School Randomness

Since I got back and showed my students pictures from home, we've finally gotten back into the normal class routine. This is the second term of the year, and for me, it's the busiest. The first term had lots of placement tests, summer vacation in August, and my trip home. Third term last year started off with my visit home for Christmas, and then my classes got cancelled for things like graduation.

That leaves second term as the biggest solid chunk of classes for me. It also includes my favorite holidays of the year--Halloween and Christmas--which makes it even more exciting. More on that next week, though.

I've been teaching all my first-year students a shopping unit. After getting a feel for the level of the students' vocabulary, discussing it with the teachers, and reading my notes on last year's attempt, I decided to stick with the same basic situation: clothes shopping. I prepared a full dialogue between a salesperson and a customer looking for a certain kind of clothing, asking for a certain size and color. The salesperson finds one, the customer asks how much it costs, and based on the amount, the customer might buy it. While I've never had a dialogue like that with a department store clerk, all the questions are useful in and of themselves--a customer can ask simply for "this" in a different size or color, or might just ask how much this costs.

Most importantly to me, though, is that shopping gives the students a practical situation, and the vocabulary (types of clothing, colors, sizes) is almost entirely a review for them. That allows the most emphasis to be placed on the actual dialogue.

The lesson worked just fine: everyone understood the vocabulary with ease, and the dialogue therefore didn't take long to explain. Just like last year, some of the more mischievous boys decided to pronounce "change" as though it were Japanese, which makes it sound like "chahn-geh." They probably wouldn't have been nearly as amused by it if I hadn't cracked up at hearing it. This of course encouraged them, and the next victim was "orange."

The follow-up to this lesson was the same situation, using clothing that comes in pairs: shorts, pants, jeans, shoes, etc. Just like last year, I discovered that all the students have learned that "pants" means "underwear," so asking them to translate "I'm looking for a pair of pants" predictably resulted in lots of giggles. (I later found out that, in fact, this is due to the influence of British English on Japan.) The change in grammar--switching all the corresponding pronouns to plural--gave even the best students some trouble. It seems that they don't learn how to make these distinctions on the fly, which reflects the system's dependence on rote memorization. More on that some other time, though.

The second-year students at Toyotama, having already learned all my basic lessons last year, continue to challenge me. Luckily, my favorite teacher is in the class with me, so we do pretty well. So far this term, we've been teaching them about cooking. Starting with ingredients--I brought in a bag of flour, a saltshaker, an onion, broccoli, etc.--then covering cookware--I brought in a bowl, spoon, and fork, but failed to haul in an oven--we ended by teaching them about recipes. We went over a sample together, then broke them into small groups, and told them to prepare their own recipe.

We spent the next two classes helping them individually. We had them prepare a presentation, with each student graded individually. The presentations were pretty good, with recipes ranging from chocolate chip cookies to omuraisu to ramen to okonomiyaki.

The third-year writing class is coming along nicely. After familiarizing ourselves with their writing abilities during first term, this term we gave them a different kind of assignment. Last term we gave the class the same writing topic, one assignment at a time. This time, we gave them each a list of topics, and told them to write four essays by December. Sample topics included "a typical day for me," "my favorite holiday," and "my favorite videogame." We also told them they're free to make up their own topic, if they come to us first.

They started slowly at first, but seem to be doing fine with it now. Koji has jumped headlong into an essay describing Monster Hunter 2. Erika is doing the same thing, but about a farm simulation/roleplaying game called Harvest Moon. Misa is writing about a typical day for her. Takashi has been absent a lot lately, so he's still fishing around for ideas.

As far as I'm concerned, Koji, Erika, and Misa are demonstrating beautifully the benefits of creative writing in a foreign language. Erika is learning words for young farm animals and terms about farming. Koji is learning things like "after you kill a black dragon, you bring the gems to a blacksmith so he can improve your armor." Misa is using phrases like "my alarm goes off at 6, but I always sleep until 6:45." Not enough time has passed yet for me to tell if they'll retain this, but it certainly seems to be working better than making them all memorize dialogues about restaurants.