Open Classroom Day

I have been on the road for every weekday of the past two weeks, so it was a little disappointing but also a chance to be an involved dad when the kids both had Saturday school plus an open classroom day for parents. I made it to both after attending the usual Saturday morning staff meeting of aides to the Boss, which was at 9:00 this week.

The open classroom included a proud moment for me. Our kid who is in fifth grade in elementary school had just begun Japanese (Kokugo) class when I arrived. I slipped into a gap among the several parents who stood in the back of the classroom. The 25-year-old teacher was teaching them kanji by having them identify homonymous two-character words.

The example he wrote vertically on the blackboard (and I do mean blackboard, with chalk) was for various words that are all pronounced kanshin:

感
心
・
関
心
・
寒
心

By the way, he was a little off in how he wrote the character 寒. This made me feel good, the way it always does when people reveal themselves to be human in spite of my brain sometimes assuming against all evidence that everyone here is perfect at their first language. In the end I liked even more the young whippersnapper who is teaching my kid. Writing on a board, etc., in front of people is something I have gotten better at over time but still get pretty nervous about. Much respect to teachers here, who write that way all day.

He had the students get into groups of four and use their dictionaries to find sets of homonymous two-character words. There are a lot of these in Japanese, because they originally came from Chinese but left behind the tones that would have otherwise differentiated them. If the kids could find a pair of homonyms, they got 1 point; if a set of three, 2 points; if a set of four, 4 points; and if a set of five, 8 points. This doubled on and on for each additional one. A very savvy group could have found words pronounced コウショウ koushou to receive 2 to the 46th power points, but not one did. Alas.

The teacher acknowledged that he couldn’t check each group for correctness and count up their points within the allotted class time, so he enlisted us as parents to assist. My kid looked my way with a look that said “I am going to you for this” and I replied with a look that said “excellent.”

When my kid and their group came over to me with the sets of homonyms they’d found, I read each word aloud and tallied up the points. At this moment, I was totally focused on doing this before the time ran out. But as I looked up, the other kids in the group were saying things to my kid, who was nodding and pointing my way, hyping my Japanese skills with a smile on their face. That felt great. Because I seek the praise of others. But also because it gave those kids at least one example of a person who is visibly not from here but can wield the language.

The next exercise was to play shiritori, but instead of taking the last phonetic character of a word to start the next word, the students had to take the last kanji of a word and then think of a next word that began with the same pronunciation but was a different kanji. Much more fun than the real shiritori, in my humble opinion. I checked not only my kid’s group for that, but a couple of kids whose parents were not there came to have me check their work. It felt great.

I also felt very lucky to happen to have an occupation in which knowing Japanese pretty well is literally the job, as an interpreter and translator. Also that it happens to coincide with something valued in the classroom. If the exercise had happened to be software programming, some other dad would’ve impressed them.

Every time I go to my kids’ schools, I am reminded of how much I like the aesthetic. It is very similar to the pleasing nature of older buildings that are worn but still useful.

a well-worn wall in the school

By that, I mean that walls and floors and everything else are beat to hell. Only bare-bones repairs are made. The whole building is unabashedly lived-in and function-over-form. Buildings are made to function and last a long time. On the grounds there are also ramshackle sheds and messily tended gardens where the students grow vegetables. There are even rabbit hutches.

An incredible thing about our junior high school is that it is positioned up against a small mountain that has an official name but is locally called Kuriyama (chestnut mountain). As part of their curriculum the kids regularly hike and excurse into the mountain to observe flora and fauna and generally experience a degree of nature. My father in-law attended the same school and talked about how the kids used to scare each other by jumping from high tree limbs down in front of their friends at night on the mountain’s many trails.

Some people may dislike all the facility roughness. And some repairs should probably be made in a more timely way. But I like the general understanding that it is not fancy paint or carpet or decor that matter. I am reminded of attending Robert Frost Elementary School in the 1980s. The building was designed according to some kind of new-agey open-space philosophy that gave us cavernous spaces where I suppose we were meant to learn in a cacophony of various groups echoing together, while our parents enjoyed their very very very fine houses with two cats in the yard, at which they’d only just begun. But which instead resulted in makeshift classrooms being formed within the caverns, from partitions of chalkboards and bookshelves erected to serve as walls that should have just been there in the first place. This was in Utah, which of course then and now has assiduously and grossly underfunded the actual teachers who teach students.

Anyway, I like the simple design and get-the-job-done feel of our local public schools.

Another thing I have noticed at open-classroom visits since they resumed after the heights of Covid: Classrooms got IT-connected and remote-capable in an impressively short time, especially for Japan. Today there was a large monitor in front of the class, with textbook sections displayed, and later a big digital timer for the above activity. There was a webcam positioned at the top of the back classroom wall, because some students still participate remotely. In fact, some who weren’t attending even in the before times due to emotional or other reasons are now attending online, I am told. And there is a wifi router in each classroom. Having previously viewed some of my kids’ classes in session online, I have to say the admittedly imperfect setup is still surprisingly viable and functional. We sometimes fail to appreciate how much hard work surely went into getting all this installed and running.

The kid who is in second grade in junior high school was happy to hear that I would attend, when I told them in the morning. This in contrast to some of their friends, who forbid their parents from attending. But one warning was given: I should not go during the time when they would be studying English. Sure, whatever. Maybe they were worried that I would jump in and correct the teacher or something. So I made sure to leave the elementary school when its fourth hour began, so I could see fourth-hour science in progress at the nearby junior high school. But I made the fatal error of assuming that fourth-hour at the junior high is the same as that of the elementary school, and showed up right in the middle of third-hour English instruction. Kid gave me a death stare (albeit with smiles) from their desk as I stood in the hall looking in at an angle through the doorway. Whoops. But it turns out that they were okay with me being there. It is a joy to see my kids in school.