Читать книгу Japanese Lessons - Gail R. Benjamin - Страница 15

When we hear about the high achievement levels typically reached in Japanese elementary schools and the discipline and social pressure for conformity that are often said to characterize the Japanese, it is easy to imagine what Japanese elementary schools must be like. Usually Americans expect them to be quiet, disciplined, tightly controlled environments with teachers in charge who manage the social and academic activities so that a minimum amount of “wasted time” interferes with a learning program that requires great concentration from students and intense teaching from teachers.

I was able to observe the classes of several teachers at first-, second-, fifth- and sixth-grade levels, in the subjects of music, science, physical education, morals, and reading, and I talked with Sam and Ellen about other classes. There were differences among teachers and among classes in different subject areas, but there were also common approaches and techniques that were different from those usually found in American classrooms. Like other observers, I was struck by the easy, relaxed discipline, the quick pace, and the high degree of student participation in these classes. The students seemed to be engaged, active, lively, and anything but downtrodden.

At Okubo Higashi, as in most urban schools in Japan, class sizes vary from thirty to about forty-five students, drawn from the immediate neighborhood and not grouped or tracked by ability; the purpose is rather to give each class an equal mix of abilities and characteristics. Since Japanese neighborhoods are less economically segregated than those in many other countries, there is usually a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds represented in each classroom also. In less densely settled areas of Japan, classes may be smaller and more homogeneous. This is generally seen as a disadvantage.

The rooms at Okubo Higashi are standard issue classrooms. There is a wall of windows on the south side, the major source of heat and light. At one end of the room is a blackboard, and bulletin boards are found on the other walls, though there are also windows into the hallway on the north side of the room. Access to the outdoors is from doors in the window wall; classrooms on the upper floors open onto a balcony. Each student has a cubbyhole where the backpack and personal belongings are kept during the day. Each room has a desk for the teacher, a desk for each child, an electric organ, and some bookcases. Each room at Okubo Higashi also has a gas heater in one corner for use in the winter. For the younger grades there is a flimsy guard fence around this stove. The stove is an immovable object, because of its venting system.

Children have all their classes in the same room except for physical education and, for the upper grades, science labs. Music, art, and science all involve the use of equipment in the classroom, brought out for use and then stored again. Like Japanese houses, the classrooms give the impression not of being cluttered so much as being packed full of useful things. They are also liberally decorated with work done by the students, as are the hallways. These are not specially chosen pieces of work. If drawings from the expedition to the park are exhibited, the drawing of every student will be included. If the calligraphy exercises are being shown, everyone’s is there. The school motto is displayed in each room as well as admonitions about behavior, changed from time to time (sample: “Let’s all listen when someone is speaking”) and the class’s weekly schedule. Children are expected to take home most of their books and equipment such as pencils, crayons, and so forth each day, not leaving them in their desks or cubbyholes. Teachers, too, remove many belongings each day, in their case to a permanent desk in the teachers’ room.

Because there are times during the day when children stay in the classroom but teachers leave to go to the teachers’ room, there is a sense in which the room belongs to the students, the class, more than to the teacher. The children’s imprint on the classroom in terms of paraphernalia and decorations is much stronger than the teacher’s.

In Japanese houses, the furniture is movable, and it is often moved. In nearly every Japanese home, for instance, the room that is used for eating, watching TV, and most other activities during the day is also used for sleeping. Beds (soft mattresses and quilts) are stored in large cupboards during the day, and the daytime furniture is shoved aside each night to make room for sleeping. Even if there are separate bedrooms for some members of the family, the bedding is seldom left in place all day; it is stored away and the room used for play, study, and other activities until bedtime. (Bedding left on the floor all day is a sure sign of immorally sloppy housekeeping, and besides, they say, the bedding will get moldy if it is not put outside to air every sunny day.) The notion of a fixed arrangement of furniture that remains constant is not part of usual Japanese life at home, and certainly not at school. I would guess that the furniture in Japanese classrooms gets rearranged four to six times a day for different activities. This means moving all the movable elements—the teacher’s desk, the student desks, the organ.

