Elementary, my dear Walker

The fifth-grade teacher at the elementary school I sometimes teach at deposits a stack of thin paperback books on my desk. Combined, they weigh as much as two or three of my high school textbooks. Most of them seem to be about half illustration, filled with blindingly clear timelines and diagrams or black-haired manga-style children bandaging simple injuries and doing science labs.

This stack of 8 by 11 sized books represents the standard Japanese fifth grade curriculum.

Basically, one of these books—Eigo Note, an activity book for very simple spoken English lessons—brought along all of its friends to help out with today’s lesson. Today is school subjects. Because of the surprising variability of Japanese school schedules, I see this class only about half the days that I’m at the elementary school. The homeroom teacher fears that they don’t know the subjects, and figured that the best way to teach them is through associating them with the books they see every day.

Every class has its unforeseen difficulties. Once lined up on the blackboard chalk shelf, there are more textbooks than subjects mentioned (in Japanese) in the book: English, Japanese, Social Studies, Science, Math, Gym, Health, Home Economics, Calligraphy, Arts and Crafts, and Moral Education.

Maybe I’m a victim of my major, but as I model pronunciation for the fifth graders, I’m thinking, budget cuts, education policy, socialization. When they reproduce their own schedules in their activity books and report, “On Monday, I study…” it becomes impossible not to compare. Their books are tiny compared to the hardback brick I had for prealgebra in fifth grade, or the history textbook we sometimes got to use. They don’t read whole novels for homework. Look at all those classes with hands-on activities! What’s even in the moral education textbook?*

The teacher must notice the way I’m staring at the books, and asks the question that always makes my classes go over time: what’s this like in America? The students’ eyes get wide and they start whispering rumors to each other. “I heard they have school buses” tops the charts.

I don’t explain that I moved in elementary school, that I did a two-year science magnet, or that I was possibly the most cynical fifth grader my school district had ever seen. I don’t explain about small schools and blended classrooms.

I do explain that we didn’t have periods and bells. They ask how the kids knew that they had a break between subjects, or how the teachers knew when to change subjects. I explain that we didn’t have breaks, and that we knew the times for when we had to move to things like math or PE.

They are surprised that we had math for an hour every day compared to their 45 minutes, and that people moved to different teachers depending on their math ability. Some of the students like the idea. They’re really shocked that we had not one, but effectively three English classes: a session for literature, a session for writing, and a session for vocabulary.

Next come the real shockers, to the teacher and to the students. They ask what days I had science. I explain that there were some weeks when we didn’t have science, but when we did, it was usually twice a week. I explain that to my knowledge, we didn’t have a science textbook—we had videos and some simple experiments and a teacher doing his best.

“Social studies?” they ask. Two times a week, perhaps, I answer. “Music?” Once or twice a week. “PE?” Once or twice a week. “Arts and crafts?” Once a month. The teacher asks me to repeat and explain what that means. The phrase “once a month” isn’t taught in conjunction with their school subjects.

Suddenly they look at me differently, the ten-year olds I’m supposed to get accustomed to foreign faces and foreign voices. They look at me with same expression I see on the faces of people listening to accounts of growing up poor in the world’s backwaters or war zones. My students are looking at me like a survivor, like someone deprived of something basic.

I went to one of the best elementary, middle, and high schools in my state. I was a National Merit Commended Scholar without taking PSAT prep outside of my school. I went to a selective private college and graduated Magna Cum Laude. I am, by my country’s standards, well-goddamned-educated.

It’s too much. I tell them about school buses and summer vacation. They like that, and finally, they don’t appear to pity me any more. Smiling becomes difficult.

That internal voice that only appeared when I started living abroad—the little nationalist in my head that urges me to defend American policies I disagree with—starts its whine. We spend time on writing. We don’t have entrance exams.** We spend money on ships and military bases that keep you safe from North Korea.

All of those rationalizations are missing the point. The point is that American education has so much potential (our books are thicker, we have writing, and we have levels of math!) but fails to deliver. Education in the US is asked the impossible: give us world class scientists and inventors without a substantive science or engineering curriculum; give us fitter kids even though we’re cutting gym; nourish our kids with pizza pockets; attract top teaching talent with $24,000 salaries and careers at the mercy of cuts. If the level of science and hands-on activities at my well-funded and small suburban elementary school shocks Japanese fifth graders, what must it be like in big cities or in states like Texas that are considering cutting the senior year of high school?

