Importing Diversity: Inside Japan's JET Program (37 page)

Into this environment, the antithesis of the stereotype of orderly Japanese schools, entered the ALTs. Ordinarily a school with such severe discipline problems would not have invited an ALT, but Yamada-sensei was passionate about teaching English conversation and he was determined not to
let the students' behavior sabotage his opportunity to bring in native
speakers. The other two JTLs, however, were not interested in team teaching, forcing Yamada-sensei to take complete responsibility for the visits.
He managed to arrange for twice-a-week visits from ALTs posted to a local
board of education, though the specific ALT would change from one semester to another.

What was most instructive about this situation was how these ALTs reacted. Yamada-sensei recalled: "Our school had two ALTS, and they were
completely different. Rebecca came barging in and wanted to change
everything to her way of thinking. We all thought, 'Whoa, so this is what
Americans are like.' But then Marian came, and we expected the same
thing, but she was more Japanese than we were. All the other teachers and
even the office staff and principal loved her. Myself, I can work with either
type, but Marian was much more acceptable because she was sensitive, so
they gave her lots of presents when she left." Yamada-sensei showed Marian's picture to his classes and had all his students write letters to her be fore she even arrived. By the time she appeared at the school, everyone was
bubbling with anticipation. But neither Rebecca nor Marian were much involved with after-school activities, and though they loved working with
Yamada-sensei they found the students to be extremely unruly in class.

It was with the third ALT to visit Kamo, an American named Richard,
that disaster finally struck. Richard was quite irritated by the disruptive
classroom behavior of some eighth-grade students who would hang out
windows, talk with their neighbors, surreptitiously read comics or play
handheld electronic games, or even move about in the back of the room. He
found it virtually impossible to carry on the team-taught class. But Richard
was even more nonplussed by Yamada-sensei's strategy for handling the
disruptive students. Day after day he stood by helplessly as Yamada-sensei
stopped class repeatedly to exhort the boys in the back of the room to pay
attention. Sometimes he would ask one of the offenders to stand and would
proceed to lecture him at length, completely disrupting the flow of the
carefully devised lesson plan. Rarely did these approaches have much of an
immediate effect, and in several instances Richard, against his better judgment, intervened. Once he lost his temper and screamed at the class at the
top of his voice, "Shut up!" This worked like magic-once; by the next
class period nothing had changed, and subsequently he found that raising
his voice had only a minimal effect. On another occasion Richard actually
walked to the back of the room, grabbed a boy by the shoulders, and pushed
him firmly into his seat, but afterward it seemed that the class was even
more unresponsive than they had been before.

One day, Richard decided he could take no more. He stalked out of the
room in the middle of the lesson and went straight to the principal's office,
where he complained that Yamada-sensei was unable to control the students. Because Yamada-sensei refused to resort to appropriate interventions such as physical punishment or suspension, Richard argued, there
was no clear deterrent to the students' behavior. He also informed the principal that because teaching under such circumstances was useless, he would
not return to Kamo until the situation had improved.

Yamada-sensei, however, was equally befuddled by Richard's insistence
that he send the offending students to the principal, a strategy he believed
to be simply a self-serving means of passing on the problem to someone
else. For him, discipline began with a caring relationship, and effective control rested on warm interpersonal relations between himself and the offending students. Yamada-sensei knew that the class behavior of these students was a symptom of a much larger problem, and he was not about to sabotage his schoolwide attempts to mobilize peer and parental pressure to
change these students' behavior by lashing out at them in anger or punishing them. Such a confrontational approach, he was convinced, would
only lead these students to resent authority figures more deeply: it would
do nothing to address the underlying cause of that resentment.

Yamada-sensei's disciplinary approach is consistent with Gerald LeTendre's and Rebecca Erwin Fukuzawa's descriptions of the philosophy underlying school guidance (shido) at the junior high school level. LeTendre
notes that the standard disciplinary techniques used by Japanese teachers-patient illustration of desired behavior, interviews with the offenders,
reflection papers, formal apologies, after-school lectures, and informal
counseling sessions-all rely on learner and teacher having an emotional
tie based on a shared set of goals and values. An effective teacher-student
relationship requires trust, and it assumes that the teacher is guide and the
learner is follower.6 Fukuzawa elaborates that discipline in this model is assumed to be largely psychological; that is, students reflect on their misdeeds until they "understand" (i.e., internalize the school norms and routines).' We should note that this normative model does not take into
account the various attempts by Japanese teachers to come to terms with
what they perceive as an increasingly unruly population of middle school
students. More than a few ALTs have reported witnessing severe physical
punishment, such as students being burned with a cigarette butt or slapped
in the face, and Yamada-sensei himself contrasted the approach his school
had taken with that in a neighboring school where teachers regularly used
threats, intimidation, and physical punishment to keep students in line.'

To return to the case at hand, Richard's ideas about discipline fit neither
with Yamada-sensei's educational values nor with the larger structure and
rationale of middle school education in Japan. Because there is no tracking
or ability grouping in most Japanese public junior high schools, disruptive
students cannot be relegated to special classes or groups. Nor can students
be removed from class or suspended from school at this age-teachers
maintain that the constitutional guarantee of equal educational opportunity prohibits such action. Thus, as Fukuzawa reminds us, academic instruction and discipline are inseparable at this stage: "the quality and quantity of instruction for the most highly motivated students are directly
related to the behavior of the most problematic students."9 Yamada-sensei
was not yet prepared to give up on the offending students in the interest of
the academic progress of the rest of the class.

