Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (35 page)

Karen was largely unaware of this behind-the-scenes hand-wringing,
however; and with twelve English teachers on the staff, usually enough
people mustered up the courage to speak with her to keep her from ever
feeling ostracized. In addition, a mathematics teacher who spoke English
better than most JTLs had absolutely no compunctions about engaging her in conversation. But Karen did chafe a bit under what she perceived as the
oppressive atmosphere of the teachers' room, and for this reason she eagerly anticipated Wednesday afternoon faculty meetings, which emptied it
out. "I love Wednesday afternoons," Karen admitted, "because I can do
anything I want."

Nevertheless, from the outset Hayano-sensei and Ueda-sensei were
concerned about Karen's emotional well-being. "To be honest," Hayanosensei told me, "we worry a lot about Karen because she's a single woman."
Ueda-sensei, too, confessed that he worried that when everyone else in the
teachers' room was talking, Karen must be lonely. They had observed that
while Karen was extremely sincere and likable, she was not particularly
outgoing and would rarely initiate conversation with students or teachers.
At one point Hayano-sensei even approached me to see whether I thought
Karen was depressed. Though I replied negatively, it was only a short while
later that he asked all teachers to make an effort to talk with Karen as much
as possible. In addition, Ueda-sensei began briefing Karen each day on what
was said at the morning meeting.

The thorniest issue to resolve was Karen's team-teaching schedule, and
understanding how it played out at Nishikawa requires a knowledge not
only of the distinct personalities among the JTLs (and how these individuals related to one another) but also of the place of English classes within the
larger organizational and curricular structure of the school. Ability grouping is usually said to be anathema to the strictly egalitarian mind-set of
Japanese educators; although this characterization holds for public schools
at the elementary and lower secondary level, exam-oriented high schools
such as Nishikawa have begun experimenting with tracking. At Nishikawa
each grade comprised eleven classes (with approximately forty students
per class), and the classes were divided into three groups with slightly different curricula. In each grade, the "third stream" (sanrui) contained one
class of students concentrating in physical education; the "second stream"
(nirui) held three advanced classes of students concentrating in either the
natural sciences or the humanities; and the "first stream" (ichirui), for the
average students, numbered seven classes.

This complex structure seemed to leave little room for team teaching. A
memo distributed to all English faculty on 1 September outlined the plan
of action for the first month of Karen's visit in great and revealing detail.
First, it was assumed from the outset that Karen would not visit the same
class more than once a week even though students were taught English
class three times a week, as mandated by the Ministry of Education. Second, twelfth-grade students rarely benefited from team teaching. With university entrance exams looming on the horizon, the English faculty as
a whole decided that these classes would be off-limits except for "irregular
visits." This meant that Miyatani-sensei and Murakawa-sensei, veteran
teachers in their fifties who held primary responsibility for preparing the
twelfth graders for the exams, almost never team-taught with Karen. They
had limited contact to get the "native speaker's point of view" on particularly tricky grammar points that cropped up on the "practice exams" (mogi
shiken) every now and then. Finally, only six classes were scheduled for
weekly sessions with Karen. Most Nishikawa students experienced team
teaching only as a one-shot deal; moreover, the team-teaching load fell disproportionately on five JTLs.

The first decision of the English faculty, made by consensus, was to target the tenth- and eleventh-grade advanced classes. Ueda-sensei explained:
"We were quite worried that, being British, Karen had a level of English
that would be hard for our students to understand, so we decided to put her
with our best students on a regular basis." In principle, the four JTLs who
taught the advanced students were thus bound to team-teach with Karen.
In practice, however, only three did so-and only Ueda-sensei did so with
enthusiasm. The fourth, Omori-sensei, had so little interest in team teaching that he got himself exempted from the policy by pointing to an informal survey he had conducted: there was widespread student sentiment, he
explained, that devoting one class a week to conversational English would
detract from their exam performance.

