Appreciation of Saint Stephen's

****IMPORTANT-READ BEFORE READING THIS POST*** I wrote this on the airplane on the way to Japan, but I wanted to wait to bookend it with reflections at the end of my trip-coming later today. It's not meant to be disparaging towards public schools, just reflections on the public school system based on what I've heard from other teachers, and an honest appreciation for the Saint Stephen's community.

Even though I’m on the plane and haven’t yet set foot in Japan, I’ve learned so much from my colleagues at schools across the United States. Over 90% of the teachers in this program are public school teachers. Since I attended and worked at Catholic schools before my job at Saint Stephen’s, I hadn’t realized just how broken, in many ways, our public school system is. When caught up in the daily grind of life at Saint Stephen’s, it can be easy to forget that we are, in many ways, an academic bubble. In the first 5 hours of meeting my colleagues in San Francisco, I began to feel like I wasn’t worthy of this fellowship. I love my job and my school, and I feel that I’m supported in pursuing what is best for the library. I already bought into the notion that teachers are great people who are passionate about sharing knowledge with young people. But I didn’t realize the adversity that many of them encounter in order to do the work that they love. Here are some comments that I heard on day one:

1. “We strive for around 30 (students) per class, but frequently it's around 35.” –Elementary school teacher
2. “No one asked me for lesson plans, and I know they don’t have the budget for a sub, but I’m hoping they’ll (the students) be supervised by a para. I also left Halloween coloring sheets and crayons. That’s probably what will happen.” –Elementary school art teacher
3. “We have lcd projectors in every classroom. My bulb burned out. I put in a request last fall. I still haven’t heard back.” –High school teacher
4. “We teach to the TAKS!”-Texas middle school teacher
5. “Over 75% of my students are obese. None have ever left the country. I don’t know if any have left the state. They can’t even picture Japan.” High school teacher
6. “All our principal cares about is pursuing the Assistant Principal and test scores.” Intermediate school teacher.
7. “I’ve got it pretty good. Every other year, my kids are scoring at a second grade level. This year, they’re coming to me at 4.” -5th grade teacher
8. “Everything’s about the FCATs.” –Florida high school teacher
9. “We had to cut gifted classes. They’re (the gifted students) already fine.” –Middle school teacher
10. “Why don’t they (the parents) care? Can’t they see they’re hurting their kids when they shoot up!” –Special Education teacher

Two teachers had to drop out because their schools wouldn’t support this once-in-a-lifetime professional development opportunity. Two are here on unpaid leave. One of those two said that she’s been assured that her position won’t be eliminated while she’s away. When I asked Mr. Lisk and Mr. Snodgress about applying for the program last fall, when they had only known me for three months, both immediately responded, “Go for it!” and wrote recommendation letters. Having been at the school almost another full year, I can’t believe how little they must have known about me when they agreed to write the letters. I want to give the Saint Stephen’s administration a heartfelt thank you for supporting professional development in general and my participation in this program in particular. I can’t wait, figuratively speaking (I definitely want to experience the Japan portion of my travel!), to return to Saint Stephen’s and teach our students and teachers. One of my main goals as a librarian is to serve as a resource to students and faculty in the school, and I am excited to think about the potential impact of this program on the Saint Stephen’s community.

One girl in this program is working on her PhD thesis on community-school relations. She described her ideal school environment as one in which the parents trusted the administrators’ expertise in running the school and in which families would use the school on nights and weekends. This is far from the case at her school. I immediately thought to the volleyball games late in the evenings, Boy Scout meetings after school, Mr. Yanelli’s study skills program, the booster club car washes on Saturdays, and the Sunday AP review sessions. I know that it’s easy to lose perspective; we’re experiencing an unstable economy, have the need for an honor council, and sometimes have to track students down for mandatory community service. Yet, we are so so fortunate to have the strong, intentional, Saint Stephen’s community. Every family has made the choice to send their child to Saint Stephen’s and every teacher has made the choice to make this their home away from home. Other teachers in this country are dealing with a 50% drop out rate, authoritarian principals, metal detectors at the doorways, daily false fire alarms, and 5th graders writing curse words across the school hallways. The one girl I’ve spoken with in-depth who works for an independent school is the school’s curriculum coordinator and teaches an environmentality/sustainability class that she created to fourth through sixth graders. It’s highlighted at the end of each year by a trip to Yosemite (4th), Catalina Island (5th), and a working farm (6th). Teachers in inner city schools are struggling to find outdated textbooks for all of their students. I don’t think it’s a difference in teaching ability but in facilities and opportunities to connect with students and share our passions. Let us continue to strive for the best for our students and for ourselves.

