Читать книгу Japanese Lessons - Gail R. Benjamin - Страница 13

Now that Sam and Ellen were fully equipped for school, belonged to a walking group and a classroom, and were prepared to begin the life of a Japanese schoolchild, we all wondered what that life would be like, how the hours of school would be spent, just how different a classroom in Japan could be from one in America.

Our first hint of the answers to these questions came from the class schedules. Though there are of course variations in the routine, the basic format of the school week is laid out in a schedule established by the teacher at the beginning of the year. Sam and Ellen each brought home a printed weekly schedule to keep in a special pocket on the flap of the book bag.

The teachers have taken some trouble to make the schedules look nice, and the first-grade schedule is written almost exclusively in the syllabary that almost all children can read when they enter first grade but can certainly read by the end of the first term of the school year. The same schedule is written on a poster in each classroom; it doesn’t change over the course of the school year.

There are a number of interesting features in these schedules. First, although school begins at 8:30 and children are required to be at school by that time, most of them arrive earlier because the walking group timetable assures it. The schedule begins at 8:50, except on Tuesday, when there is a school-wide assembly each week. Second, Ellen’s schedule, for first grade, shows an irregular dismissal time, anywhere from 2:00 to 2:45. This is common in Japanese schools; the dismissal time of 3:40 for older students is felt to make too long a day for first graders. Thus, first graders officially spend thirty-three hours per week in school, fifth graders forty hours and fifty minutes. This includes the Saturday hours for everyone and a required hour for club activities on Wednesday afternoon for students in fourth grade and older.

Despite what looks like a full schedule during those hours, Sam’s startling observation that there is a lot more time to play in school in Japan led us to look at the schedule more closely. He was right; there is much more time not given over to formal classroom instruction in this school than in the American schools with which we were familiar. To begin with there’s the twenty minutes between 8:30 and 8:50. On Ellen’s schedule this is marked “individual preparation,” a time for children to get organized for the day, to finish up homework, to move their supplies from their book bags into their desks, to greet friends, and to prepare for the day. It’s time when the classrooms are noisy with talk, laughter, and play, when teachers are probably not in the room, so that the children are not being subjected to close scrutiny.

Bells ring throughout the day to signal breaks between periods. There is a five-minute break between the first and second and between the third and fourth periods and a ten-minute break between the fifth and sixth periods. These breaks are truly breaks; children can play, talk, and move about during them, going to the bathroom or into the hall for drinks. Teachers don’t seem to feel a need to keep the noise down during these periods, and the children are livelier than would be tolerated in many American schools. On the other hand, neither students nor teachers move to other classrooms during this time, and so the confusion of gathering up school materials and going from room to room is eliminated. (There are very few special teachers in elementary schools, and they come to the children’s room for their classes. The students don’t move except to the gymnasium or outdoors for physical education or to the science lab once or twice a week.)

The whole school has a twenty-minute recess between the second and third periods. Most days everyone goes outdoors for free play. In bad weather the gym is used along with the hallways and one or two special playrooms in the building. This is generally a recess for the teachers too; only a few are on the playground. (There were five teachers on playground duty for a thousand students, the days I counted.) Children are not considered to be in danger during play time nor to be dangerous to others. On days of some wonderful snowfalls, I saw students throwing snowballs at each other and at teachers who returned the favor. Other pupils ran into the fence to knock down avalanches of snow on friends who crowded close, yelling at the joy of it all.

The playground equipment itself would not be found in U.S. playgrounds because it would be regarded as too dangerous. The slides and climbing apparatuses are quite tall; it would be easy to fall from them, and the ground underneath is hard dirt. The swings are wooden, and there are no guard rails to keep other children from running in front of them. The hurdles in the ground around the edges of the playground are not fenced off; it seemed as if children playing tag around them could trip.

Despite the apparent physical dangers of the playground and other areas Japanese children frequent, such as city streets, and despite their use of fireworks and other dangerous toys, they don’t seem to get hurt very often. It’s not a perfect measure of accident rates, but United Nations World Health Organization data show lower death rates from accidents, including traffic, drowning, and others, for Japanese children than for American children.

The most noticeable time-out is lunch time—one hour and twenty-five minutes. This includes time for eating, a recess period, and daily cleaning. Lunches are prepared in the kitchen by professionals but are eaten in the classrooms. (Like rooms in Japanese houses, classrooms are used for many purposes.) Students are assigned on a rotating basis to bring the carts of food from the kitchen, dish it out to everyone, clean up, and return dishes and food to the kitchen.

There are no janitors in schools in Japan, so students and teachers take care of cleaning everything except the kitchen. This means classrooms, hallways, stairs, bathrooms, and grounds; they also take care of the school’s animals and their houses. Cleaning in a Japanese building means primarily cleaning the floors. All the hallways, stairs and classrooms are swept and polished every day, with desks and other furniture moved aside to ensure a complete job.