Moreover, Yamada-sensei saw Richard as contributing to the problem
with the eighth-grade class at Kamo. First, he argued that students know that a JTL will not use severe punishment in a class with an ALT so they act
up because it is a "class oriented toward the outside (yosoyuki jugyo)."
Second, he took issue with Richard's attempts to become the disciplinarian
himself, particularly when physical contact was involved: "It makes a huge
difference who touches the student. For it to be accepted, it must be an ingroup member-for example, a homeroom teacher with whom a relationship has been built up. If an outsider touches him, it's a loss of face for that
student." Finally, he felt that in several instances Richard had not exhibited
sensitivity toward "protecting" students who were weak in English, a sentiment with which other JTLs agreed:

The ALTs don't know anything about students' situations-whether
they're bad, violent, and so on. We are very careful in how we handle
students because we don't want to make them feel ashamed, but ALTs
can't know in what situations students feel ashamed. I remember once
Richard taught many new words and then gave a test, but one student
had low ability and a stammer, and he answered in a small voice. Then
Richard raised his voice at him, "Why didn't you listen to me?" and the
boy cringed. So I think ALTs don't worry enough about how students
feel. We are very careful not to hurt the students' feelings (kizu wo
tsukenai yo ni).

Yamada-sensei continues to be an active supporter of the JET Program, but
his experience with Richard impressed on him the depths of some cultural
gulfs between ALTs and JTLs. He concluded, "The problem is that most
ALTs are too independent. We want them to depend on us, but they never
ask our opinions in a serious way or say sumimasen (I'm sorry) and apologize for the inconveniences they create."

Kawaguchi Junior High School

Even the special treatment afforded Karen at Nishikawa paled next to
Kristin's celebrity reception at a small, rural junior high school in the
southwestern corner of the prefecture. A California native, Kristin was
posted to a small district board of education where no one spoke any English at all. At first it seemed as if Kristin's year in Japan was headed for
disaster. Before she left the United States, the board of education had written to ask if she wanted to rent furniture for the year. Kristin replied "yes";
but on arrival, she decided that it was all too expensive. She instructed the
board of education to have all the furniture removed, informing them that
she would instead buy the things she needed at a second-hand shop. Komori-sensei, a JTL called in to serve as a liaison with the board of education, told me: "Well, it turns out that Kristin's predecessor wrote and said,
'Don't accept any expensive things because Japanese are soft toward foreigners (gaijin ni yowai) and will give you everything you need.' Sure
enough, I ended up giving her my guest futon (sleeping mat)! Can you believe that? Even if it was expensive, if it was the board of education that had
arranged it, we couldn't refuse it." She continued:

Kristin had bad manners when she first arrived, too. Her nails were too
long and her earrings too big and flashy. When I first met her, she was
sitting in the board of education waving a fan, chewing gum, and wearing a T-shirt with no sleeves and a miniskirt. I was both depressed and
shocked at the same time. The board of education officials asked me to
advise her to cut her nails and not use so much makeup and big earrings, but when I brought it to her attention, she said, "Oh, don't worry
about that. The Ministry of Education said that we're here to demonstrate American culture, not to become Japanese." I thought that answer was really self-serving. When I told the board of education officials what she said, they just decided to give up, saying she was too
young to understand. But, you know, gradually she changed her behavior. I think it was experience more than my advice.

Kristin's board of education decided to dispatch her to three rural junior
schools for one semester each. This, they speculated, would allow for a
more concentrated and meaningful school experience. Her first school,
Kawaguchi, with a student population of only 230, proved to be a perfect
match for Kristin's temperament and outlook. The principal treated Kristin
like his own daughter, and he even agreed to let the head English teacher
temporarily forgo her duties as homeroom teacher in order to concentrate
on team teaching. The JTLs as a group decided to completely suspend use
of the textbook for team-taught classes during the three months Kristin
was present.

When Kristen first visited her school, she was greeted by students staring, waving, and even venturing a bold, "Hello! Hello!" Her shoes were
placed in the shoe box reserved for guests. There was a schoolwide assembly to introduce her to the student body. The English teachers held a welcome party for her and later gave her a present on her birthday (not a common practice in Japan). She was called on to give a speech to the PTA and
to write an article for the local newspaper. One night she was interviewed
on the local television news. She had a fan club among the boy students,
and toward the end of her visit, many students approached her for an autograph or a handshake. Finally, there was a farewell party, which the Japanese teacher of English described to me:

For the students she was nothing less than a celebrity. All she had to do
was say something and everyone would marvel at her beautiful pronunciation. For her farewell party the student council planned for
weeks. They conducted a survey of all the students and then we made
up a song to the tune of "You Are My Sunshine." Except we sang "You
are my teacher, my wonderful teacher, please don't take my wonderful
teacher away." They gave her paper cranes they had made, and there
were speeches from student representatives and from Kristin. Then
they gave her roses, and she paraded out of the gym to the music of
"Let It Be." It was an incredibly touching occasion.

The only trying moment for the teachers was Kristen's reaction to the
annual English recitation contest. She had helped students practice for it
and was invited to come see the performances. One JTL remembered:

We had the kids do Martin Luther King's speech at the English Recitation Contest. The kids tried hard. We should have told them to do it in
a more interesting way, but we had them memorize the speech. Anyway, we invited Kristin to the speech contest, but she suddenly got up
and left without any explanation after a few minutes. We couldn't figure out what was wrong. One of the other teachers wondered if it
might have something to do with the lack of emotion in the students'
recitation. So later I called her at home and that was it-she was really
upset because they seemed so insensitive to the real meaning of that
historic speech. I never realized her feelings about blacks until she left
the gym that day. You know, our students, they'll just scribble on pictures of blacks in their text without thinking. But because of this incident we've had a chance to reflect on the mistakes we're making, and
next time we'll know to prevent this kind of thing from happening.
Kristin understood that we should have done more to teach the students. Anyway, that was the biggest shock for me. Kristin always
showed how she was feeling. We Japanese smile without showing our
feelings.