One person said, in response to my feeling like the spoiled little rich kid in comparison to others that she was glad I was here because the kids I teach are going to be the ones creating the policy one day. I can’t argue with her; she’s right. Even though we must continually strive to improve Saint Stephen’s, it is a successful school environment. Our students have a wide range of intellectual abilities, but everyone has a family support structure and the ability to use the school support structures. “We’re not just teaching reading and writing. We have to teach them how to be human beings. We have to teach them to say please and thank you. All they know at home is being yelled at.” This was said by an inner city elementary teacher. We also are concerned with educating and nurturing the “whole child,” but I believe that our bar is raised a bit higher right from the start. I don’t think of my job as just a job and I certainly don’t think of this as a vacation. I think of all of the teachers I work with in the middle and upper divisions (I’m sure it’s true in the intermediate and lower divisions as well; I just don’t know you well enough enough yet!) and I’m motivated by their intensity, challenged by their scholarship, and in awe of their knowledge. We were all hired as teachers and administrators, but we’re not just passing along subject material, we’re also sharing ourselves. Some teachers were saying that they can’t hire people from the same family in the same district, let alone the same school. I can see how this could be an issue for concern but I think our school benefits so much from trust it entails; the entire lives of some of our teachers are tied to the school. We all have a vested interest in improving the Saint Stephen’s experience.

And whether or not you are connected with Saint Stephen’s, you have a vested interest in the US educational system. Remember the 80’s song, “I believe the children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way. Show them all the future they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride.” As a group of 158 teachers coming together from all states in America, we have a wide range of political opinions represented. Yet, I haven’t heard one teacher who believes that No Child Left Behind is reaching all children. The elections are coming up soon…

Here’s a brief addition to my earlier writings. (There’s also going to be a long ending reflection piece posted tonight.) When we visited the schools, I kept hearing from the other teachers about how respectful and welcoming the students were. I’ll agree; as you know from my earlier posts, I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with Tomigusuku students. I did not think that their behavior, however, was out of the ordinary. Saint Stephen’s students greet visitors politely, smile, and include them in their school day when appropriate. We had an incredible all school welcome for our Chinese guests last year! Students (and some parents) volunteer to come to school early to meet with students at the Lugalo School! Other teachers said that their students would ignore (best case scenario) or curse at, spit at, or mock school guests. Thankfully, I have no point of reference for that. I have always been very impressed with the public behavior of Saint Stephen’s students, and that’s one of the reasons I think it was necessary to start the Ambassador program. I’m proud of our students and think that they do an excellent job of representing the school. I know we all get worn down by the daily grind, but we need to count our blessings!

Junior and Senior High Comparison

(If you're following the blog and received something like 10 notifications about this post, it's because it keeps showing up fine in preview but changing my formatting when it posts....grrrrr!)

The little kids at the elementary school were so excited and I took so many photos, I felt like had to post right away. I wanted to wait before I wrote about Nagamine Junior High and Tomishiro Senior High School. Curriculum is prescribed by the national ministry at the elementary and junior high level, but I hoped to hear from teachers assigned to other prefectures before writing about my school experiences, to limit my generalizations to their applicable comparisons.

Out of the three schools, the junior high school was my favorite. (Just like I love the Saint Stephen's middle school students and their energy!) Little kids are excited no matter who visits; you have to work a little harder with preteens. Yet I found them intensely curious about my life and about life in America. They wanted to practice their English, or pantomime, and I'm sure we were a huge distraction to whatever lessons teachers were attempting to teach. In their free time they asked similar questions to what our students might ask. "Do you have a boyfriend?" "Do you have a cell phone?" "Do you like school?" While I'm not going to say that they were always focused in class, they always had an intensity about them that I appreciated. 80% of the junior high students are involved in clubs, like sports (super-competitive, plus they only play one sport year round), brass band, and engineering (robotics, technology, and solar car competition). The clubs meet Monday through Friday after school through dusk, and they also meet on Saturdays! Another co-curricular program sounded a lot like Saint Stephen's IQ program, cultural trips to other parts of the country and work experience days with local businesses. The reasoning behind the work days, however, is quite different. As I mentioned in describing the elementary school, we visited a poorer area of Japan. The school instituted the work days help students make knowledgeable decisions about work, since high school is not mandatory. Last year, 4 students of 198 graduates chose not to attend senior high school, either because they didn't pass an entrance exam, couldn't afford the fees, or weren't interested.

