The Life of My Students

Writing these types of blog entries is far more interesting that writing the ones about me.  Anyway, it’s about time I talk about the daily life of my students and my fellow teachers so that you can better understand the type of life I have here.  

The problem with writing this is that I don’t really remember my life as a middle school student too well.  This is partly because my middle school experience melts together with my grade school one.  I went to a Catholic elementary school, grades K-8, and I entered it in the 3rd grade.  Therefore, from 3rd grade to 8th, I was in the same building with the same group of classmates.  My mom was a 6th grade teacher at the school, so everyday I came to school early with her,  helped her set up her classroom while the other students socialized outside, and stayed late after school while she had meetings and such.  Ok, enough about me.  The point is that the middle school years of 6-8th grade were not that distinct from my grade school ones, other than the fact that the classrooms and the teachers were different.  Here in Japan, however, middle school is taken quite seriously as a separate experience from elementary and high school.   

So, the daily life of my middle schoolers.  I’ve never walked in my students shoes before, but I’ve seen enough to understand what it must be like. 

A good estimate would be that most of my students get up around 6 AM, maybe a little later or earlier depending on how far away they live.  If they live in the same village as the middle school, they must walk to school, rain, snow, or shine, with their backpacks (they have two) and gym bags weighing them down like pack-mules.  Only if they live in a part of the village REALLY far away from the middle school can they ride bikes to school, and I think means only one of my students.  The students from the other villages walk to the nearest bus stop and hop on a school bus; it is not yellow and looks like a coach bus.  

All the students arrive around 7:50.  On most days, there are teachers and some student council members lined up outside of school waiting to greet them.  The students all stop and bow towards the school before they walk on to the school grounds.  They then go to the students' entrance where they take of their outside shoes and put on their inside shoes.  

From the time they arrive until 8:40, they have independent study time and a short, 10 minute period of instruction by their homeroom teacher.  The morning’s study is often regulated by a schedule, with time spent writing in a journal one day, reading a book the next day, taking a quiz the next, etc.  

Starting at 8:40, they have four 50 minute periods with 10 minute breaks in between.  They do not change classroom unless they have gym, shop, computer, or music class.  After a student comes to the faculty room to ask the teacher for the next class what is needed, the teacher comes from the faculty room, bringing all their materials with them, and arrives in class as the students take their seats.  The students stand up, bow, and request the teacher to begin teaching.  Class ends with the same custom, with the students saying “Thank you.”   In our English classes, of course, things are different.  The students stay seated, say “Hello Ms. Kaneko and Mr. Erik,” and then we ask “How are you?”  and such.  

Come lunch time, half the students put on masks, aprons, and hair nets and walk to the lunch center next to the school where all the school lunches are made.  They carry the food back in big pails and tins, along with baskets containing all the dishes and chopsticks.  In their classroom, they setup a line and start dishing out the food and setting up the trays and plates on each student's desk.  When everything is ready, the rest of the students (who have been reading in the nearby classroom) come in and lunch begins.  The students all put their hands together and say “I (humbly) receive,”  a Japanese custom before eating a meal.  When lunch is finished, they say “It was a feast,” clean up, and haul everything back to the lunch center.  

Next is a 40 minute lunch break!  Recess! Yeah!  Well, at least sometimes they go out and play.  The baseball team usually goes out and does a little bit of practice, but sometimes all the students decide beforehand to play a game in the gym or outside on the field.   Other times is seems like everyone stays inside and catches up on homework or just screws around.

When break is over, it’s time to clean the school!  Yes, that’s right, everyday the entire school, teachers included, stops what they are doing, breaks out cleaning rags, brooms, rakes, and vacuums, and cleans the school.  They clean the bathrooms, scrub the floors, clean the windows, sweep the grounds around the school, rake up dead leaves, water the flowers, and gather up the trash.  There is no school janitor.  This continues on for 15 minutes.  At 2:10, the last two class periods of the day start.  

After a last 10 minute period of instruction (like the one in the morning), the students get ready to go home, have a school wide 1 minute period of silence (to reflect on what happened that day?), and then burst out the doors and head home, right?  Wrong.  From 4:30 to 6:30 (sometimes later in the longer days of summer), almost all of the students stay at school for club activities.  I’m sure larger schools have a very wide range of activities, but at my little country school we just have sports:  baseball, volleyball, soft tennis, and basketball.  That’s it.  Students have to choose one at the beginning of their middle school career and stick with it until the end.  Practice is quite tough, at least from what I’ve experienced working out with the baseball team.  Running a 4K, doing 300 sit ups, doing upper body workouts, doing sprints, and pushing car tires along the ground (weird but exhausting) might be one day of baseball conditioning.  

Finally, the students board the bus and go home.  Sometimes it is already pitch black outside.  The students who walk home have to have flashlights and reflective gear.  I’d estimate that most get home by 7:30.  The whole ordeal of school has taken almost 12 hours of the day, and that’s not including homework, which can take up to three hours if you are a third year student getting ready for high school entrance exams.  I’m not sure how they can concentrate on homework when they are no doubt exhausted from school and sports, and to get up the next day they probably have to go to bed quite early.  

Saturdays offer no respite, or at least, not the type of respite we expect in America.  Students still wake up early and pile on the bus, but this time they just spend the entire morning, 8:00 to 12:30, doing sports practice.  The teachers who run all of these sports clubs sometimes have to show up too, driving from their homes 40 minutes away just to show up to practice on Saturday morning.  Basically, the point is that everyone spends like 60% of their waking lives at school.

Next time, I’ll talk about what my day is like at the different schools.