What to tell the Superintendent?

This is a pontification, read at your own peril. This only proves Chrissy shouldn’t leave me alone for too long. I bought a back-scratcher at the 100 yen store, but I need an editor.

This morning on the school email, I saw that Superintendent Sturm had written that he has scheduled some time to see me and to ask what my impressions are about Japanese education. I am not an expert on the Japanese educational system, but I have started checking out information online about. I want to know what the experts say and see if it agrees with what I have observed. I know that Japan outscores the US on Test scores on Math and Science. I would like to figure out what the Japanese do that the US does not. Forgive me if I use you as a sounding board.

The only way I can approach this issue is as a parent. When I ask myself which school system I would send my kids to, I have to answer the US system regardless of test scores.

What do the Japanese have that the Americans do not? Simply, the Japanese have a culture of education. It is expected that the students will perform well. It is expected that the students will do their homework. It is expected that students will, if possible, attend cram schools after school.

The primary weakness of the Japanese system is the lack of classroom discipline. Doesn’t that sound surprising? In the classroom, the teacher carries no weight. Teachers are forbidden from sending a student out of the classroom. Students have an absolute right to an education. This serves to undermine those who are seeking an education, while it gives all of the power to the disruptive students. The best teachers engage the students to a point that the students want to participate. Yet even with these teachers, students sleep in class and students talk non-stop to other students, and some students refuse to work in class at all. I see this as all part of the exhaustion that they suffer from all of their activities.

There are several students that I know fairly well. The one I know best is a boy named Katakami. I eat lunch with him nearly everyday. He is fairly typical for an 8th grade boy. They have assigned seats at lunch. He sits beside a boy, Yamashita. Next to Yamashita is another boy Shimizu. I sit on the girl’s side of the table, next to a girl named Matsumura. Everyday, Katakami and Shimizu pick on Yamashita. Yamashita is a great sport, all three of them are really good friends, but Yamashita is always the last one done with his lunch. All through lunch the two other boys tickle Yamashita so he can’t eat quickly. They squeeze his knees under the table, they run their fingers up and down his sides and back. One day I expect that Yamashita will blow his lunch all over Matsumura and me, but so far we have been lucky.

Katakami is a leader. The other kids respect him quite a bit. He is one of the kids others will seek out to speak with me, if they don’t understand what I am asking. He is a captain on the baseball team. He is a serious student. His day begins at school at 7:30. They practice baseball year round and each day begins with baseball practice. School runs from 8:20 to 3:30. Lunch is at 1:00. Students serve lunch to the other students in the classroom. They rotate this responsibility. If they are not on lunch duty the students have fifteen minutes before lunch and twenty minutes after lunch that is essentially free time. After school, they have another baseball practice. This practice lasts until it is too dark to see. Then the students can go home. After a short break at home, Katakami has Juku, cram school, at 7:00 pm. It lasts three hours. He also keeps a homework log of how many hours he studies outside of school. His homeroom teacher checks this log intermittently. I once saw his log; he would study very little on the weekends, maybe four or five hours a day on the weekends. Don’t forget that he also plays most of his baseball games on Saturday. I asked him how he gets to the games on the weekend; he said they walk. His weekend is almost as full as his school days.

Another student I am getting to know is Osawa. She is a great kid, a very hard worker. She is one of the best English speakers in the school. She is in the 9th grade. At the beginning of most of my classes, we play a game called ‘Survivor’ where kids must answer my questions before they can sit down. She sits in the front of the room and is frequently laughing at the softball questions I serve the last standing students. I will ask questions like how many. . .? and then I will count in Japanese or Spanish or whatever language I can think of. I will give the kids the answer. I will model the correct response and the kids will still stand there. Osawa is one of the few kids who picks up on most of the things that I am doing in class to help them out.

Osawa loves school. Last Friday, I asked her if she was glad it was the weekend, and she said no, she liked going to school. Every time I see her, I make a point of saying hello, calling her by name and chatting with her. Osawa is on lunch duty. I frequently will see her in front of the kitchen on the ground level and I will call to her from the second floor. (There was a group of seventh grade girls who have noticed this and they were mildly surprised that I spoke to her by name, I asked the 7th grade girls to say hello to me on Monday. I will have them write their names in Kanji and also in English so I will start saying hello to them in English as well.) Yesterday, after most other students were gone, I saw Osawa leaving, I asked her what she was doing this weekend. She said studying. She didn’t have any other plans. I asked her how long she would study English; she said five hours. I don’t know if that meant a day or five hours total. Five hours would be enough studying for me for two days, but I would be surprised if she studied just five hours over the weekend.

There is a third kid, I don’t remember her name; the Kanji on her nameplate is very complicated. She does not speak English well, but she is a friend with a girl who will frequently talk with me. Initially, this girl would avoid eye contact or any interaction with me. Even still, when I speak to her in English, she immediately turns to her friend to translate. She doesn’t need to, though. I can see it in her eyes; she understands more than she thinks. She is teaching me Japanese. She is one of the kids, I will speak with in Japanese when I first see her. I will say ‘Konichi-wa’ and ‘genki-des-ka’ (Hello, how are you) before I slip back into English and ask her the same questions. She does not have Juku. She does not have a sport to participate in after school. She is free. She had a word for it, which I haven’t yet learned. She is a bright kid, but she is getting left behind in a classroom without discipline.

