Day 27: Teaching

Today is Wednesday, so I got to teach an Oral Communications class. (If you ask me, every English class at my school should focus on speaking rather than grammar and memorization of words and sentences, but the Japanese simply don't believe speaking a language other than their own is very important, so they limit the number of Oral Communications classes to a whopping one per week and only offer the class to the high-school sophomores.) Oral Communications is probably my favorite class, because I actually get to teach, which is a rarity. Most of the time in the other classes I attend, all I do is ask the students some questions for a few minutes, give advice to students, answer a few of the teacher's questions, or do absolutely nothing. (I often wonder why I'm getting paid.)

Anyway, when I teach Oral Communications, I'm really in charge of the class, which is great, but I make sure to get whoever I'm teaching with involved in the activities. Unfortunately, however, no matter how successful my classes are, no matter how much the students' English improves as a result of what I do, and no matter how little Japanese is spoken when I teach, my English teaching colleagues refuse to adapt any of my methods to their teaching. As you can imagine, that is not only disappointing, but also unbelievable.

The other little bit of teaching I did today was about a 5-minute warm-up lesson for the new students. Because they are learning the alphabet, I had them spell some words, but I also asked some fairly easy questions, just to mix things up a bit. The warm-up went really well, even though only a few of the 40 students actually volunteered answers.

The lame thing is, as soon as I was done, the main teacher took over and switched right back into Japanese. He also did a bunch of useless activities, so the rest of the class was actually a big waste of time. That's life here in Japan, though, and there's very little I can do about it.

I was actually quite surprised when the main teacher asked me to do a warm-up activity in the first place, because the last two times he asked me to come to his class, I did absolutely nothing. I think the vice-principal, who is going to be teaching half of the class, might have told the teacher that he has to use me in some manner or other rather than have me just stand around in the classroom. 5 minutes of teaching is still not nearly enough, however, but I am pretty sure that's all I'm going to get.