Out with old. In with the new.

It’s official; my Elementary Schools are the unofficial sponsors of my blog. I only seem to blog (it’s ok as a verb, right?) when I’m at ES. Typically I have three classes during an ES visit. They tend to be in the morning when the students (and teachers) are at their most attentive. This leaves me with the afternoon free, so I dutifully study Japanese until I fall asleep (about 45 minutes usually does the trick). I spend the rest of the day making coffee and tapping away on my konpyu-ta. Anyway, this is a long way of saying: I’ve not written in my blog because I’ve not been at Elementary School. So, with excuses out of the way, let’s begin.
The ES break was due to the wrapping up of the school year at the end of March. Schools, Universities, the fiscal year and winter all end at the same time in Japan, this is the land of uniformity after all, or so they say. This neatly ties in with the haru-yasumi (spring break). School holidays are only holidays in name in Japan. Everyone still comes to school, the students take part in their club activities and the staff shuffle paper and try and look busy. The English teachers from around Joetsu got together for a few viciously productive meetings during the spring break.
The employment practices of the Japanese education system and the UK education system are somewhat different. In Japan, rather than being employed by a specific school, you are employed by a Board of Education, which oversees a number of schools. This means that where you work is in the hands of the BOE, not you. If you are a new teacher, you might want to work in one of your local schools. Sorry, because you are a newbie you’ll have to work two hours up the road (in band 3). Once you have done three years there (and three years is the max you can do before being moved on), then we’ll shift you to a new school a little closer to where you ideally want to work (band 2). Another three years later and we might put you in a local, band 1 school. More experienced teachers get to stay at a school for up to seven years before being moved on. Who gets shifted where is entirely in the hands of the BOE and the school principal announces the details of the moves during a rather intense morning staff meeting.
The way I see it (if you ever see this combination of words in my blog, it’s usually a hint that you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph as there may be little value in it for you…) by having the ability to move people around as they wish, Japan avoids having those truly awful problem schools that exist in some places. By placing the right teachers in the right school at the right time, I believe that you can completely reverse the fortunes for a school. Admittedly, successful schools will lose good teachers, but the hope is to maintain a level playing field across the board. I’m sure there are many other pros and cons and reasons for their methods, and the google-web is there for those of you who are interested.
At any rate, out of a staff of 26, seven left Itakura Junior High School, including the Principal, Vice Principal and the head of English – all of my bosses basically. The end of the Junior High School year culminated with a ceremony. Without meaning to generalise, there’s nothing the Japanese like more than a ceremony at which they can be all solemn and intense. Great pleasure is taken in doing things in a regimented way, with lots of bowing and sporadic bursts of manic applause. There was a special separate staff leaving ceremony, where the entire 3rd grade came back to see off their old teachers. It was a very sad affair (sad – upsetting, not sad – pathetic). The departing teachers said a few words and cried; the students said a few words and cried. I remained stoic. The teacher-student relationship in Japan is much closer that in the UK. It is viewed as the responsibility of the school to bring up a child, not the parent. Flowers, sad music and a tunnel of clapping students only heightened the tear-jerking quotient. A staff party followed with lots of drinking, raw fish (as well as jelly fish and deep-fried chicken cartilage (not together, but separate is bad enough I think)), and the full version of the school song sung in an uncomfortably tight arm-in-arm circle – I felt like John Redwood trying to bluff his way through the Welsh national anthem.
Anyway, those days are past now and autumn leaves lie thick and still, as they say. New teachers have arrived and desks have been re-arranged. I feel like a veteran at Itakura now. All things considered, I have been there for longer than one in four members of staff! Best of all though, the 2nd grade from last year, 3rd grade this year, have surprised me enormously and seem to have finally grown-up, which should make for a fun year. Moreover (check out my vocab), I know a lot of the first grade students from the two Elementary Schools that I work at, so I know them better than any of the other teachers, so they aren’t scared of me, which is important in the teacher-pupil relationship if you ask me! Still, the new kids remain terribly nervous and it’s very amusing to see the cocky ones from 6th grade ES who are now bumbling around without a clue. In their defence, a shiny-new school uniform that’s three sizes too big for you does little to make you look or feel cool.