If you haven't looked at the slideshow yet, now's the time to do so. (Separate email in order to comply with privacy laws) My group members kept commenting, especially in the junior high, about the deteriorating condition of the school building. It's only 29 years old, but the humidity has not been kind to the structure. I didn't think it was bad; the building was very clean, just not aging well, and in keeping with the style of many schools I've seen in tropical areas. But depending where you're from, like the big box brick schools of the American midwest, I guess it could be jarring.

The motto of the senior high school we visited is “academics and sports.” (I think this says quite a bit about the type of school that we visited.) The administrators said that their school is a lower-performing academic school, but “they are nice and good students.” The school focuses not just on scholarly learning, but also guides the students in life choices. The school operates on the principles of diligence, cooperation (the principal said something here about “healthy bodies, healthy minds” but I’m a slow note taker, so I didn’t get more than that recorded), creation, and producing functioning adults. The school offers three tracks: sports (for athletes and future gym teachers), IT (for university and vocational students), and academics (for smarter students who are willing to take two extra classes, one before school and one after.) I’ll be bringing back a copy of the curriculum and the three year plan for anyone who is interested in learning more about the specifics of the academic system. The school has a college and career office. While the administrators stressed student interest and individual attention, most of the work of this office is completed in group sessions. After graduating, 60% of the students attend university and 10% find jobs. The school’s biggest challenge is helping the other 30% of the students find a purpose in their lives.

We were not given the same amount of freedom to wander the halls and classes of the high school. In fact, we only got one period on our own; otherwise, we saw part of a computer class and part of an English class. Unfortunately, many of the students that we did see seemed bored. (While I’m not going to claim that the junior high students were always paying attention, it’s because they were talking or otherwise engaged in an activity, not because they were sleeping.) We found out, however, that many of the more motivated students attend one of the other, more highly-respected, high schools in the city. Even clubs, for which Japanese schools are renowned, are not as active at Tomishiro because many students have to work after school.

In both the junior and senior high schools, we noticed what we would consider old-fashioned, teacher-centered, teaching methods. (It turns out this is indeed representative of schools in prefectures of schools across Japan.) The teacher stood at the blackboard and lectured. Students sat in their rows of desks, listened, took notes, and completed worksheets. I wondered if this was the case because we visited a poorer district, but this is true across Japan. I was going to write here about technology in the classroom, as you might imagine, it’s nothing like technology use in US schools, but expect a later post about this...

I greatly enjoyed both my days in the schools! The above should be seen as a comparison and description, not a judgment. I'd love this to be the beginning of a discussion of different education styles and different ways of learning. I've learned so much on this trip and in visiting the schools! With all of the traveling I've done, I've never been able to get an inside view of education in that area. We were welcomed with open arms, and I feel like I made some wonderful connections with students and teachers.

English as a second language

Before I left, Ms. Mishkin and Mr. Calleja asked me about English language instruction in Japanese schools. We're spending about 30 hours this week on school visits. Since I don't understand Japanese, there's only so much I can learn from classes conducted in Japanese. (Although, you pay more attention to contextual clues like body language and the responses of the class when you can't just half-listen from the back of the room and get the gist of what's going on.) So far, I've been very impressed with the first two English teachers whose classes I watched. Schools officially begin English instruction in 7th grade, but schools are able to offer English once a week in the elementary grades if they want. The school I visited offered English on a rotation with art and music classes. In the past 10 years, the Japanese ministry of education changed from a rote grammar translation method to more active methods. (The teachers backed up what you observed in the past, Mr. Calleja. Due to this method, students had vastly disparate reading and speaking abilities.) Now, sometimes immersion methods are used, but it's at the discretion of the school. At Iraha Elementary School, one teacher teaches all subjects except the 'special' once a week classes. (The teacher attends these classes with her students; it's not prep time!) In the grade 3 class I observed, the English teacher spoke no Japanese but the classroom teacher sometimes translated when the students were having trouble understanding. The class was playing a fruit, animal, and sport identification game on the day I attended. The students sat in a circle, divided into two teams. About 30 laminated cards with English words and pictures lay in a pile on the floor in front of them. The teacher said, for example, "I'm thinking of a fruit" to prepare them. Then she'd say, "I'm thinking of a strawberry." The students then dove into the pile, hoping to be the first to find the correct picture. This was complete controlled chaos! The person who matched the picture to the item requested got to pin it to the board under her team's name.

