Day 12: First Classes

Today I went to the first English class for the first graders (the first-year junior-high students). The class will eventually be divided into two groups, A and B, and each group will have its own teacher, plus I will help out one or two times a week in each class.

The class was pretty basic. Most of the time was spent on introductions. The teachers (including me) introduced themselves to the students first, and then the students introduced themselves to the teachers. The surprising thing was that the class was conducted almost entirely in English, which is a rarity. For whatever reason, the Japanese teachers of English who I have worked with do 95% of their teaching in Japanese. That, my friends, explains why most Japanese can hardly speak English.

Anyway, the teachers used the rest of the class to go over the syllabus and explain other matters such as what to bring to class and all that usual stuff.

After class, I had a brief discussion with one of the teachers who is in charge of the first-graders. He likes to do a lot of activities which I consider unnecessary, so I tried to convince him to run class more often using the communicative method like he did today. I also tried to convince him to jump right into things, rather than spend a lot of time on basics such as the alphabet and pronunciation drills. I don't think I will get through to him, but I'm going to keep trying.

(I'm 99% sure 99% of the students already know the Roman alphabet inside and out, yet the teacher wants to spend several weeks going over it. There's just no reason for that, and I hope the teacher quickly realizes that. These kids may not be rocket scientists, but they're not babies.)

About the only other thing to report is that after school, I practiced a little basketball with the basketball team, which was pretty fun.

Oh... And today I took a bunch of pictures of the sakura that is blooming. I've included a picture so you can have a look for yourself!