Aaron Ackerson's Blog

Earlier this month, my school was in the news, but unfortunately not for anything good. The 8th grade shop teacher was arrested for allegedly stealing money from the student council's safe and later from the vice-principal's desk. Accoring to a newspaper article I saw, he did it to have money to spend at a girlie bar. Whether or not this was to pay a tab he had already accumulated was not made clear in the article. The story got national exposure when Mino Monta (the Japanese Regis Philbin, basically) talked about it on his show. Mr. Muramoto is the man to the right of me wearing glasses in the background of this photo from my welcome party in 2004:

I never liked the guy. He was always screaming horrible things at students when they broke little rules. I recall once he was verbally wailing on one girl, screaming things like "You're not a human being!" As I recall, her offense was chewing gum at school. Ms. Amimoto used to say that his way of yelling at students sounded not like that of a school teacher, but like that of a gangster. I always got the impression that he hated kids and got off on verbally abusing them. I don't know how he even became a school teacher in the first place. I was surprised when I heard that he was the one who had been stealing from the school, but not nearly as surprised as I would have been if it had been any of the other teachers.

In other news, I've been enjoying my job overall lately. In the 7th and 8th grades, I'm working with teachers who encourage me to make my own activities for classes, and the students in both of those grades are really receptive to what I'm teaching, so it gives me the motivation to be creative and teach the things I want to teach. Also, since I've been teaching there for almost two years now, I have a pretty good idea of what kinds of activities will or won't go over well, and I am now pretty confident that when there's something I want to teach, I will be able to come up with a way to teach it that will go over well both with the teachers and the students. Two of the areas I've been focusing on are two of the main things that I feel are lacking in the regular English classes: pronunciation and fixing Japanese English.

I think one big reason why students have trouble with pronuncation is because when their regular English teachers say English words to them, they say them with more of a Japanese pronunciation so the students have an easier time understanding, even though those teachers are more or less capable of pronouncing those words correctly. For example, even if a teacher is perfectly capable of saying the word "don't" when they're speaking to me, they will often pronounce it as "donto" when they use it in front of the students. I don't know if this is intentional or not, but almost all the teachers I've worked with do this.

This has multiple negative effects on the students. For one thing, if that's the kind of English pronunciation they get used to hearing, then when they hear a native speaker's pronuncation, it is very hard for them to understand. Often when I say something very simple to a student, for example the spelling of a word, no matter how clearly I pronounce it, they will have no idea what I'm saying. Another negative effect of this is that the students also have trouble making themselves understood when speaking to a native speaker, especially if that native English speaker isn't used to hearing English words spoken with Japanese pronunciation. For example, if you limit the way you pronounce English words to syllables that exist in Japanese, there will be no difference between pairs of words such as "bath" and "bus", and "rake" and "lake." Also, the Japanese pronunciation of "work" sounds more like "walk" to me and vice-versa.

At Daihou elementary school I've noticed first hand the effect of hearing teachers' bad pronunciation. I teach two 5th grade classes there with two different homeroom teachers. One of them is pretty shy and has no confidendence in her own English ability, so she leaves all the English to me. The other teacher loves English and uses a lot of English herself in the class. Out of the two classes, the students of the teacher who doesn't use much English seem to have better pronunciation, because the only English they are hearing is what they are hearing from me.

Anyway, in my 7th and 8th grade classes, one activity I've been doing is using word trees to help the students be able to hear and say the difference between words of minimal pairs (such as "rake" and "lake"). Also, syllables are thought of differently in Japanese than they are in English. For example, the one syllable English word "next" becomes the four syllable "ne-ku-su-to" when spoken with a Japanese pronunciation. To get the students to correctly think of syllables in English, I've started doing syllable counting activities where students listen to me say a list of words and count the number of syllables in each one.

The other area I think is lacking in the regular English classes is that there is little to no effort put into correcting common misconceptions about English, perhaps partially because many English teachers hold the same misconceptions. In Japan, it's considered really cool and modern to use English words in your Japanese. But since most people doing this don't actually know English very well, the meanings of the words tend to take on completely new meanings which people assume are the same meanings they have in real English. For example, in Japanese English "reform" means "remodeling." Also, words borrowed from languages other than English are assumed to be English. For example, many Japanese people (including many English teachers) think that non-English words such as the German "thema" ("theme") are English. Even the word "chakku" (meaning "zipper"), which is a native Japanese word, is assumed to be English. Lately I've been making my own activities to correct these misconceptions.

The one thing that I really don't like about teaching at the junior high school though is the current 9th grade. For the most part, they just make fun of me and don't listen to anything I say, and the teachers don't do all that much about it. I can't wait for those kids to graduate.

In other news, I just found out that this summer, two new ALTs will be taking Hunter's place, so from this fall on, I won't be teaching elementary school classes anymore. On one hand, I think I will miss the energetically eager students, but on the other hand, my job will be less tiring. Right now, my Fridays are murder. I have three 9th grades in the morning, which are stressful for the reasons I mentioned above, and in the afternoon I have two elementary classes, which have a positive atmosphere, but are pretty draining for me because of all the energy the students have.