"Wot dis? Dis pen!" Appalling classroom English set to change?

Before AccessJ's five favourite terrible classroom English moments, we have some news.

It looks as though things may be set to change at some possible distant point in the future. Today both the Daily Yomiuri and The Japan Times have been busy informing me that the government has hypothetical plans to send Japanese English teachers to genuine, bone-fide English speaking countries as part of their teaching qualification.

This could be a smart move as some teachers we've worked with have been embarrassingly bad at the language. Let's just hope they send the textbook writers there too.

However, it does seem to be another rung on the "reforming English teaching" ladder which has seen cutbacks to and potential downsizing of the JET programme. Many tongues have been wagging on that one.

Nevertheless I don't think it's time to panic just yet. The main reason for this theorising of how best to better Japanese English is the advancement of English teaching in elementary schools. English has been semi-taught in elementaries in my town for more than 20 years. I did it last year and had a blast, but the quality of the teachers' English was pretty bad. Albeit it was the first year there had been a more formalised structure to the learning, and the first time the homeroom teachers were actually supposed to be actively involved in the lessons.

But to be honest maybe it's better in some ways to have Japanese teachers with decent accents than it is to have poorly (or not at all) trained gaijin bashing their heads on things everywhere. There is definately room for improvement on both sides of the fence, let's just hope that the demand for us foreigners doesn't fade away before we've all died and gone to hell.

But anyway, let's lighten up this post a bit with some of my favourite classroom English errors/strange English.

1. Straight from the title - "Wot dis? Dis pen!". Terribly awkward moment in elementary last year. What should I have done? Is it okay to correct him? I guess it is, but I don't want to make any delicate nervous teachers cry on my watch.
2. "How green roofs are hot?" - Oh boy. This was from a Junior High teacher, and printed on a worksheet as a question. I was asked to read it out and pick a volunteer to answer...
3. "Come, Father. Come!" - preposterously complicated ejaculation from a distorted retelling of 'The Whale Rider' in third grade JHS textbooks. "Kahu climbed up onto the old whale. 'Come, Father. Come!'" - if anyone can convincingly explain that in a way that 14/15 year old will understand you can give a speech at my wedding.
4. "What is your treasure?" - Incomprehensibly stupid subsection of the Junior High textbook featuring everyone's heroes Bethwel and Chakila. Bethwel's treasure is the city, doncha know. Chakila prefers "the tree", whilst dashing smooth operator Gerado has a penchant for his school.
5. "I have six balls!" - the funniest thing about this one is that it was actually me that said it. My face changing from mild enthusiasm to master comedian mid-sentence must have been quite a sight.

Anyway, stories in the comments as always.

School Lunch in Japan

This "5 random school lunches" entry will show you exactly what we get fed at school in a typical week, but for now let's have a look at how lunchtime works.

In my school, the children of my weekly host class come and collect me and my (weird) food from the teacher's room. Then we go to their class and I sit around for ages while they serve each other. Then we say いただきます (itadakimasu) and eat in about 5 minutes, then sit around waiting for the end-of-eating chime. This is usually 5+ minutes of loneliness.

It has become even less fun than it sounds.

Don't get me wrong, I love my kids. But if they ever work up the courage to speak to me it's just to ask what my favourite colour is, how tall I am and if I have a girlfriend. I've taught them for 18 months, they know this stuff already.

Talking Japanese to them just makes them laugh... :(

When the bell rings we say our いただきました (itadakimashita), "wash" our plates and bowls with 100ml of water and a pair of chopsticks and then go our separate ways. Then everyone except me brushes their teeth. I don't brush mine directly after eating because dentists say it's bad for your teeth.

