The Good School

A while has passed since I updated this thing. A whole school term, in fact. I had spend the last term at Kunimoto JHS, and am now back at Takaragi, the “bad” school. Takaragi really isn’t that bad, as I have mentioned before, but Kunimoto was absolute perfection. The children sat quietly and listened to me. When I asked them to speak, they spoke, to write, they wrote, and to stop, they stopped. Most of them actually understood the instructions I gave them too, which was good, and at least three students were able to have a conversation with me that extended past the day, date and weather. Teachers were also great, I made friends with not only the English teachers, but others too, particularly with one of the Japanese teachers, who helped me out a lot when I was studying.

I saw several festivals there too, including a job fair, where students went out and did all sorts of odd jobs – at the sports park, convenience stores, police, hospital, even the zoo. Also the graduation ceremony, the last ceremony for the third graders. At least eighty percent of the school was in tears at the end of the ceremony, and not all were students. When I came here in 2002, I met an ALT who said he couldn’t believe the relationships students had with their teachers, and now I see what he meant. At Kunimoto, they had a system where a teacher would start with the first year students one year, and teach them right through until they were in third year, so the students didn’t have to deal with different teaching methods. This worked quite well, and also created really good relationships between student and teacher. Also, another thing that’s different here, is that if any child gets in trouble for something outside of school, and is in trouble with the police, they often call the student’s homeroom teacher before they call the parents, and teachers try to deal with it. Kunimoto, of course, doesn’t have any problems like this.

The only problem was it’s distance from my house, but this was only temporary. I fixed this problem by buying a scooter, thinking that this was a brilliant idea. It was a good idea, in that it reduced my trip to school to 15 minutes, but since it was smack bang in the middle of winter, I would often arrive at school near frost-bitten, despite wearing thick gloves every day. Also, I was surprised to learn, and a bit slow to learn, too, that the speed limit for scooters isn’t 50km/h like it is with everyone else, but 30km/h, and that scooters aren’t much fun to drive through snow, so I eventually upgraded to a car, much better, and slightly less scary. Tochigi is renowned for being the most dangerous prefecture to drive in, with the most road fatalities in Japan. Couple that with the fact that Utsunomiya has like the highest ratio of cars to people in the world. So not only am I driving amongst the worst drivers in the country, but there are also more of them.

Scary thought that.