Teaching kids is for the birds. First of all, it's not the kids fault. Stupid kid, stupid parent, right? Stupidity is inherited I believe. i live in Japan, and I teach kids only on Monday, and thank ____ for that. (I don't believe in GOD™, that's why I left a blank) I can't believe that some people do this all week, 6 days a week. Good Christ, I'd have been committed by now if I had to teach kids every day.It seems to have been the trend in Japan for the last 5 or 6 years + and it doesn't matter whether kids are interested in learning English or not, they're pretty much forced to attend English classes as early as 6 months old! Learning a second language when they're young is the ideal time to to do it, but a 6-month old baby doesn't even have their own language figured out yet, let alone a foreign language. Parents should at least wait until their child is old enough to make that choice for themselves.
Parents in Japan just send their kids to English school because that's what their friends are doing, and their friends, and so on and so on. It's just another example of the ruthless competitiveness this country is known for. The thinking is that if their kids aren't going to English school, their friends think they're poor, or weird or don't care about their kids' education and future. What a bunch of shit THAT IS.
What really pisses me off to no end is that when the mothers bring their kids to school, they are chit-chatting and gossiping like it's a fucking café, and I have to strain my voice sometimes just so it's loud enough for the kids to hear over their mothers' mundane chatter. Japanese wives are very good at certain things and one of those things is waste their husbands' salary. At least if you're forcing your kids to go to school, please TAKE A FUCKING INTEREST in what your kids are learning. If you wanna chat, piss off with ya and go home.
The school I teach is not that bad actually. Yeah, there's some bad kids, stupid kids and just down-right evil kids, but it doesn't even compare to some of the horror stories I've heard from other teachers. If there's so much violence in school's these days, why isn't there a camera monitoring every classroom? Now, before you think that's a little "extreme", why don't you read a few little bedtime stories about things that have happened in Japan over the last few years.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50678-2004Aug8.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16500163/site/newsweek/
http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/0509/050924-violence.html
http://web-japan.org/trends98/honbun/ntj980401.html
http://www.japantoday.com/jp/news/384109
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/member/member.html?nn20051007f1.htm
Here's a few more little "news bits". some of them are not school related, but they are included just to give you an idea of the nature of some of the violent crimes in the last few years in Japan.
"TOKYO — 17-year-old boy stabs his mother to death. Having killed his mother as she slept, the boy cut off her arm and head with a saw. Spray-painted her arm white and stuck it in a potted plant. Put her head in a sports bag and carried it with him to an Internet cafe, where he spent two hours watching rap music videos in a private booth. He then took a taxi to a police station in his town in northern Japan, where he surrendered the head and told the officers, "It didn't matter who I killed." It's pretty hard to swallow such a story, but it's real, and this kind of shit seems to be going on regularly in Japan."
Over the last several months, there has been a series of killings in which the bodies have been cut up or disposed of in sickening ways. Who's to blame? TV? Violent Manga? Movies? Music? There's a huge sense that a country once bound by tight family values and community ties is deteriorating into something quite ugly indeed. Here's more..."In December, a Tokyo woman confessed to killing her allegedly adulterous husband hitting him with a wine bottle and then cutting his body into pieces. The parts were found scattered across two city wards; his head was buried in a suburban park."
"a 21-year-old Tokyo man was accused of killing his younger sister. He claimed he lashed out violently after she belittled him for his failure to win acceptance to dental school. Police said he hacked her body into pieces and stuffed the parts into four garbage bags."
"In March, the strangled body of a young, female English-language teacher from Britain was discovered buried in a sand-filled bathtub in a university student's Tokyo apartment. The suspect eluded a police raid and is still on the run.""Woman in Yokohama randomly stabs her 2-year-old child in a shopping mall."
"Couple accused of dumping their toddler son's body on a mountainside after he suffocated in the helmet compartment of their motorcycle."
"a 14-year-old killer deposited the severed head of an 11-year-old child at the gates of an elementary school in Kobe, and taunted police and citizens with threats to kill again before he was finally caught."
OK. Who's to blame? It's easy to lay blame on Japan's many social ills or America's negative influence, or even violent games, movies, music, manga, etc but I can't help thinking it's due to all this pressure and competitiveness brought on by Japanese society. Firstly it starts in the home, then secondly, in the schools. Kids are so pressured in this country to do well in school that some actually commit suicide because they fail a test, or they lose a game. And we're not talking just high school kids, we're talking about elementary and junior high school kids too.
Another fact you should keep in mind is that Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. On average, over 80 people EACH DAY off themselves, most commonly by hanging themselves or by jumping in front of a train.
Here's a personal account of one of my students, and I'm not going to mention any names for obvious reasons. She's only 5 and she has been attending a special English school for the last few years, and her English is pretty good actually. Her English is good because she has been going to school from 9:00 in the morning til 5:00 in the afternoon 5 days a week and she can ONLY SPEAK ENGLISH in the classroom. Then, her mother also brings her to the school that I teach for another hour. I can't help notice her mothers' stern look the whole time, she never smiles and she watches her daughter like a hawk, just waiting for her to fuck up, so that she can scold her. You can even sense a certain fear in the child, when she answers a question. It's truly sad and i feel really sorry for the kid, because she hasn't been given any choice in the matter. This may just be one of those kids that grows up later in life and suddenly snaps because she's been carefully controlled her whole life, and now she needs to feel freedom...The current school system in the U.S., Canada, Japan and many other countries has done little else than force schools to teach kids how to beat those standardized tests. It's a common complaint for young teachers that they feel like they've become a slave to this nonsense. Those tests are fucking meaningless and everyone knows it.
I see a tremendous failure of the educational system every day in Japan, bad system, bad teachers who don't give a shit about students, too many classroom hours, no interaction between students and teachers, many cases of teachers molesting and raping their students, it's fucking pathetic actually. I don't want to call kids stupid, because I don't think that's the problem, exactly. They're just so incapable of forming complete, written or spoken thoughts with actual grammar and correct spelling. There was an article in VICE magazine a number of years ago that reproduced a bunch of essays handed in by Grade 12 high school students in the U.S. and they were riddled with spelling errors, terrible grammar and incomprehensible script.
What's the solution? I don't know, actually, but I think parents can stop by letting their kids have mind of their own and stop forcing them into doing shit they have no interest in doing. (How man of you remember taking piano lessons?) One thing is CRYSTAL CLEAR. Many parents in Japan are just plain STUPID. And also, be a good parent and do shit with your kids, don't just leave them in their rooms playing Nintendo DS.If the U.S. and Japan doesn't get their shit together, they will fall desperately behind the rest of the world. They already ARE falling behind. THIS IS a global marketplace now, y'know?
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