The JTLs with whom Karen taught once a week were Kira-sensei, a
young female JTL who had just returned from a summer trip to the United
States; Kamada-sensei, a young male JTL who was interested in experimenting with team teaching; and Ueda-sensei, whose elective class in conversational English was directed at students who were concentrating in
language and literature. This optional class, made up mainly of female students who hoped to study at one of the "foreign language" universities
nearby, was held in the school's language laboratory. Smaller than most
classes, it became one of Karen's favorites because in it she could use creative lesson plans. The remainder of the JTLs were asked to sign up for one
of the regular or irregular visits from the ALT so as to experience team
teaching at least once during the semester, and all but two complied.

Over the course of the year, then, Karen team-taught with thirteen different teachers, and she quickly discovered that they took radically different approaches to her role in the classroom. Ueda-sensei's classes were consistently the most cooperative, in both the planning and the teaching
stages. But the classes Karen really threw her heart into were those she taught with Ikuno-sensei, who had been transferred to Nishikawa the
same year that she arrived. Ikuno-sensei had a reputation among the other
English faculty as being extremely antisocial. A staunch union supporter,
he was critical of the school-the stifling atmosphere in the teachers'
room, the proliferation of rules and regulations, and the overly serious
focus on exams. He refused to use the official form sent by the board of education for the lesson plans used in team teaching, preferring instead to
type out his own lengthy plans as well as a personal evaluation of each
class. For this class Karen even made a mailbox, which she placed on her
desk. She had Ikuno-sensei's students write letters to her, and then she
wrote replies.

Karen was particularly enthusiastic about the political message embedded
in many of these classes. For instance, the two addressed world hunger in one
lesson by playing the hit song "We Are the World" and asking students,
working in small groups, to translate it. Then she and the JTL had the students write essays on poverty, which they sent off to a development agency.
Ikuno-sensei even spent a whole period telling students about differences
between "developed" and "developing" countries, though he admitted that
the principal did not know about this. So excited was Karen to discover a
teacher who tried to help students think critically that she began to spend as
much time preparing for Ikuno-sensei's classes as all the others combined.

I was completely surprised, therefore, when I discovered that Ikunosensei did not volunteer to team-teach; in fact, he was far from satisfied
with the team-teaching arrangement:

I've had a hard time with her British accent and her being female. Ideally, I should be able to tell her, "'Here's how I want you to interact
with students, I want you to do this ... ," but I can't bring myself to
tell her. There must be a better way to do it. It seems like she's always a
guest (itsu made mo okyakusan). Until today I planned everything. But
actually I want her to direct the class more. That's my self-evaluation
(hansei). She should teach more so that students can hear her English. I
just don't have time for all this preparation. Before class is the hardest.
I get this sinking feeling in my stomach and keep thinking to myself,
"There must be a good idea for this class," but no good ideas ever come
up. I want her to do interesting things, but not games-even songs are
better than games.

Yet in spite of these reservations, he continued to prepare diligently for his
classes with Karen, in part because of his poor relations with other teachers. The following year he asked to be transferred to another school.

Several teachers tended to forgo the textbook when team teaching with
Karen. One was a part-time teacher, Tsuda-sensei, who volunteered to do
several one-shot classes: "I decided I wanted to give it a try. The risk is high
and it's more work, but I'd never done it before so I wanted to try it. The
first few times we didn't use the text. The students have the mind-set that
team-taught classes are fun because we don't use the textbook. I think the
best part of team teaching is that it motivates students to take an interest
in English. We can do exam preparation apart from team teaching. So to
me, it's difficult to use the textbook for team teaching." Turning the activities over to Karen, however, had its pitfalls. In one class I observed, Karen
had planned to show three pictures of pollution and ask students to write
what they saw. But when they balked at writing an open-ended response,
Tsuda-sensei immediately switched gears and asked Karen to use "yes-no"
questions. As Karen walked by me in the back of the class she whispered,
"Oh, Jesus Christ, this is not what we discussed at all. We had planned to
let them use their brains a little." Afterward Tsuda-sensei confessed that he
was depressed by the way class went. In addition to not being able to please
Karen, he had been embarrassed when she had asked him a question that
he had not understood. His response ("What?" [Eh?]) had sent students
into peals of laughter. He consoled himself with the knowledge that "if students think, 'Even with that English they're communicating,' then I think
I've been successful."

