It was mostly about convincing the students that English could be fun and foreigners weren’t threatening. I’d grade paragraphs, but I was more of a cheerleader than an instructor.

During the first year of high school they tended to be enthusiatic, but some of them were ground down somewhat by the demands of an English intensive program for two years.

That was the nice thing about JET though, as I was a cultural ambassador first and an educator second. I’d help out the teacher in the classroom, but playing pickup basketball games with students during during the weekend was as much a part of my job as conjugating verbs in class during the weekday.

And yeah, exams, onerous but seemingly-inescapable club memberships, and hakwons are the reason kids here have no time for homework, let alone personal reflection. In University, the picture changes only slightly — on top of club memberships, there’s department outings and the demands of social life.

But I think the real reason for apathy is that so many people are studying things they’re not truly interested in. Since almost everyone who can afford it goes to Uni here, you get lots of people who don’t like to study in Uni; and there’s less freedom in class choice, and less of a phenomenon of flunking out (especially now that the college-aged population is declining and everyone’s competing to get or keep students). So standards go lax and you have too many apathetic students.

One of the nice things about my teaching experience, though, is seeing some people “get” it, get shocked by the idea of participating in class, and then seizing upon it. I had a student thank me for that, crying, on the steps of the office building the other day, and I knew her just well enough to know it was sincere. She and her friends, they seem to have “gotten” it about education and learning.

The big problem with the high school students was apathy, at least in the final year. Exams, school clubs, and cram schools would eat into their time for homework and at times it was obvious they couldn’t be bothered to do the work assigned.

Some of my students’ essays are quite moving too. One older woman wrote angrily about necessary educational reforms; another student wrote of the dangers of enforced homogeneity here; still another wrote stirringly on how sexism is the underlying force that keeps abortions illegal and therefore underground, dangerous, and uninsured for women.

There were a couple of minor cases of plagiarism on the high school newspaper, but it was easier to deal with it because it was an extra curricular activity, and there weren’t any grades on the line.

The junior high school student essays were at times very moving. One student wrote of her dream to become a sommelier at Tokyo Disneyland. It’s amazing what those kids can do those electronic dictionaries…