Bullying

Please tell me about your experiences (or I’ll take your lunch money)

(La version francaise est ICI)

Bullying takes many forms, from the big kid punching the smaller kid for his lunch money to the 13 years old girl sending anonymous hate mails to her unpopular classmate. In both cases, it can have devastating effects on the victims (and actually on the bully as well).

I know that bullying is a big problem in Japan that is sometimes accentuated by a culture of “don’t ask, don’t tell”. I also know that many suicides are related to bullying here. What I don’t know is “how” it is happening. What form it is taking. I have not witnessed any bullying first hand in Japan (and I hope I won’t) but I know other JETs have. I want to hear about you.

It seems that the most frustrating thing is that JETs (and teachers, for that matter) can’t do anything about it. The bullies appear to get away with it without facing any consequences. A teacher was telling me that a bully can’t be expelled or suspended from a school because he has a right to be educated (I think the school is actually missing a very important opportunity to educate that kid). So instead, the victim is the one trying to avoid school. The kid wants to stay home but he/she gets in trouble for doing so. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but is the bully really facing no consequences at all while the victim is forced back in the lions cage without any support?

It would also seem that parents of victims will sometimes try to hide that their kid is being bullied because it is a shameful thing. So they would definitely not try to push the matter with the school to find solutions.
On the other hand, I also heard that some parents might go talk to the school’s administration about a dispute between two “friends” instead of trying to deal directly with the other kid and his parents. Making the problem bigger than necessary by doing so.
Which scenario is more likely? Does it depend on the school? On the region? Did you observe any of this?

Back in Canada, I didn’t spend a lot of time teaching in big high schools so I haven’t witnessed much physical bullying. I think the kids are now more inclined to act against and condemn bullying. The “third player” is fulfilling it’s role more and more. (There is the bully, the victim and the 3rd player is the “witness”. If he is a silent witness, he is actually encouraging and supporting the bully, I think this is mostly what happens in Japan; leaving the victim isolated and without support. If the witness speaks out and affirms that he does not approve of the bullying, the bully is now the one being isolated and maybe thinking about changing its ways.)

The problem that I witnessed in Canada was actually young girls having psychological warfare with each other. It often turned out to be 2, 3 or more girls against one who was singled out as different or not as “cool”. At first, the lonely soldier tries to fight back but as the war becomes more intense and the big weapons come out (anonymous hate mails, starting atrocious rumours, getting more and more people to “hate” her…) she ends up needing a lot of support from adults. Luckily, I didn’t see this too often but it did happen.

In Canada, every school as a social worker or another professional who helps students work out these situations. As far as I know, there is no equivalent in Japan. Is there?

I would really like to know more about your experiences with bullying (in Japan or anywhere else). Please tell me in the comments below, or you can email me (jddinjapan@gmail.com) if you don’t want to make your story public.

My next move will be to look into the situation of England. I think they had a big anti-bullying campaign some years ago. I’ll update this post if I find anything interesting.

Snow Days and the Fight Club Equation

(La version francaise est ICI)


When I looked out the window last week, I saw something magnificent: Snow! Ok, it wasn’t everywhere on the ground and only in the many tall mountains surrounding Urasa but still, this is visible snow in October. Even for Quebec City, it’s a rare occurrence.

First snow of the season

Of course, with it came the cold. Last week as been surprisingly chilly compared to all my previous experience with Japanese weather (it will actually be my first winter in Japan).  I’m not too worried about the cold though since Quebec’s coldness can probably only be matched by Siberia and Antarctica.

Seeing snow in October reminded me of a time, back when I was in high school, when they actually closed our school on the 31^st of October because of snow falls. They very rarely ended up closing the school, so this was a very exciting moment. What student doesn’t like a snow day!

Sometimes, I wondered why we didn’t get more of them. Actually, teachers like them too! Sometimes it can be a bit annoying when an important test is due soon and you are not done preparing the students for it or if you worked very hard on a lesson plan and that day was the only time when you could teach it. But most of the time, any teacher won’t complain about a snow day.

I can’t tell for sure, but I would think that school principals don’t mind them either. An extra day off from all the crazy stuff they have to deal with is probably welcomed once or twice a year.

So I still want to know why we didn’t get more snow days!

Maybe the weather itself is one of the reasons. Actual snowstorms that make transports and walking outside really dangerous just don’t happen that often. But still, there were some days where I felt like it would be easy to justify closing the school. As a matter of fact, on these days, there were often half of the class missing because the parents decided not to send their kids to school. Of course, my mom would not be one of those parents; if the school was open, I was going. That’s it.

The cities’ readiness to deal with snowstorms is a big factor in deciding if the school closes or not. In Quebec, most of the main roads would be kept in pretty good shape even in very bad weather conditions. But in Victoria… ah! …Well, to be fair, I think I saw snow only 3 times during the 4 years that I lived there. But it was still kind of funny to see the whole city shut down after a 3 centimetres snowfall.

Ultimately, it’s apparently the school bus companies that have the final word on whether they will offer service on a given day or not. If they choose not to operate on a specific day, the schools would be pretty silly to stay open for only the students who can walk to it.