Most teachers at Nishikawa stayed fairly close to the textbook. According to Karen, Sasaki-sensei was "the worst." He always asked her to do
conversation practice for the first ten minutes of class and then turned to
grammar explanation, pattern practice, and new vocabulary words for the
remainder of the period. One day he left a note on her desk in the teacher's
room before she got there, explaining that he had things to do in class until
9:20 A.M.; Karen should come only for the last twenty minutes and do a
game or whatever she wanted. The following week he canceled the teamtaught class entirely, saying he needed to prepare students for the exam.
Karen complained, "Sasaki-sensei always wants to do it separately. There's
no team teaching with him."

Karen's reaction to being treated like a tape recorder was to concentrate
on those team-taught classes in which she was given some leeway. She
began to work very hard preparing materials for her "good" classes, and
sometimes she would spend hours drawing pictures or composing questions. Although ideally team teaching is a sharing of responsibility for the
class, Karen was not involved in students' English study beyond her guest appearances. For example, testing was central to life at Nishikawa, and during end-of-term exams her classes were often canceled; she was rarely involved in making out tests or grading assignments. For the most part,
Karen accepted this role without complaint.

On the whole, the students themselves were thrilled by the ALT's presence. One informal survey done by Kawakami-sensei showed that 9o percent of the students were enthusiastic about Karen's team-taught classes.
Karen, too, was able to find some satisfaction in relationships established
with students in the advanced classes as well as with a handful of the
twelfth-grade girls who were taking an elective class in conversational English. The JTLs, however, by and large viewed team teaching as the bane of
their existence. They struggled to find a comfortable teaching mode with
Karen, and at an evaluation meeting after the first year, they unanimously
agreed that team teaching was "stuck in a rut" (mannerika). Even Uedasensei admitted to some misgivings after a homeroom teacher in the
eleventh-grade advanced track told him that none of his students achieved
outstanding scores in English in the end-of-term exams. Ueda-sensei reflected, "He didn't say it was because of team teaching but I think it was
implied in his comments, and I thought about stopping team teaching and
just doing exam preparation. In the long term, though, I think team teaching is best so I've decided not to give it up."

Extracurricular Activities

The extracurricular activities and special events in Japan's secondary
schools are as demanding as their better-publicized academics. Karen initially expressed interest in joining an after-school club, but her attempt to
participate in track and field left her frustrated. With her limited Japanese
skills, she felt uncomfortable in the relatively unstructured setting of club
practices; and she discovered that high school age students, while more mature than junior high students, were also more inhibited. She quickly tired
of their shy but polite demeanor toward her and informed Ueda-sensei that
she would rather participate in the ESS (English Speaking Society) club.

Unfortunately, while sports clubs were very popular at Nishikawa, the
culture clubs were not, in part because they were "required clubs"
(hisshukurabu). The ESS was made up almost exclusively of girls (fiftyfive), not an insignificant number of whom, according to Kawakami-sensei
(the faculty sponsor), had chosen it as a last resort. Karen did coordinate
one cooking lesson (scones, English pancakes, and Swiss rolls), but the bulk
of the sessions involved showing a movie or doing some kind of listening exercise. After going several times and feeling very awkward, she confessed, "I hate it when people join the ESS club who don't want to speak
English. At 4:0o in the afternoon, I don't want to listen to Japanese." At one
ESS meeting I attended, Kawakami-sensei was orchestrating a listening exercise followed by a quiz. She spoke in Japanese exclusively and interpreted
every word that Karen said. "This is killing, isn't it?" she whispered to me.
"A classic tape-recorder lesson."