For some classes the desks are in parallel rows facing front. There is an assigned seating order for this arrangement. In some classes two rows are pushed together with a boy and a girl sharing each pair of seats. In other classes, though the boys and girls are not separated, the arrangement is somewhat looser. Rows of desks face the front for classes such as reading, when everyone in the class is doing the same thing and not working in small groups. Sometimes in Sam’s class, he said, there would be two long rows of desks facing two more rows on the other side of the room with the teacher pacing the middle area.

Another pattern, all the desks in a circle around the edges of the room, is used for large group discussions. When small work groups (han groups; see chapter 4) are engaged in activities together, the desks are placed in clusters, with each desk facing the others in its group. Such study groups might be formed for almost any subject.

One common U.S. classroom practice that does not occur is to have a portion of the class interacting with the teacher while other members of the class work individually on other subjects or assignments. In other words there are no reading or math groups divided by ability level, no times when some members of the class are separated from the others to receive different instruction. In Japan all students are working on the same class material at all times, sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a large class group, and sometimes in small groups.

Classrooms are multipurpose rooms, and Japanese elementary school teachers are multipurpose teachers, too. Teachers are not specialists but teach all the subject areas. Guidelines imposed by the school and the Ministry of Education regarding how many hours should be spent on each subject each year prevent teachers from idiosyncratically emphasizing their favorite subjects or slighting areas they do not like teaching. The prevailing philosophy, that everyone can do everything if they try, applies to teachers too, who as a matter of course teach art, music, physical education, mathematics, reading, social studies, morals, home economics, and everything else that elementary school students are expected to learn.

The various ways of arranging the furniture of the rooms give some indication of the variety of teaching formats that children will encounter during a day—all, however, with the same group of fellow students and the same teacher. In many if not most schools, students in a given class remain together for two years with the same teacher.

In America Sam and Ellen have always been in schools that prided themselves on the number of specialist teachers they were able to provide, for art, music, physical education, foreign language, and computer skills. They have also had rather complicated methods of providing specialist teachers for academic subjects. Some schools have grouped the children in a grade by ability, and had each homeroom teacher teach one or two subjects to several different groups at different times; some also have provided special teachers for enrichment or remedial work. The upshot of these efforts to give students well-qualified teachers, teaching to each child’s level of achievement in a small group of similar students, is that an individual child has to deal with the personalities and teaching styles of as many as six different teachers each week or even each day, and with the personalities and group dynamics of as many groups of fellow students.

I would find it difficult to work in such circumstances; I have always thought that this typical mode of classroom organization places great burdens on American students. It may also help to explain why American teachers feel psychologically overloaded. They often complain that it is difficult to know many students well and say that problems are created when children do not have adequate opportunities to become adjusted to an individual teacher’s style. The disadvantage of the Japanese system, of course, is that occasionally a student and a teacher experience a real antipathy, with no relief. Teachers say this is a relatively rare occurrence, however.

Japanese students are faced each period of the day and week with a fairly constant schedule. Each class’s program for accommodating the required hours of study for each subject remains the same for an entire year. Sometimes this is disrupted, as when preparations for Sports Day involve some activity every day during September; in addition, four whole days are given entirely to preparation for this event. Generally, though, life is predictable.

The course of a class is predictable, too. Teachers work hard at the beginning of the year and during the first years of school to teach students to manage the routines of classroom procedures, so that the teachers can be uninvolved in activities that are not teaching. Because the class leaders are responsible for getting everyone ready for class, teachers can begin classes not having had to tell anyone to be quiet, nor urge anyone to get ready, nor scold anyone for slowness. The teacher’s job is teaching, not classroom management.

Much of the class time in Japanese schools looks familiar, consisting of a period of teacher explanation or teaching, a period when the teacher asks questions and members of the class raise their hands to respond, and a summarization period. On closer observation, however, there are some striking differences from American practices. One is the way every student who volunteers seems to be given recognition, and another is the role of the teacher in judging student responses.

