All done!!
Sorry for the lack of updates for the last month. I've been pretty busy but now I've got nothing but free time to write about it. Hopefully I can remember the significant stuff that's happened.
First of all Yukiko and I went to a Thanksgiving Day dinner with some friends. Most of the others were teachers from Kwansei Gakuin University and its attached senior/junior highschools. Thanks to my friend Dan for inviting us. The great dinner was hosted by Dan's (and now hopefully our) friends Kelsye & Matt. The food was great and we got to meet a lot of new people. Yukiko made a wonderful vegetarian lasagna which I really enjoyed, and she got to dig into some traditional Thanksgiving turkey with the others. There was one girl at the party named Kiomye that I hadn't met before. She was a little shy at first but after a little while she was really all over me. She even surprised me by giving me a kiss on the lips before I left. Nice to know I still got IT. Did I mention she was only 2?
School finished up for the year and it was pretty interesting. There were a couple of exchange students from Singapore for a few weeks and they were very shocked to see: 1) how low the English level was at an 'International School' in Japan and 2) how poorly behaved the students were. I told them that's how I felt when I first arrived at the school. I was also reacquainted with just how lazy some of the students are. My 3rd year students (the seniors) were given a speech presentation project in their last 3 weeks. I wanted to make a speech contest but the other teacher I work with convinced me it would be too difficult and too much pressure for them. He had a point, as a few of them have absolutely no, zip, zero English ability after studying in the international program for 3 years (not too mention 3 years of jr high English). So to make things real easy for them we decided to make it a 50 word speech. Now that's about 5 sentences. So we explained the project to them and told them that they had 1 week to complete the opening sentence of their speech, "In the future I want to..." They could finish the sentence any way they wanted. I want to:
This would become the theme of their speech. Pretty easy homework given that they had 1 week to do it I figured. Well I figured wrong, 0/16 kids did it. So when we started writing the speech in class the next week it took 10-15 minutes to go around and 'pester' the students to come up with a first sentence. So at this pace you may wonder if they could finish even 50 words in 50 minutes of class. Well no they couldn't. Well, 2 students did and my hat is off to them. Now before you think that I'm making fun of my students just because they have a very low English level I should mention that, while my students do have a low English level, they spend most of their time in class using mobile phones, reading comic books, sleeping, drawing on their desks, etc. So don't have too much pity for them. And I wasn't expecting them to come up with anything mind blowingly literate. We had practiced the future tense in class many times and this shouldn't have been difficult at all for them. Some kids decided to write their speeches in Japanese first and then translate it afterwards. While I tried to tell them this method would take twice the time and encouraged them to translate in their heads as they were writing they wouldn't hear any of it, not least because of the headphones they were wearing. However most students couldn't even come up with 50 word essays in Japanese. So while one may understand their difficulties in English, what does this have to say about their Japanese skills? As only a few students finished their speeches we decided to give them another class to work on their speeches. When I looked at the (Japanese) speeches that were written in the other class (we have to collect their papers at the end of every class as they are physically unable to keep anything from 1 class to the next) I realized that the students had no idea what a speech should be like. Even in Japanese they were awful. One student's essay went something like this:
Not so much a speech as a grocery list. So I asked the other teacher to explain a little bit to his class what a speech was. As it was only to be 50 words it shouldn't be too complicated. Just talk about the theme. When do they want to do it, how are they going to do it, why do they want to do it?
Unfortunately I was sick for the next class and asked the other teacher to take both groups himself. When I came back I was surprised to learn that many of the students still had not finished! So we gave them a 3rd and final class to finish. Apart from 2 kids, who had to finish them after school, they all did it. So the hard part was over I thought. Boy was I wrong. The students were then told that they had 1 week to memorize their speeches. The chorus of cries of 無理！無理！ was nearly deafening. I expected this though and reassured them that if they memorized only 7 or 8 words a day they would be able to do it. The students nodded as if to say that this minimal amount of homework may just fit within their busy schedules. We also explained that besides memorizing their speeches they would also be marked on pronunciation and posture. They didn't know what 'posture' meant so I demonstrated what was good posture and what was bad posture. In fact they should have known this because we had practiced public speaking a few weeks before and I talked to each of them about their posture. Fast forward to a week later and what do you know but only 2 students had memorized their speeches. One student was even gutsy enough to give me this excuse "I didn't have time to memorize it because I went fishing yesterday." For me this merely begged 2 questions: why couldn't you memorize it during the 6 previous days? or if you hadn't memorized it yet why did you go fishing?
Because 88% of the students hadn't memorized their speeches we told them that they could simply read their essays but forfeit half their possible points. Then, to lift themselves up to even greater heights, 6 or 7 of the students were unable to even read their essays because they no longer had them. Sometime during the week they had lost them, thrown them out or folded them into fishing lures. Luckily we had copies of their essays, in order to see how well they'd memorized their speeches, so we could make copies of their essays for them to read to us. It was a nice way to finish off their last class. The 3rd year students have no classes from January and effectively graduate in December. I'd been hoping to have a fun/party style class to finish off with but all the delays during the speech writing process destroyed that plan. I was also hoping to not have to ask them to not use their mobile phones during our last class when other students were in the midst of making/reading speeches but alas this too was but a dream.