Milky rice-fed anecdote rant:

• Lunch comes with 200ml of milk. I don't drink it because I have an allergy, but it took several months for that to be accepted by my school. They said they couldn't cancel my order without a doctor's note. I couldn't get one for various reasons; mostly being almost as far away from my doctor as is physically possible. In the end I appealed to the Board of Education who told them to stop being so stupid and not order me it.
  It may sound petty, but that saves me about 12,000yen a year. Plus I don't drink it for God's sake. I'm not sure why they made such a big deal about it, but it seems that being just like everyone else is a very important part of school life. On that subject, let me recommend an excellent book: Becoming Japanese: The World of the Pre-School Child by Joy Hendry. Check out our recommended book page for more info.
• And another thing. I try to keep to a pretty strict diet, not to mention that a mountain of rice midday makes me very sleepy. I started to give away most or all of my rice (and bread) every day to hungry looking students. Then one day a teacher complained about me! The same day the Head Of Teachers came to have serious words with me about being in Japan and having to do things the Japanese way. Apparenly that extends to overeating at lunchtime. "I'm on a diet," I said, to which he responded "The government told us that eating rice at lunchtime will not make us fat." WHAT??

Two of my friends here have gone as far as to actually take their own lunch to school, though this is definitely frowned upon and is not recommended. Nevertheless, at my school there's a gaijin student (born here) who brings her own lunch every day. I get the strong impression that she's a bit segregated for various things like that which she does differently. More so, perhaps, than for her skin tone. Her parents seem like very smart people, but for some reason they've made this massive error in judgement which is only enforcing the very Japanese idea that "foreign" people and Japanese people are completely different.

Anyway, that's the end of the rant and hopefully you've learned something about working in a school in Japan.

PS: On some occasions (like sports day or something) when there is no school lunch, the teachers order bento boxes and eat in the staff room. They suck.

5 Random School Lunches From Japan

When I first got here I thought lunch was great - plentiful, reasonably tasty and a new experience. 18 months later I dread the whole experience.

I recently explained why eating with my students kind of sucks sometimes, but now I want to talk about the food itself.

I'd like to point out, before any enraged Japanophiles get on my case, that although I openly dislike a lot of Japanese school lunches so do the Japanese.

Without further ado, here are the five lunches I was presented with last week:

1. Monday
   
   
   • Rice,
   • Prawn and dough fried thing (satsumaage)
     
   • Salad of carrot, cucumber, caggabe and tofu strips with a peanut dressing,
   • Miso soup with potato, two types of tofu, daikon and carrot.
     
   Calories: 789
   Review: Everything was fine except for the soup, which tasted awful and was a chore to eat. 2/5
   
   
   
2. Tuesday
   
   
   • One packet of softmen noodles,
   • Fried fish with lemon sauce,
     
   • Hijiki (seaweed), carrot, cabbage,
     
   • Miso ramen soup with pork, carrot, daikon and onion.
   Calories: 726
   Review: Pretty good! 4/5
   
   
   
3. Wednesday
   
   
   • Rice with yukari. Not sure what that is but it turned it purple and tasted similar to umeboshi (pickled plums),
     
   • Tomato omelette,
   • Fried sweet potato slithers, cucumber and lettuce,
     
   • Sumashi soup with wakame, mushrooms, reformed fish and indeterminate bits of vegetable.
   Calories: 734
   Review: Cold and miserable. 2/5
   
   
   
4. Thursday
   
   
   • A bread roll,
   • A cold hamburger with ketchup,
   • Seasame sprinkled pickled cabbage and cucumber,
   • A particularly flavourless soup containing boiled potatoes, carrots and daikon, with bizarrely thin pieces of hotdog sausage at the bottom.
   Calories: 820
   Review: Slimey yet satisfying burger, but the soup was dreadful. 3/5
   
   
   
5. Friday
   
   
   • Rice,
   • Some kind of tempura fish with tempura sauce,
   • Nori, beansprouts, carrot and celery salad,
   • What can only be called "stick soup". This is very common, and aside from the sticks (actually root shavings) contains tofu, carrots, daikon, small bits of funny looking chicken and spring onions. The proper name for this style is Kenchin soup.
     
   Calories: 742
   Review: Greasy, bitter, full of twigs. 2/5
   
   

Note that these are usually presented with a 200ml bottle of milk (included in the calorie counts). I have an allergy.