What I see as the weaknesses of the Japanese educational system is they are students and teachers working too hard, class sizes are too large, the lack of discipline in the classroom, and the teachers lack resources in the classroom. The public school is not where education takes place. Class sizes are huge. Most classes are 30% larger than the normal class size back in the states. Everyday I am amazed at how well the Japanese teachers manage their classes, but real education takes place at home or in Juku. The expectations are set by the society, not in the classroom, rightfully so. If a student is not fortunate enough to have a Juku, they will be left behind. It doesn’t matter what skills they have. Furthermore, minor problems, like students living in a broken home, are major problems with students. Several times teachers have pointed out students who have a stepparent to help explain the behaviors I see in class.

Students work so hard, that it actually negatively impacts what they learn. They have no time to process the information they gain. Half jokingly, when I was speaking with Osawa about how much homework she would do, I said, “This counts as homework,” meaning us talking together for five minutes. I told her I would think about her while I was relaxing this weekend and she was studying English and other subjects all weekend long, poor kid. You have to have a solid base of study, but you also need to give yourself a break and let your brain work to connect all of the junk you through in there. In my own work, I will frequently hit a point where the more work I put in, the more work I create for myself. Maybe it is an inherent ‘lazy streak’ that tells me when it is time to quit, but in everything I do, I hit a point where I look at what I am doing and say to myself, “I can keep this up for three more hours right now, or I can finish it in five minutes, tomorrow.” I wonder how much further along these kids would be, if they took a break. I don’t think the Japanese have that ‘lazy streak’ that I have been blessed with.

What the Japanese admire about Americans is our free time. The time we have to do nothing or whatever we want. They don’t have it. In my discussions with Katsumoto, Lincoln Middle School’s new shop teacher if he has his way, he has said he ‘envies’ the time we have. He asks if everyone has time to DIY, do it yourself, like I seem to have had. He has seen pictures of the house Chrissy and I have built. He knows about the projects I have put on hold until I return. I tell him many people ‘do it themselves,’ but not to the extent that we have done. He recognizes that I am crazy and frequently take on tasks that I may never finish. Chrissy taught him that word ‘crazy.’

The weakness with American schools is the lack of commitment to education culturally, politically and financially. Several years ago Washington voters voted 70% in favor of giving teacher annual raises to match the rate of inflation. A year later, a slight majority voted to repeal Washington tax system. This resulted in the revocation of the pay raise. The Washington State Supreme Court declared that the primary responsibility of the state government was to educate its students. This was back in the 1980s. In reality this hasn’t happened. There are poor districts neglected by the state and local communities cannot keep up with their existing economies and tax base. Americans pay lip service to education simply, but do not have the commitment to education to keep the politicians supporting the schools the way they should.

Pullman has been an awesome community. They wholly support education. There will be pockets around the US where education is valued, but these places are not the norm. If the US were to compete with the Japanese in education, we would have to lengthen the school year. That is the primary way, the easiest way that I can see. Japanese kids have a 240-day school year. It is a full third more time in class. If American kids spent that much time in class, they would close the gap in test scores. I would be surprised if the US kids wouldn’t be number one.

Many teachers will balk at a lengthened year. As it is teachers frequently work extraordinarily hard throughout the school year and use their own money to supplement what little classroom budget that there is. Summers are used to develop curriculum, continue education, again primarily at the teachers expense, and maintain certification. There are not a lot of rich teachers. I don’t think that we should add 60 days to the school year, but I don’t think it will be long before we will have to add days to the calendar.

I see education as a 180-day suitcase. We have a lot of things to pack into it, continuing education requirements for teachers, test scores, values education, accommodations for special needs, increased access to grades, parent contact, increased liability with test scores, integration, calls for privatizing education, contextual education, and 150 kids to evaluate and for whom we need to create increasingly individualized lesson plans. Americans want all of these things, but it all has to fit within the 180-day suitcase. Expectations and responsibilities keep adding to teachers and students, but it won’t fit into 180 days. Increasingly money for education is being siphoned off into special needs education, testing and many other necessary programs. Schools have become a catch all for everything that society needs. Then people ask what is wrong with our kids; what is wrong with our system.

In Washington, teachers are well trained, but it isn’t always the well-trained teacher that makes the best teacher. It helps, but it is only a part of the answer. Teachers need to be able to build appropriate relationships with kids while they have a knowledge base to guide students in their field. Increasing requirements on teachers will not lead to great benefits in education.

People think that testing is the key. Testing is a thermometer. There are things we can do to effect what the thermometer tells us, there are things we can do that will effect what the test tells us. We have to ask ourselves, what do we want from ‘education.’ Testing tells us one thing; it does not educate a kid well. You can teach a kid how to improve their scores on a test, but is that education? In Pullman, we devote 1 out of 10 days to standardized testing and practicing for standardized tests. We lose 10% of the school year in tests not directly related to what should be taking place in the classroom, education.

Increasing the school year would cost the taxpayers quite a bit. Americans don’t want to pay for the public good. Americans want immediate results, what we fail to realize is that whatever we choose will cost us just the same. Americans don’t want to raise taxes for roads, but we will buy new tires, rims, and suspension when our cars fall apart because of the roads we drive on. Americans don’t want to pay for a public healthcare system, but we pay for it in increased insurance and hospitals will definitely pass the charges for the indigent patients they treat onto those who can afford it. Education is the same. We want a cheap labor force to change our tires and to super size our fries and we pay for it in our economy for generations. We refuse to buy an education for our kids that will provide real wealth and shift our economy to a more knowledge based economy and away from a low paying service economy. We will pay no matter what.

The Japanese don’t have the answer key when it comes to education, and neither do the Americans. We can learn from each other though, and copy down the answers that they do have right.

Does it look like Sturm and I will have a fun trip to Kyoto on the fourth?