At the junior high level, the best class that I observed all day was also the English class. The junior high has at least one master teacher! He doesn't speak any Japanese in the classroom, and he makes the students participate and practice their speaking. When I entered, there were 4 signs on the board. They read, "Q: Who is s/he?" "A: S/he is..." "Q:What does s/he do?" "A: S/he is a..." He'd hold up a picture and another teacher would point to the appropriate sign as he asked them to identify the person as they practiced their vocabulary words. By including people like Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Beyonce (they responded Cameron Diaz-haha), and Rosa Parks, he also got a little culture and history into the lesson as well. When he held up a photo of George W. Bush, students struggled with his job name. Several shouted "King" and, my favorite, one said "princess," which I guess vocab-wise is close, but it's got an entirely different meaning. This led to an impromtu Q and A session when the teacher asked if I could help. I got asked, "Where do you live?" (Disney is an excellent landmark for this culture!), "Do you like Japanese food?" (most of what I've tried) and "Do you like Chris?" (I then found out that Chris was the teacher's name---I do like Chris.) :) among other questions. Sometimes, the female teacher translated my responses, but most often she pantomimed. Then the class played a "relay race." The student in front (all of the desks in all of the schools were in straight lines!) was given a new card with a famous person and all in the row had to practice the 4 questions from the board by asking one of the questions or responding appropriately. Everytime someone got the English right, he passed the card to the person behind him, repeating questions and answers until the end of the line.

During the class, I was marvelling over Chris's mastery of English. It turns out that he's a Hawaiin native, here on the JET teacher exchange program. His time is split between 5 schools, and he spends two weeks at a time in each. The quieter female teacher I mentioned is actually the students main English teacher. (I briefly saw another JET teacher in the high school. She also had them working in groups and speaking, and was willing to change up her class when a group of English speakers came in willing to talk to her students. I was thinking that JET must have a great training program, but they actually don't train much at all, except Japanese language skills. I'm wondering if the reason that the other teachers and I were so impressed is because these are the "modern Western" ways we're trying to model in our own classrooms.)

Onto high school, which is slightly out of context without a longer post about the day at the school. In short, it is a poorer high-school and has low-to-middle-achieving students. We were given only one period to explore on our own, but one of the two classes we were scheduled to watch was English. This meant that 15 of us, plus the guide, the translator, and the principal, were crammed in the back of a classroom wtih 40 students and one teacher. This isn't an ideal set-up, so we were already a little on edge, especially because the students were completing a worksheet. When the teacher spoke, he read the worksheet aloud, then they practiced the problems. During this time, we started to talk to the students. We were under the impression that he really didn't like that because he called the class back to order and said firmly, "This is my class." A few people got pretty upset. I think he actually meant, "This is my class-class, back to order" because he began calling students to write their answers on the board. He spoke in a mix of Japanese and English, and seemed inflexible in what he wanted to get done during the period. He came to our administrator and teacher meeting in the afternoon, and it appears that we misjudged him. He's actually a very nice man, and he got us copies of the English exam students have to take before university. (Language teachers, it will be at school next Friday.) He apologized that he could not change the schedule more, but said that we had observed a difficult class for the most advanced students. It was an English grammar course, not a speaking course. They were behind in their studies, and he needed to get through some material before the standardized test of English language ability that's part of the university entrance process. Still, I think it's sad that his students were unable to practice their English. Those who did speak to us while we were roaming the aisles spoke only a few words at a time and didn't seem more comfortable speaking than the 7th graders or the elementary students. Perhaps they were shy, or perhaps speaking had to be tossed aside in favor of reading ability for this test.

At the university level, courses refine grammar study and also read (what they defined as) American Literature. This includes A Christmas Carol, Pygmalion, and Tuesdays with Morrie. They practice conversational English in class. Still, the Japanese never admit that they are fluent in English. Even when they can emulate American colloquialisms perfectly, they say, "a little" or "maybe I can help" when you ask if they speak English. The Japanese don't seem eager to practice their English speaking skills, nor do they seem particularly interested in learning English, even people who work in the tourist profession.

Take this post and run with it! Language instruction at young grades, teachers from foreign countries, immersion methods, teaching to the tests---the floor is yours!