In the race toward economic and intellectual primacy, the race in which Asia is our biggest competitor, our Achilles heel is the lip service and hypocrisy surrounding the importance of education. The results of ignoring science, of ignoring hands-on activities, and of refusing to even be a real competitor in the world field of education are so plain even a Japanese fifth-grader can see them…when presented to them in plain English.

* Want to know what’s in the moral education textbook? Among other stories of world leaders and community heroes, there is a long chapter on Martin Luther King Jr.

** America doesn’t have the infamous recall-based entrance exams of East Asia. However, writing and math emphasis in wealthy suburban elementary schools like mine is intentionally designed to accustom children to the way of thinking measured in America’s de-facto entrance exam, the SAT. Never mind that intelligence tests like the SAT are regarded by research psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists as utterly bogus; we get into our unique habit of disregarding science fairly early.

On Winter

I dislike generalizations, but I'm fairly comfortable with this one: most Japanese people pride themselves on being extremely aware of (mainland) Japan's four seasons. Coworkers remind me of the four seasons. Student compositions on what they want to tell foreigners about Japan often feature the four seasons somehow. I have students named, literally, "four seasons." Beer comes in autumn leaf bedecked cans in October and cherry blossom bedecked cans in March. You cannot find a fan in October, and come April, I probably won't see a kotatsu (heated table) cover for six months. There. Are. Four. Seasons. In. Japan.

Yet, in Ishikawa, it would be polite never to talk about winter.

January and February are when Siberia dumps whatever it has left over on the west coast of Japan. The form of precipitation can change depending on the minute--I have been snowed, rained, hailed, and sleeted on within the space of the fifteen minutes it takes me to walk to school. None of the houses or apartments I've been to have central heating. Most people keep warm via kerosene heaters or heat/ac units, piling on thermal underwear in their own homes to keep costs down. There is no sunlight.

Minnesota got me used to meter-tall piles of snow, dead vegetation, bitter winds, and ice biking. Despite this, NOTHING could have prepared me (or Japan Railways West) for the sheer amount of snow that hit us in early February.

I was coming home from visiting my partner in Gifu one Sunday night. It had been snowing in Gifu prefecture, and there they were big, pretty snowglobe flakes drifting down past the city lights. Sometime between there and Tsuruga--a charming port city in Fukui prefecture--it turned into a snow storm. In Tsuruga, our train stopped.

Our train stopped for almost 36 hours.

It turned out that almost a meter of snow had fallen in just over a day. That weekend dumped so much snow that the tracks were under too much for the train to move forward. We had to wait in the train until JR West's track plows could dig us out, or until another train could get through. For the first time in its history, JR West shut down all its Hokuriku (Northwest Japan) lines for a full day because of snow.

Needless to say, I missed work that Monday. I didn't get back to Komatsu until 5 am Tuesday morning, and went to work a few hours later hating trains and snow and my phone's battery life. I had kept in contact with my school, and they responded like I was sending them secret messages from inside a hostage cell: "are they feeding you??" "I am relieved to know they are treating you well!" "Please don't come to work if it has been too much for you," etc. My poor supervisor might never let me travel again.

My students got a snow day. They studied. Some came to school anyway.

Apart from the train adventure, most of my winter time has been spent finding ways never to leave my apartment, and preferrably, not to move away from the heater or blankets. The computer was farther away than my Kindle (thanks Mom and Dad!), so blogging was clearly far too much effort.

I did my first legitimate grocery shopping trip yesterday, because this weekend was sunny and warm. Until lately, grocery shopping has entailed ice biking and its impossible cousin, slush biking. Between ESS recitations and helping students with studying for their entrance exam English compositions, grocery shopping has been me grabbing what I can as quickly as I can before it gets too cold and dark outside to get home safely--before the ice refreezes. The roads to the stores have been icy and frought with peril, but the little sushi place is close and tasty.

Now that the stores are more accessible by bike--and now that I see the sun once or twice a day, hooray!--it's like a big dark sheet has been lifted from my culinary vision. I realized...I can cook food! It will taste delicious! So now I'm back on my bento kick and dinner planning kick.

My goal? Never get prepared food unless I am with friends.

Wish me luck. I might post a bento recipe or two.