Elementary School English Clubs (and me)
At the elementary school, I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the “English Club” I teach on Tuesdays. This is not to be confused with the elective English class I teach at the Junior High School. In fact the elective class at the JHS has been going very well. We’ve been doing a lot of interesting things in that class. For instance, the students wanted to study English music, so I brought in the new albums by “Eminem” and “The Beastie Boys” and we discussed the anti-war themes in the lyrics. More recently we started a pen-pal exchange with a class in Israel (see one of the previous posts).
But at the elementary school club, things have not been going well.

I was excited when I first found out I would be teaching an English club at the elementary school, because at the elementary level I meet the kids so seldom that it is difficult to make any progress. Since the club meets every week, I thought I might actually be able to get somewhere with these kids. So I prepared a lot of lessons that I thought would really challenge them.

They hated it. I guess that was my own mistake. They didn’t want to study, it was club time. Clubs are supposed to be fun.

So then I started doing lessons that were mostly just active games with some English vocabulary inserted. I have a whole bunch of these games up my sleeve from my time at Ajimu. At Ajimu elementary, I used to play these games in the gymnasium. I don’t have access to a gym now (the Taiko (Japanese drumming) club is using it), but we do have an atrium upstairs where we can do some active games.

The kids hated that as well. Part of the problem is that the students are all 5th and 6th graders, and, all female except for two. And female 5th and 6th grade students is a difficult group to work with. They don’t want to study. They feel that the games are childish. And as soon as the lesson starts they get into little groups and start complaining about me. They give me death glares whenever I ask them to do anything. And they’re terribly cliquish. If we do any games, making teams is a huge headache because putting them in a separate group from their friends, even for a half hour, is a big deal. And there are always certain students they will or will not talk to.

I’m exaggerating somewhat, because only about half the class is like this. But it’s always the troublesome half of the class that draws your attention. I really don’t know what to do with them anymore. More and more I’ve been visualizing myself strangling some of them. I asked them what they wanted to study and they said my predecessor used to have cooking classes with American food, do parties, and give them American candy.

Cooking classes is obviously out. I mean can you imagine me teaching cooking? Especially to a group of 5th and 6th grade girls?

We did do a Christmas party. I taught them about a white Elephant gift exchange, and then provided gifts for everyone to choose from. I even brought chocolate for them. Technically chocolate purchased in Japan, but American brands. And that lesson went really well. But I told them we can’t do parties every week. And the next class it was right back to the drawing board.

The school year will be finishing soon, so this week the current fourth grade students were previewing all the clubs to decide which one they wanted to join. There was a question time for the fourth graders. “Why don’t you ask him why this club is so boring?” one of my 5th grade students suggested.

Fortunately only one more month to go, and then I get a new group of students in the English club. Although whether that will be an improvement or not remains to be seen.