Teachers appear to have several techniques to make classes feel more participatory. In one sixth-grade reading class students seemed to be reluctant to take part in a discussion of a new story (I think my presence made a difference). When several students did raise their hands to respond to a discussion point, the teacher called on one, who gave an answer. Then he gave each of the others a chance to respond also. Many of them simply said, “The same,” which seemed to be treated as a legitimate response, and both students and teacher appeared to feel the contribution was constructive. The students were apparently not striving for uniqueness. Sam said one of his teacher’s techniques was to ask everyone who had volunteered to stand at once. She would then choose one student to give an answer, and those who had planned to say the same thing would all sit down, leaving those with different responses to offer still standing until their answers had been requested. This pattern of giving every volunteer recognition, even for a response such as “the same,” prevailed in all the classes I watched, and student responses were not commented on by the teacher, either positively or negatively. They were assumed to be correct, unless students objected.

I did see teachers use questioning of specific students in a controlling way a few times. In these cases the teacher would call on a child who had not volunteered by name. The child would stand in the usual way and sometimes give the required answer, but more commonly would look at the floor and mumble “Mo kangaete iru,” “I’m still thinking about it,” a formula for avoiding an answer that still is less self-denigrating than “I don’t know” or some other alternatives one can imagine.

One of the most startling sights for me the first time I saw it was what happens when a student gives an incorrect answer. Other students immediately raise their hands, calling out loudly, “Chigaimasu!”, “That’s wrong!” One of those who called out would then be chosen to give another answer. Or, as Sam reported, in his class if you were the one whose answer was wrong, you got to call on someone to correct you.

It was seeing this happen that led me to focus my later observations on the practice of teachers in evaluating student participation. It became clear that teachers routinely and emphatically refrain from giving either positive or negative evaluations of students’ answers to questions or other responses to academic material. Those responses are evaluated, but only by other students. If no one objects to what you’ve said, you can assume, and the rest of the class can assume, that it was right, at least for the time being; it doesn’t need to be said or restated by the teacher for it to have validity and authority.

I don’t mean to suggest that teachers can’t or don’t manipulate a series of questions to lead to conclusions or points they want established, nor that their tactics necessarily are ones that kids can’t figure out. But I am saying that teachers do not use their authority as masters of the material or as adults to establish the correctness of answers or responses made by students. Instead, peers are the source of validation or correction of a student’s responses.

Students are often sent to the board, singly or in groups or as representatives of their groups to write answers to math problems or science problems or for other activities. It is a common practice for these students, either individuals or groups, to be applauded by the entire class for successful performance. Students show by smiles and bows that they appreciate this approval. The teacher may sometimes initiate the applause, but her role is subordinated to the class’s; it is the class’s applause that students acknowledge, not teacher praise.

Nor is the value of student responses solely a matter of their correctness. When leading class discussions, teachers are careful to list and acknowledge all the positions and arguments contributed during the discussion. Offering an idea that eventually is rejected is still seen as worthwhile, because the reasoning that leads to its rejection is a way to learn. Students, at least in science classes, do not seem so attached to the ideas they individually have proposed that they are not willing to change their minds.

Several classes that I visited, in reading, science, and morals, ended with individual writing as a summary activity. In these cases the teacher handed out small, unintimidating pieces of paper with an illustration and a lined space for writing. Each child was to answer a broad question concerning the lesson on the paper. The teacher wandered through the class as this was going on and watched what was being written. Either by marking the paper as he went through the class or by calling on a number of pupils at the end of the allotted time, he chose a group of different responses, and the authors read to the class what they had written. No teacher comment was made—none, either positive or negative.

Similarly, at the end of a second-grade science laboratory class on materials that do or do not conduct electricity, the last activity involved making a switch to turn on and off the current from a battery to a light bulb. The teacher moved through the class as the students worked. At the end she asked six children to come to the front of the room and demonstrate their switches. The switches were all different and all successful, but no comments were made about which were “better.” There seemed to be some expression of delight from those watching. The teacher’s only action was to choose the examples shared with the class; she made no comments or compliments.

