Japanese teachers of the compulsory grades spend only a
fraction of their working hours teaching their actual subjects. The title of
this post is misleading because even when not teaching “formally” they are of
course still teaching the kids, and often the lessons outside of the classroom
are the most important. But before I get into that, here’s a breakdown of what
I mean.
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| There's usually cleaning time and sixth period for the upper graders as well. |
As you can see from this time table, elementary teachers
spend 5 hours a day teaching classes (225 minutes on short schedule days). Five minutes of every class consists of formalities
and sometimes more if the teacher includes kanso (student responses), which
they usually do in elementary. In junior high this goes down to less than a
minute since by then there is theoretically less need to teach manners. So
let’s reduce our count for elementary teachers at least down to 4.5 hours of course
content time per day. The number of breaks the kids get is astounding to an
Australian point of view, especially the way they have a ten minute break… after
their lunch break.
But there are many days when not even 4.5 hours are spent on
lessons. Before the annual sports day in particular, regular classes are
replaced with preparations for around a month (and at JHS there is the cultural
festival as well, which means at least another month of disrupted classes).
There are also interruptions to classes to prepare for the graduation ceremony
in March. At JHSs the first graders go on a camping trip that takes up
considerable preparation time and the second graders take a trip to Kyoto that
requires even more. This is extremely entertaining to watch by the way; the
entire grade takes the same shinkansen (bullet train), but the train only stops
briefly at the station. The students and teachers prepare for this logistical
challenge by marking door-sized lines on the floor of the gym, blowing a
whistle and timing how long it takes to get everyone over their line.
Teachers also don’t spend as much time preparing class
materials here as Australian teachers do. Every public school in Japan teaches
the same curriculum from the same range of textbooks, and there is an entire
subsidiary industry dedicating to producing lesson plans, worksheets, art kits
and other materials based on these textbooks. Teachers don’t even have to mark
most of the students’ homework, they just hand out answer sheets and the kids
correct it themselves.
In many ways you would think that Japanese teachers have it
easy… and yet they spend around twelve hours a day at work and even on public
holidays or weekends there are always one or two teachers at school.
So what are they doing?
Well, I’ve written about some of their activities before:
they act as surrogate parents, providing kids with emotional guidance and
pastoral care, and they do things that I would put firmly into the category of
parents’ responsibilities including looking for kids’ lost property and
searching the streets for kids who are late home. There is also a definite
element of staying at work for long hours because it looks good, not because
they actually have anything to do (a great number of my co-workers spend hours
a day sleeping at their desks, reading the newspaper or gossiping. There are
even “rest rooms” with couches and space to nap. There is also an
insane focus on everything being hand-made, which I will get back to in a
minute. The big killer though is the dreaded club activities. All but one or
two JHS students in any given school are members of a club. They practice after
school until around 7pm and every weekend. Vacations just mean more time to
spend on club activities. At my husband’s high school his tennis club students
recently went straight from a morning of academic tests to an eight hour
uninterrupted tennis training session. When the students compete in other cities
or prefectures on weekends the teachers accompany them as chaperones as well as
coaches, organising hotels and sometimes driving them in their own cars. Once club activities wrap up around 7pm the teachers still
aren’t free. They take it in turns to patrol the neighbourhoods where the
students live until around 10pm, checking game centres to make sure there are
no students inside.
As I mentioned, there is an obsession with things being
“hand-made” by teachers. In elementary schools the most gratuitous example of
this is the monthly displays that decorate landings and corridors. These must
be hand-made and new each year, even if the same design is used every Christmas
or what have you. Huge magazines come out every season with patterns and ideas
for teachers to copy, but they have to do all the cutting and gluing from
scratch. Buying pre-made decorations or just, I don’t know, putting up a glossy
poster, are seen as unacceptable alternatives.
In junior high this translates to worksheets. If a teacher
wants to make an original worksheet rather than copying one from a resource
book, nine times out of ten they will painstakingly draw it up by hand with a
pen and a ruler, then photocopy clip art from a book, trim it to the right size
and glue it to the worksheet. I had always assumed that this was a result of
the pervasive inability to use computers (until two years ago teachers in
public JHSs in my city shared one PC per school, and that PC ran Windows ‘95).
A fellow ALT one day made a worksheet on his laptop, though, and the teacher
asked him to remake it by hand because the computer version was “cold”
(impersonal or unfriendly). So it may be that it is a preference and not just
technological incompetence.
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| High tech cooling |
This preference extends beyond schools. I once spent three
hours working at the board of education making an index for a big folder of
documents. I was given stickers, stamps and ink pad, a cutting board and a box
cutter. I had to stamp numbers on either side of the sticker, cut it in half
and then match the outer edges neatly while sandwiching the page margin between
the inside edges to make an index tag. The kind you can buy in packs of fifty
for a dollar that would also look much neater than my ink smudged, crookedly
cut ones (but lacking the heartfelt warmth of all the swearing I did while
making them).
In response to Japanese students’ test scores slipping
further and further in relation to Chinese and Korean students’ scores, the
Education Ministry is responding with knee-jerk “add more chapters to textbooks
and more school hours” responses. In my prefecture all 5
th and 6
th
graders were required to spend part of their summer holiday this year at school
taking additional maths classes.
In Osaka elementary schools are going to increase to six teaching days a week. In my opinion all this does is add a
further burden to teachers and increase the stress children have to deal with.
There is no consideration of promoting greater efficiency at schools (or in the
bloated and ineffective bureaucracies that administer them). While I personally
love
the relationships that exist between schools, teachers and students as a
result of the
additional non-classroom stuff teachers do, I also can’t see how
educational outcomes can be improved unless the role of teachers is revised to
focus more on teaching and less on parenting.
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