The work is divided into different chores, and work groups are assigned chores on a rotating basis—no one much likes doing the bathrooms. Some jobs can be done more playfully than others. Nor is this frowned on. No one minds if a group of five whose task is to polish the classroom floor turns this into a race while pushing the polishing rags across the floor. Cleaning is required school work, but it’s surely closer to play than sitting at a desk being talked to by a teacher.

Since we have returned home, Sam and Ellen have complained about the cleaning, though they didn’t voice any objections or even think it was worth talking about while we were there. They now say it was hard work and sometimes distasteful. Cleaning the toilets, even with plastic gloves on, was “gross” and “disgusting.” The other jobs were also not fun but serious work, in their view. But they have never expressed the idea that it was inappropriate for students to do this, whereas most American children who hear about it immediately suggest they would expect to be paid.

Training children to take on responsibility in a group, for the group, is a legitimate task of schools in Japan, and cleaning is a major tool for teaching this. It’s not part of a “hidden agenda”; it’s part of the curriculum. It also encourages children to think of the school as theirs, as a place they each have a stake in. Cleaning is not play, but it’s different from instructional class time.

Finally, dismissal from school may not mean the end of playtime. Everyone lives within walking distance of school, so no one is being picked up by a school bus or a car pool and whisked away; many children either stay on the playground (it’s the biggest open area in the neighborhood) or walk home with friends slowly—Sam and Ellen took up to an hour to make it home. I worried, but that’s because I’m American. A common family rule among my friends was that their children should be home by 5:00.

Japanese parents realistically do not worry about their children being kidnapped, accosted, or molested, either by adults or by older children. They do not worry about their children doing inappropriate activities when they are not under close supervision, and children seem welcome in stores and snack shops. They get modest allowances to spend as they please, usually on food and toys. Japanese parents also seem not to worry about their children getting hurt in traffic, though three years of living in Japan has not been enough to make me feel safe about adults walking or bicycling around, let alone children. This is a misperception on my part, though; pedestrian accident rates are low.

The academic part of the school schedule is largely determined by the Ministry of Education, which issues guidelines on the number of class hours that should be devoted to each subject each year. In Ellen’s case those specifications take up twenty-four of the twenty-nine class periods each week. The teacher can decide how to allocate the rest of the time. In Ellen’s class and in most classes, one period a week is devoted to a class meeting. Ellen says this time was usually spent talking about problems, but sometimes class meetings were fun and included games or play.

For Ellen’s first-grade class, Japanese (the name under which reading is taught) gets eight periods a week, mathematics four, social studies two, science two, music two, art one double period, morals one, and physical education three. The textbooks are chosen from a small number of series approved by the Ministry of Education; teachers supplement these with commercially available materials geared to the textbooks and with materials they prepare themselves.

Sam’s fifth-grade schedule includes five periods a week for Japanese, five for math, three for social studies, three for science, two for music, one for morals, three for physical education, two for home economics, a double period for art, and one for calligraphy. Wednesday afternoon there is a club meeting, and that still leaves four periods a week at the teacher’s discretion.

There is a morning assembly for the whole school on Tuesdays from 8:30 to 8:50, sometimes held outdoors and sometimes in the gymnasium. Its main feature is usually an address by the principal on a theme of his choosing. Each class marches in as a group and lines up as one of the older students in charge for the day issues commands for students to stand at attention, dress their lines by extending arms to the side and to the front, bow to the principal, and then stand at ease for his talk. All the students sing the school song before the talk. At the end of the meeting the student in charge again gives the commands for coming to attention and bowing, and then classes march around the room or the area and back to their classrooms.

Just as there is a weekly routine, there is also a routine that establishes the modes of behavior for each class period. Each day there are two children in each class who together are in charge of issuing the verbal commands that get pupils ready to be taught and help them move through their day. In the morning these children report the attendance to the teacher. They take care of getting all the desks in the proper order for the kind of class coming up. Sometimes desks are arranged in rows and lines, sometimes pushed out of the way altogether, sometimes gathered in groups of four or five facing each other. At the beginning of each period the leaders announce the subject and the page in the textbook and ask everyone to get ready and be quiet. This is all done in standardized verbal formulas. They look around to be sure that everyone is in proper order and may sometimes tell one or two children to sit up straighter or stop talking. They then announce to the teacher that all is ready and call on the class to stand and bow. Everyone says, “Sensed onegai shimasu” “Teacher, do us the favor (of teaching us).” The teacher then begins to teach.

All of this happens very quickly, taking perhaps two to three minutes, with the beginning and end of each class also marked by school-wide bells. The bells are treated as signals, but the classroom routines are more important. Students don’t assume that they should immediately be released at the first vibrations of the bell. In general I was struck with two contradictory feelings as I observed these routines. First, the routines are followed very easily and quickly; the whole pace of movement in this school feels very lively. Second, the routines and the schedule are treated as a comforting set of guidelines. There is no sense of hurry or compulsion about getting things done exactly on the button, but the end result is that things are accomplished very smoothly and on schedule.