Not only do Japanese teachers, then, stay in the background as far as the social management of the class and the classroom goes, but they try to do the same when it comes to academic material as well. Evaluation by one’s fellow students is focused on more than evaluation by the teacher, by teacher design.

Of course, Japanese teachers do not just let incorrect responses stand, nor do they fail to exercise discretion in the written selections that are read out loud, but they do use manipulation of further discussion or follow-on questions to get to the points they want clarified, without relying on out-and-out correction of student responses. They do not act in authoritarian ways, as academic authorities, as much as teachers do in many other systems.

Most Americans expect that in a classroom students should encounter new materials or ideas and incorporate those materials and ideas into their existing mental frameworks, thereby changing them, and “learning.” If we think that this process entails playing around with ideas in an experimental mode, then an important function of teaching is to provide feedback on the efforts of learners to use the ideas. They must try out the ideas, present the results of their trial thinking or use of the materials and ideas, and then get some evaluation of their efforts.

In American classrooms teachers are the evaluators. Through their assessments of student responses as right or wrong, acceptable or in need of additional work, they let students know about their progress in learning. Teachers are supposed to know and understand the materials they are teaching, and they serve as the authorities on thinking and operating with that material; they decide who has mastered it. It is considered important classroom practice to give students timely feedback about their responses, feedback that lets them know whether they are on the right track or not. We reasonably expect this judgment to come from the teacher, who is after all the one with the most knowledge, the one who can make the judgments accurately; she is the authority.

In the Japanese classrooms that I observed, teachers almost completely delegated this teaching function to students. Teachers almost never corrected or praised student responses. Students did this, and some student responses, usually at the end of a class session, were left without any overt evaluation. A set of attitudes about evaluation of schoolwork is being conveyed by these practices. One is that teachers are not available arbiters of correctness, because they fail to act as judges. Another is that one’s peers are a reliable guide to academic correctness. If one’s peers are capable of being reliable authorities, then one is oneself likely to be reliable. Third, this custom of peer evaluation implies a contract according to which each student must to be willing to correct fellow students and to accept their correction. Calling out “Chigaimasu!” “It’s not that way!” involves some danger to one’s own face—after all, the other guy may be right. At the same time it is a challenge to the fellow student you have accused of being wrong. I think children become more sensitive to this dilemma as they grow older, comparing my time in fifth- and sixth-grade classes with the time I spent in first- and second-grade classrooms. That may be why in the upper grades a challenged student is allowed to choose a corrector. Fourth, students learn that evaluation need not always be explicitly formulated or made public. Confronted with the writings of a number of classmates in the setting where no comments are made, one may make one’s own judgments, or withhold judgment altogether, and do so privately. No one else intervenes to judge your judgments. One effect of this standard procedure is to emphasize that each person’s judgment is valid and can stand alone. But it also teaches children that others may be judging their actions and work even when nothing is said openly.

Perhaps the ultimate realization of how independently Japanese elementary school classes can operate both socially and academically was brought home to me the day Ellen reported at supper that her teacher had been absent that day. To my routine query about what the substitute teacher had been like, she replied that there was no substitute. I asked somewhat anxiously how they had managed and what had happened, and she replied, “Oh, Kuroda sensei wrote on the board what we were supposed to do, and sometimes a teacher looked in the room.” There were no riots, and they did their work, she said. Sam said his teacher had been gone that day, too, and they did the same thing. I later asked other parents about this and learned that it is routine practice. When I questioned the principal sometime later, he confirmed that several teachers had gone to a training course for two days and that no, they didn’t get substitute teachers unless a teacher was absent for a long time—a month or more. Some parents nowadays object to the absence of a teacher, not because they worry about discipline but because they are concerned about their children falling behind academically, so schools are starting to use more substitutes. I still can’t decide whether it’s more extraordinary to be able to leave thirty-five first graders with no teacher for two full days, or to be able to leave forty-five fifth graders in the same situation. Sam did say the fifth graders didn’t work as hard as usual.