there are ups and downs. It’s much better than last year, and the students are learning a lot more, but the stress of teaching on top of Teach for America and Loyola Marymount requirements leaves me wondering how much longer I can sustain this lifestyle. I’m not a person who feeds on the very act of teaching, who can throw his entire being into his lessons and his students. I’ve met people like this, people who seem “called” to teach, who can’t imagine themselves doing anything else—and I know I’m not one of them. I’m too introverted and drifty. But I can still imagine myself becoming a great teacher. I am already doing an acceptable job, and I think that by next year I could be doing an excellent job. But is it what I want to do with the rest of my life? That question resurfaces in my mind every single day, and I still can’t seem to answer it.
Statistics from Los Angeles Unified School District. Photo-Journalism Courtesy of The Eagle News Staff (i.e. journalism kids who needed something to do).
If you are interested in more pedagogical/professional information about me, here is the Spring 2008 version of my online professional portfolio.
I am seeking a teaching position in the Houston, TX area and I have enjoyed your thoughts and experiences. It helps getting a peak behind the school doors and read about what’s actually happening in your school. Keep up the good work, I also enjoyed the LA Times article about the reporter’s visit to your classroom.