Books List

Since I have been in Japan I have read around twenty books. Some of them are soft reading like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Others are much meatier, like The Dead Sea Scrolls Deceptionand The Day of Deception. One excellent book that I recommend highly is Shockwave. The author’s last name is Walker, so it has to be good.

Shockwave is a book that follows firsthand accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima. Walker follows the stories of the scientists who created the bomb, the pilots who dropped the bomb, and even individuals who survived the bomb. He even drops in on Truman during the Potsdam Conference when he heard about the successful testing of the first atomic bomb. This is unlike many of the drier history books out there. It really covers the story of the bomb as if it were a novel. He brings many of the emotions and motivations of both sides into view.

The school year in Japan is drawing to a close. The third (9th US) grade students will leave the school on March 13. Then the first and second grade students will have the school to themselves for the final week of classes. Students have already finished their final exams. I don’t know what we are doing in class, because we are still teaching lessons. As with students in the US, many of the kids have checked out and aren’t highly motivated to learn.

Yesterday, I walked around the field after school and visited students as they practiced their various sports. It was nice to see the difference between my first walk around the field and my walk about last night. Last night several students ran up to me to talk to me. Many of them were simply demonstrating their skills at hurdling, playing basketball, and others batting.

One girl pointed out a boy, whom her friend had been telling me about all week. It really is very sweet. One of my second grade students has been telling me about a boy she has a crush on. She has told me that he is very shy, he has long eyelashes, she sits next to him in class, and she touched him on the shoulder. She is very excited when she tells me these things, but it has taken her four days to tell me that much information. She comes up to me before lunch everyday with a group of friends and tries to let me in on her little excitement.

Many of the third grade students have told me about their high school plans. Some students have had to take several exams at different schools before they finally were accepted into a high school. Osawa, is moving to Tokyo. I just found out this morning that her entrance exam went well. She missed classes last week to travel to Tokyo for the test. Tanigawa has made it into Kansai Gaukuin, a prestigious school near my home in Nakaya-cho. Nishimura, my Chinese girl will attend Osaka Gaukuin. Kunieda will go to a school in Northern Osaka. Tanaka, the boy I spent a week prepping for an English interview made it into his high school. He brought Tanigawa by me one day to thank me. He needs a translator, still. My Chinese boy will go to a high school that has an excellent program in badmitton. He is very excited about it. All of the 230 third grade students will spread out across the Kansai region to their various high schools.

When I look back at the last six months that I have spent with these kids and the books that I have read, I can’t help but compare the two. While here, I have read more books for pleasure than I have ever been able to in the past. Each book had something to give me. Some books were pure joys to read. Other books, I would read and set aside for a later day before I finished them. The students are just like the books. Some of them were exciting and engaging from the first moment I met them. Others were work. For some, I was only able to begin to read and get a hint of their story before the school year has ended I have to put them back on the shelf. Some of them I would like to remove from the shelf again and see how their later chapters develop.

I can’t help but think that there are over seven hundred stories here in the school. I have just begun to understand a couple of them. Every year, as a teacher, I fall in love with my students. I learn about them as I teach them. I begin to care about their individual lives. Even here in Japan, with the limitations of the language I have found it possible to learn enough about my students to really care what happens to many of them.

The preceding paragraphs are my first attempt to write a Japanese essay called a ki-sho-ten-ketsu. It is where you introduce one topic, develop it and then introduce and develop a second unrelated topic. The final part of the essay is where you draw the two topics together. Unlike an English or Western styled essay where the thesis statement is written in the first paragraph, this style essay leaves the thesis out until the end if it is stated at all. The Eastern essay introduces the background before drawing to a point.