Yoshida-sensei and I have been teaching "I like, You like, He/She/It likes" To 1st years for the last two weeks. She is convinced this is the hardest thing to grasp ever. I think it is marginally annoying. The counter system and its further pronunciation variations is was harder to get a handle on. When you first approach it it seems bewildering. You check with a chart telling you what word you should use for long, cylindrical objects and what word you should use for birds and rabbits, and pretty soon you remember it. These kids can't do that because, as I have said before, they have never been taught how to assemble a sentence, so it is just a big pile of junk to them. Today, 3 minutes into class, Yoshida-sensei, who I am going to trash a lot today, but who I like, realizes that, even though she told me that class 1-4 understood "s-es" so I should make a harder lesson for them, they didn't actually know it. SOme kids could do the lesson well, others were lost. I just asked them to do things like "I like apples. She likes Apples. I play baseball. He plays baseball." Of course I got the inevitable "I like plays baseball." If these kids had ever been told that they can't have to verbs in a sentence like this then this wouldn't be a problem. I told Yoshida-sensei that I would go slow with the next class and explain how to make 2 and 3 word sentences. Yoshida-sensei's entire teaching style consists of fretting and panicking so she is a little stressful to work with.
For the next class, 1-5, I went slow. I told them there were things called nouns and things called verbs. Yoshida-sensei freaked out because the word for noun and pronoun are different in Japanese. I said that I didn't care. That some things were people or objects or animals and others were things that are done. I would rather just teach them the words "noun' "Verb" and "Pronoun" in English and then work on short sentences everyday. But, no. They have to learn things they will never use and will only confuse them. Some kids understood, "Godzilla does karate." But class was largely unsuccessful.
Cut to lunch time. We have to record the listening test for next week. On the 4th floor is a very expensive language lab, with computers and headsets and microphones and dubbing equipment. Behind it is a store room, cold and grossly disorganized. Yoshida-sensei takes me to that room where an old tape deck sits on a cluttered table. She hooks a cheap microphone into the mic jack and hits record. She messes up the start of the script. She rewinds the tape with her fingers. (most teachers do this and I can never get a straight answer as to why.) We start again. She tells me to speak louder and get close to the mic as kids said they couldn't hear last time. I explained that when you yell in a mic you get tons of pop and static that makes it hard to understand. To much time in studios and recording has made this process painful to me. When we finally finish, pro that I am making no mistakes, we check the tape to find that the mic was cutting out during the whole process. Yoshida-sensei panics and runs off to class. I go to the Language Lab and spend 15 minutes with the system. I figure out how to record on the nice tape deck or the MD, with a set of monitoring headphones, a nice mic, and variable levels. I had to remove boxes of tissue and hundreds of copied work sheets to get to everything but...
I don't even need to make an analogy. That is the Japanese education system. Throwing sand at the floodwaters and wondering why they keep rising. When we finished recording, I tried to explain how to record on the system to Yoshida-sensei. She responded, "I can't use computers. Don't even show me. It's no good." I told her that 1-5 is her home room class, and that is just what they say about English. "Oh, you're right." She replied.
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