So how do the bus companies actually decide to operate or not? I’m kind of picturing the guy in his office doing actuarial calculations to see what are the probabilities for a bus to crash and how much it would cost them in lawsuits versus how much money they would lose by not working on that day… kind of like in Fight Club when Edward Norton explains what his job consists of. (I hope everyone as seen Fight Club at least once!)

But do the bus companies really loose any money when there is a snow day? If not, we should really get way more snow days!

If I put my juvenile wishes aside. I do understand that it would be a bit irresponsible to call snow days every time there is a snowfall. Especially since the people that are most affected are probably the parents. If their kids can’t go to school, what are they supposed to do with them? These parents need to go to work and the kids are not all old enough to stay home by themselves all day.

That being said, it might be a good excuse for these parents to take a day off from work and spend quality time with their kids… I think many families really need that.

Tokyo Orientation and Paying For It

(La version française se trouve ici)


Any foreigner in Tokyo needs a map or something to provide orientation. It is HUGE! Just go on google map and look at how far it expands. Imagine yourself walking in there and trying to find a specific street (by the way, to add to the foreigner’s confusion, they name the city blocs and not the streets in Japan). It seems too big to be functioning but somehow, it works out.

 I guess the same thing can be said about the JET Programme: With about 36 participating countries and over 4000 JETs in Japan, it is a huge programme.  If I was to try to provide a “map” of the programme, I would  need to include three ministries (The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) and the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT)), the Council of Local Authorities for International Relations (CLAIR) and the Contracting Organisations (the boards of education and the schools actually hiring us). I would also need to include all the foreign Japanese embassies that take part in the selection process and the preparation of the new JETs.

I won’t go into the details of the roles of each one of these organisations but I think you get the picture: It’s kind of a big deal.

We could feel it at the 3 days orientation seminar at a luxury hotel in downtown Tokyo (is there anywhere in Tokyo that is “not” downtown?). Whether they wanted it or not, at some point, everybody wondered how much money was involved in all of this (the free flights, the seminars, the luxury hotel, the transportation, our salaries and, as we would find later; the things provided by our contracting organisations: for some people it might include a car, a house (!), furniture…)

View from the room

What I’m getting at is that JET is a publicly financed programme.  If I’m not mistaken, the Japanese economy, like many others, is not doing so good (I actually stumbled upon an article of the New-York Times today about that). A lot of people are looking at ways to cut down the expenses and the JET Programme is one of their target. About a month ago, I read a very interesting article from Debito Arudou about the situation of the JET Programme and why it is not meeting the expectations.

If I grossly oversimplify that article; it says that the programme costs a lot of money and that Japanese students are still not learning English. But it’s not the JETs fault, it’s the Japanese education system’s fault.

Ok… so if we can’t teach English to the students, what are we doing exactly? Why are we here? Why are they still spending so much money on this thing?

Well, the official purpose of the JET Programme (as stated in many of their official documents) is to : “Promote internationalisation and mutual understanding through foreign language education and local international exchange activities.”

Even before I left Canada, I’ve been told that a way to see the job was as a “cultural ambassador”. So, is this a way to justify everything or does it actually means something and has a real application? -(By the way, if you ask a question with “or” in it to a Japanese person, they’ll answer by yes or no! More on this in another blog post about language).-

I think the term “cultural ambassador” does mean something and that our presence here is not pointless: When I was teaching sciences in Canada, I realised that 95% (if not more) of what I teach will be forgotten by most of the students a year later. (How much do YOU remember from your high school science classes?) So why should we keep trying to put these facts and equations into their heads?

The point is not for them to become proficient scientists while they are in high school. The point is for them to know that these things exist and become curious about the world around them. We want to ignite some passions and get them interested (which means that the way we teach is very important). If they have that curiosity, they will pursue their learning fuelled by their own motivation and will make career choices accordingly. Anyways, the introductory classes in most college and university science programs tend to teach all the basics again to make sure everyone is at the same level.

So the point is to get the Japanese students interested and curious about foreign cultures. English is a mean to do that. If they have the spark and decide to travel abroad after high school, they will figure out a way to have functional English.

That being said, I think there are ways for us to be more than "promoters for holiday destinations" while in front of the class.

More on that later…

Purpose

(La version française de cet article se trouve ici)

I've been given an amazing opportunity to learn more about pedagogy, internationalization,language, cultural identity, different school systems, curriculums and myself (!) with a job that involves teaching English to Japanese high school students.

This blog's purpose is to share my observations with anyone who is interested in the aforementioned subjects and, hopefully, get your take on them. I'd like input from other JETs that are doing similar (or completely different) observations and from people back in Canada who want to discuss the similarities and differences of the school systems and cultures.
Please, don't hesitate to leave comments and give your point of view so we have a discussion going.

I also plan, in the next week, to do the same blog in French. I think I'll sometimes translate my posts from English to French and sometimes it'll be the other way around. (Hopefully, some day, I can also do it in Japanese! Maybe next year.) I'm guessing the writing style should be quite different whether the original post was in English or a translation from French. In either case, I definitely won't win any Pulitzer.

I think it's time to get blogging. It's already October and I have yet to start writing about everything that happened since August when the JET journey began in Tokyo...