My Speech

I guess this falls under the catagory of "because it's my blog and I can."

This is a model speech I had to give to my speech class to give them idea of what a good speech should be. The Japanese teacher suggested I write about my experience in Japanese schools. I figured since I went through the trouble of writing it, I might as well post it.

It is incredibly simple English because it had to be understood by 9th grade Japanese students. I also did my best to hide my criticisms by saying, "isn't such and such really interesting?"

Anyway, it's not a great speech, so I'm not going to waste a lot of space introducing it or apologizing for it. Without further ado...

Japanese Schools and Me
Long, long ago, when I was a junior high school student, we often heard about Japanese schools. “In Japan, the students study very hard,” our teachers told us. “They even study on Saturday and Sunday.” I couldn’t believe it. I wanted to come to Japan to see for myself.

Japanese schools are very different from American schools. For example, most schools in America do not have school uniforms. I thought uniforms were bad because they made everyone look the same. I thought Japanese students would hate school uniforms. But many Japanese students say that they like their uniform because they don’t have to choose their clothing every day. I never thought about this before. Maybe uniforms are good.

The only thing I don’t understand is why the school uniforms look like sailors uniforms. Students are not in the navy, but they are in school. So why do they dress like sailors? I don’t understand it.

Japanese students do spend a lot of time in school. But I was surprised to learn that not all of this time is spent studying. For example, there are a lot of school meetings in the gym. In the fall the students spend a lot of time practicing for the sports festival. They also practice for the chorus festival.

Greetings, or aisatsu are very important for the Japanese people. Every class must start and finish with the right aisatsu. In the gymnasium, the students spend a lot of time practicing their aisatsu for special events like graduation or sports festival. I was very surprised. In America, we only study school subjects. But in Japanese schools, they spend so much time learning Japanese manners.

So, when I go back to America, I will tell my old teachers, “Yes, it is true. Japanese students do spend a lot of time in school. But they are not studying school subjects all the time. They are practicing aisatsu, and having class meetings, and learning how to be Japanese.”

Japanese schools are very interesting for me. I hope to teach everyone about Japanese schools when I go home.