Skool visits

Last week was official school visit week, so we both trooped in to see Felix and Ruby in action.
Avid readers of these pages might have noticed from previous photos that Japanese schools look alot like schools in Australia — from about 40 years ago I reckon. Tiny wooden desks, chalk and paper on blackboards, gas heater in the middle of the room, no air conditioning. Certainly no such thing as interactive whiteboards, computers in the classroom or a laptop on every desk, let alone wireless internet or school intranets. At the end of the school year in late March there was great excitement when a couple of the classrooms got whopping great flat-screen TVs, although Ruby’s grade six teacher was less than impressed: “all it does is get in my bloody way,” she muttered, and went back to the chalkboard.

In the interests of journalistic integrity I should report that the primary school does have a computer room full of creaky old terminals, but Ruby says they hardly ever went in there and nobody knew how to type anyway. Felix says he has been in there once in three months.

But anyway, back on topic. Here’s a couple of photos of Felix in his element:

You see what I mean about the classrooms.

The junior high skool also held an official classroom inspection day, on a Saturday for some reason. I suspect this was to give fathers a chance to attend, although on the day it was the same old collection of mothers plus the super-keen Australians. And the class that we got to inspect? English. Yes, English is compulsory at junior high school, and Ruby is at junior high school, so Ruby gets to recite lines such as “How are you? I’m fine, thank you. And you?” and practice the alphabet for 50 minutes three times every week. I’ve had a quiet word to the teacher and we have agreed that the time will eventually come when Ruby is granted special dispensation to be excused from this charade; but at the moment, just two weeks into the new skool year, it’s all about fitting in and being seen to fit in, so English classes it is. At least Ruby gets to chat to the British assistant teacher Lucy-sensei on her weekly visits.

And then there were the home visits. In Japan, instead of the parents going in to the school, the teachers come out to you in the afternoon or evening. The schools tend to take a much greater interest in the personal lives of students than we are used to in Australia. Last year a Japanese teacher friend in Melbourne told me that if the police pick up an errant kid on the streets they’re more likely to contact his schoolteacher before his parents. So the home visit is presumably to check that the kids have a stable home life — ie that your place isn’t a complete hovel and that there’s food on the shelves. And we haven’t been called up to the school to explain the lack of fish in our diet or anything, so I guess our household environment has passed muster.