A previous post went into some detail as to why Japanese schools make such high calorie and bizarre meal choices, but actually this week was fairly tame. No pregnant fish, whale or awful soy-burgers. When I do get something like that I'll be sure to post it here.

UPDATE:

As promised, here are pregnant fish (komochi shisamo) in all their glory. Inside is literally full of eggs, and you eat them whole. Luckily their bones are made out of tissue paper so don't destroy your mouth. Despite their looks, they don't actually taste that bad, despite the ash-esque aftertaste.


Lunch Mats.

You may have noticed that each day I had a different coloured mat under my food. Lunch mats are big business in Japan. All the kids have a different one for approximately every day of their lives, and all the big shops have huge racks of them. All the big (and not so big) anime series are reprezentin', and I even found a Thomas the Tank Engine one.

I only have five different mats though, and I often feel a bit underdressed. Obviously it's time to invest in some more to retain some macho pride.

Your lunch stories in the comments box please!

Being an ALT series: 

Part #1: Teaching English in Japan 

Part #2: Your Role

Part #3: A Typical Day

Part #4: Planning Classes 

Part #5: Getting Drunk on Duty (the Enkai) 

Part #6: 4 Japanese Teachers You May Have to Work With

Part #7: Physical Resources

Part #8: Making Activities


  

Elementary School: The Hello Song vs. "Anything OK"

Those of us teaching English will have reams of stories complaining about the repetitive things we have to do. Read and repeat after Mr Dom, read and repeat...

One of the worst cases for me was The Bloody Hello Song. Last year I taught elementary students one day a week. I loved it and desperately want to do it again. But one thing I don't miss was the shockingly bad

Hell-o-o! Hell-o-o!

Hell-o-o how are you?

I'm fine, I'm fine

And I hope that you are too!

x3, then x3 again with a stupid "gesture dance". At the start of every single lesson.



This was a perfect example of the worst side of teaching in Japan - when all control is removed and the gaijin must perform!

Don't get me wrong, I really love teaching and I don't mind following a set plan one way or another. When it all falls apart is when you're forced to perform in a certain fashion; whether it's to sing one of these awful songs (sometimes to annoying American backing tracks and sometimes cold), or painfully act out some skit with a homeroom teacher with less English than the students. The whole flow breaks down, progress is halted and it's nothing but embarrassing for everyone.

Elementary worked best when it was just me - when the homeroom teacher stood back and only chipped in when needed. It was at its worst when he or she butted-in to explain in Japanese what was intended to be organically learned, or worse just repeated my lines several times.

Maybe they were just inexperienced teaching with an ALT (me). It was the first year it had been done in this way, and several of the teachers were virtually shitting themselves - literally shaking like a leaf for the whole lesson. But for this particular school there was as-good-as a script for each lesson. All the teacher needed to do was chime in from time to time and not screw up my bit. I'd say two-thirds of them managed that.

However, I also worked at a different elementary. This one was very small (only one class per grade) and the English-level of the teachers was abysmal. I'd teach two classes there. The first was a case of "repeat after me" and used a missplaced textbook.

The second was something all teachers will shudder at the sound of: "anything OK". It took several classes of the teacher turning to me at the start and saying "Free lesson!" for me to understand quite what was happening. It turns out he was so scared that he wouldn't even try to teach English. The first few times I replied with "huh?", after which he would turn to the class and shout "janken champion!". The rest of the lesson would be one big game of rock-paper-scissors in Japanese. Once I cottoned-on I started to prep proper classes for them. That was fine - it's fun. But those words will forever haunt me... "Mr Dom... free lesson!"

So what have we learned? Well, it doesn't seem to matter whether you have complete control or are entirely directed, you're still a very difficult tool to use. Be prepared for this and plan for every eventuality. If you're in control, have a backup lesson planned in case everything falls apart (at least a game or something). If you aren't, be prepared anyway just in case it turns out that you actually are. Lose all self-consciousness or you won't get through the Hello Song with your sanity intact, and make sure that you never have to revert to the pathetic Janken Champion.