First of all Yukiko and I went to a Thanksgiving Day dinner with some friends. Most of the others were teachers from Kwansei Gakuin University and its attached senior/junior highschools. Thanks to my friend Dan for inviting us. The great dinner was hosted by Dan's (and now hopefully our) friends Kelsye & Matt. The food was great and we got to meet a lot of new people. Yukiko made a wonderful vegetarian lasagna which I really enjoyed, and she got to dig into some traditional Thanksgiving turkey with the others. There was one girl at the party named Kiomye that I hadn't met before. She was a little shy at first but after a little while she was really all over me. She even surprised me by giving me a kiss on the lips before I left. Nice to know I still got IT. Did I mention she was only 2?
School finished up for the year and it was pretty interesting. There were a couple of exchange students from Singapore for a few weeks and they were very shocked to see: 1) how low the English level was at an 'International School' in Japan and 2) how poorly behaved the students were. I told them that's how I felt when I first arrived at the school. I was also reacquainted with just how lazy some of the students are. My 3rd year students (the seniors) were given a speech presentation project in their last 3 weeks. I wanted to make a speech contest but the other teacher I work with convinced me it would be too difficult and too much pressure for them. He had a point, as a few of them have absolutely no, zip, zero English ability after studying in the international program for 3 years (not too mention 3 years of jr high English). So to make things real easy for them we decided to make it a 50 word speech. Now that's about 5 sentences. So we explained the project to them and told them that they had 1 week to complete the opening sentence of their speech, "In the future I want to..." They could finish the sentence any way they wanted. I want to:
go to...
study...
be...
do...
etc, you get the idea.
This would become the theme of their speech. Pretty easy homework given that they had 1 week to do it I figured. Well I figured wrong, 0/16 kids did it. So when we started writing the speech in class the next week it took 10-15 minutes to go around and 'pester' the students to come up with a first sentence. So at this pace you may wonder if they could finish even 50 words in 50 minutes of class. Well no they couldn't. Well, 2 students did and my hat is off to them. Now before you think that I'm making fun of my students just because they have a very low English level I should mention that, while my students do have a low English level, they spend most of their time in class using mobile phones, reading comic books, sleeping, drawing on their desks, etc. So don't have too much pity for them. And I wasn't expecting them to come up with anything mind blowingly literate. We had practiced the future tense in class many times and this shouldn't have been difficult at all for them. Some kids decided to write their speeches in Japanese first and then translate it afterwards. While I tried to tell them this method would take twice the time and encouraged them to translate in their heads as they were writing they wouldn't hear any of it, not least because of the headphones they were wearing. However most students couldn't even come up with 50 word essays in Japanese. So while one may understand their difficulties in English, what does this have to say about their Japanese skills? As only a few students finished their speeches we decided to give them another class to work on their speeches. When I looked at the (Japanese) speeches that were written in the other class (we have to collect their papers at the end of every class as they are physically unable to keep anything from 1 class to the next) I realized that the students had no idea what a speech should be like. Even in Japanese they were awful. One student's essay went something like this:
In the future I want to: be a baseball player, go to Italy, study business, marry a beautiful woman, be rich, drive a nice car, and so and so on.
Not so much a speech as a grocery list. So I asked the other teacher to explain a little bit to his class what a speech was. As it was only to be 50 words it shouldn't be too complicated. Just talk about the theme. When do they want to do it, how are they going to do it, why do they want to do it?
Unfortunately I was sick for the next class and asked the other teacher to take both groups himself. When I came back I was surprised to learn that many of the students still had not finished! So we gave them a 3rd and final class to finish. Apart from 2 kids, who had to finish them after school, they all did it. So the hard part was over I thought. Boy was I wrong. The students were then told that they had 1 week to memorize their speeches. The chorus of cries of 無理！無理！
Because 88% of the students hadn't memorized their speeches we told them that they could simply read their essays but forfeit half their possible points. Then, to lift themselves up to even greater heights, 6 or 7 of the students were unable to even read their essays because they no longer had them. Sometime during the week they had lost them, thrown them out or folded them into fishing lures. Luckily we had copies of their essays, in order to see how well they'd memorized their speeches, so we could make copies of their essays for them to read to us. It was a nice way to finish off their last class. The 3rd year students have no classes from January and effectively graduate in December. I'd been hoping to have a fun/party style class to finish off with but all the delays during the speech writing process destroyed that plan. I was also hoping to not have to ask them to not use their mobile phones during our last class when other students were in the midst of making/reading speeches but alas this too was but a dream.
posted by Jason at 1:49 PM
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