All types of students
Every year or two a new crew of young JET teachers (Japan Exchange and Teaching Program teachers) fresh out of university and starting their first jobs arrive in Japanese high schools. These days, they are all less than half my age. Just kids. They’re so young that sometimes talking to them is difficult because our experiences and our cultural references are so out of synch. Anyway, I enjoy filling them in as quickly and succinctly as possible about how Japanese schools operate, what the students and Japanese teachers are like, plus some helpful tidbits of information about Japanese society and culture. Even the weather. I’m the elder guy. I’m very eld. Maybe they don’t care what I have to say, but I say it to them anyway.
Every day I see them I ask how their work is going, what they think of the school, how they find the students, if they are well settled into their apartments, and can easily shop in their neighbourhoods, find what they need and want, and generally get around. After a few weeks I suggest (inquisitively) that maybe now they can start to see their own school teachers in a different light, understanding why their old junior or senior high school teachers said some of the things the said, did some of the things they did, and behaved in the ways they behaved. After all, there is both method and purpose to this teaching stuff. Most of schooling is simple crowd control.
Japanese teenagers are not too unlike North American teenagers, I imagine. We are only visitors in the schools here with only limited exposure to them and to their environment. We don’t speak Japanese well enough, we are not Japanese teachers, we are not homeroom teachers, we are not their parents, and we are certainly not their friends despite the fact that we are always friendly. So, remember that there is always a lot going on in our students’ lives that we don’t know about just by looking at them.
It’s public school, so our students most likely reflect any random cross-section of the population. That means that about 10% of them are left-handed. Somewhere between 5% and 10% of them are gay. Between 20% and 30% of them are sexually active. Many of them have part-time jobs. They are probably awash with boyfriend/girlfriend issues. When I came to Japan divorce, while present, was still quite rare. This has changed a lot in the last thirty years so that today between 15% and 20% of the students come from broken homes. This affects some of the answers they give to questions, and it limits the type of questions I can ask them. We must avoid public embarrassment, especially in this culture.
In thirty years I have lost four students - three boys and a girl. Three to suicide and one to a traffic accident (or so I was told). The point here is that a certain percentage of our students, unknown to us, suffer from depression or some other mental illness, and we will never know. I’m sure their homeroom teachers must know, as well as the school nurse. But not us foreign English teachers. As a precaution, one of the first things I say when I return to school after a long absence, such as a holiday, is to ask, “How are the kids? Are all the students okay?” Naturally, as this is Japan, I expect to be lied to.
More of the same for other medical conditions which we cannot see just by looking at them. As a cross-section of the general public some fraction of our students will have allergies (hay fever is very common in Japan), diabetes, epilepsy, asthma, and more. Again, their homeroom teachers (who wield an incredible power in students lives compared to homeroom teachers in North America) probably know these things.
Some of my students have suddenly left school. One because she was pregnant, another because he was arrested, one because he punched a teacher. (The teacher had him suspended for one week for smoking. After his suspension the boy returned to school and floored the teacher with a powerful blow to the face. I don’t blame him. The teacher was an asshole. But the boy was expelled.) Some students were enrolled in my class but I never met them. I remember the first, a high school girl who came to school but spent the entire day in the Nurse’s Office because, for psychological reasons, she just couldn’t go into the classroom. When I learned about it, I went down to the health room and introduced myself. She looked okay. I was happy I met her. I had another girl student that I only met twice. Her mental problem was that she was unable to step over the gap between the train platform and the train car, therefore she couldn’t make the trip to school. She actually did it a few times, but … And, I had one boy that I never met. He came to school every day, but in the courtyard outside the front door he was suddenly unable to enter the building. So, he telephoned his homeroom teacher every morning from the courtyard, explaining that he couldn’t come to school.
Some of our registered students are, or will become “hikikomori,” social recluses and shut-ins, a phenomenon which has been a growing problem in Japan for the last thirty years. Of course, I feel sad about these difficult cases. But I am not their real teacher. I’m just a contracted visitor to the school.
Finally, I had a girl student who showed up at school one day with one leg in a cast. She had jumped off the 3rd floor balcony of her apartment and broke her leg upon landing. What happened was that she was home alone. She was hanging laundry up on the line on the balcony. But while doing so the balcony door closed. This door was designed to lock automatically upon closing, so now she was locked outside, separated from her phone. So, what to do? After a time, she decided to try to climb down the building’s balconies to the ground, like in the movies. But she didn’t make it.
The point of stories like these is to emphasize that we foreign English teachers only witness a fraction of the students’ lives, and their lives, while being comparable to adolescent lives everywhere, are as diverse as the general population. We have all types.