The Short Story: As of July this year, the Japanese government has been considering cutting the JET Programme from its budget. Their budget concerns are real and deserve attention. But so does the JET Programme. To show my support for JET, I’ve created an online exhibit called 100 English Dreams combining photographs of my students with their actual thoughts about English. Please give it a look and pass it on.
The Long Story: From July 2004 to July 2007, I worked as an Assistant English Teacher (ALT) at two elementary schools and a junior high in rural Okayama, Japan. One of the questions I was most frequently asked by adults was “Why did you choose to come to Okayama?” It’s important to note that even Okayama folks knew they lived in a place that everyone else considered a cultural backwater and were amused that anyone would choose to live there (especially coming, as I did, from not only the United States but Los Angeles, home of movie stars and Disneyland).
To be honest, I didn’t really choose Okayama. The JET Programme application allows for applicants to “request” three areas they’d like to go if a teaching position exists but there’s no guarantee of placement. I’d done quite a bit of research about JET and knew that my chances of teaching in inaka (“the boonies”> were high. As an artist, I thought it might be interested to learn a Japanese art so I chose three places that were famous for pottery. Okayama ended up first on my list because, not only is it famous for Bizen-yaki, it has great weather. In fact, the weather in Okayama is nearly identical to the weather of my hometown, Washington, DC.
Of course, when I first arrived in Japan, I didn’t have the language skills to really all that so a typical conversation went like this:
日本人：なぜ岡山県に来たか？
Japanese person: Why did you come to Okayama?
私：天気がいい。
Me: The weather’s good.
This would always elicit peals of laughter and, if my companions were male and fairly liquored up, they might suggest that there are other things in Okayama that are good, if I caught their drift.
Heh. But I digress.
I did a lot to improve the quality of English teaching at my schools. At junior high, I put together a weekly curriculum to complement the reading and writing-heavy curriculum with speaking and listening roleplaying exercises. I ran after-school Eiken preparation classes and I taught elective classes in which students performed plays and put together an English DVD about themselves and their dreams for the future. At elementary school, I used the same roleplaying approach to teaching and added props. I also played a modified “English” version of UNO with the students in between classes. If I had sixth period free, I spent it with the 1st and 2nd grade students who were waiting for their older brothers and sisters to finish classes so they could go home together. We did our homework together (I was studying kanji, preparing for Kanji Kentei) and then we played UNO.
When one of my students’ father’s invited me to make shaved ice in his family’s booth at the big summer Flea Market, I joined in with enthusiasm. I also joined his team in the local softball league. Most of the teams came from automotive factories based around town but mine was made up of older local guys. Our first baseman had to be nearly 80 and our pitcher/manager was the grandfather of some of my junior high students. We never won a single game but that wasn’t the point – softball was just an excuse to get together and drink afterwards. And teach the foreign English teacher bad puns, Japanese riddles, and slang so local folks just up the road wouldn’t understand it.
Despite the amount of time I spent with the adults and children in my community, there were definitely times when I despaired about making any difference in the perception of Americans in Japanese eyes. One year, I had a really nasty cold that kept me home from school for several days. When I returned to school, one of my students rather innocently wondered aloud, “Americans can get colds?” That same year, my supervisor told me that my English handwriting was atrocious and I made my zeroes backwards. He also chastised me for eating too many mikans because the palms of my hands were “too yellow.”
But I did see small changes. When I first arrived, I was often asked “How do Americans celebrate Christmastime?” and I always countered this with “Well, you know, in America we have a lot of different kinds of people and some of them celebrate like this.. and some celebrate like…” After three years, people stopped asking me what Americans do and started asking me what I, or my family, did.
And sometimes I saw big changes. After one of my former junior high students tried to run away from home twice in high school, I was asked to talk to him. Because of all the teachers at junior high, I’d encouraged his writing and his drawing the most. We traded books and movies back and forth and talked about games and comic book character development and movies. When I came to his house, it was the first time a foreigner had been there but nothing between us was different – we talked about games and comic book character development and movies. And in the end, with support of many teachers and his own family, he was fine – he graduated high school with his classmates and went on to study animation in Tokyo.
At this time, I knew that I was going to be the last JET teacher in my town as the Board of Education has decided to get ALTs from a company called Interac rather than through the JET Programme. My town wasn’t the only town – other towns and cities in Okayama had done the same. I knew my successor had big shoes to fill so I spent a month preparing for her – I took pictures of every one of my students and had all of them make a magnetized English nametag they could stick to their desk so she could learn their names easily. I documented all of my roleplays and games and left her notes about each class year’s particular strengths and quirks. I left her my props, my many decks of UNO, my big box of American crayons, my Totoro stamps, and my hope.
And she stayed for six months.
I don’t know how many English teachers have come and gone since that first one but I wonder if any of them still remember the students’ names or interests. Did they write letters to their students while they were there? Trade postcards at New Year’s? Run in the relay at Field Day? Haggle with a vendor at the Flea Market for a remote-controlled truck? Give confidence to a student just realizing how different he is from his peers? Inspire a student to study English conversation outside of school?
As of July this year, the Japanese government has been considering cutting the JET Programme from its budget. Their budget concerns are real and deserve attention. But so does the JET Programme. To show my support for JET, I’ve created an online exhibit called 100 English Dreams combining photographs of my students with their actual thoughts about English. Please give it a look and pass it on.
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