Interesting Topics in the Classroom

Most of the time I’m in the classroom, I spend the time just to the students out of a textbook, and feeling my brain cells gradually wither away from disuse.

Occasionally I get the opportunity to talk about American culture and politics. It’s rare, but I really relish the opportunity when it happens. For example last year during the election I was asked to talk about American politics a couple times (which I wrote about here and here).

In the 9th grade English class we are currently reading about Martin Luther King Jr. But despite the interesting subject material, the Japanese teacher actually devotes very little time to discussing it. Instead the textbook passage is used solely to illustrate the target grammar for the unit. It so happens that the subject of the passage is Martin Luther King, but it might as well be about Australian Rules Football. The grammar is usually the only thing we talk about.

Last year when doing this same lesson, the teacher asked me if I would say a few words to the class about Martin Luther King and racism in America. Being a history geek, I was very excited by this, and immediately started drafting notes on subjects such as the origins of racism, slave trade in America, the rise of slavery in the south because of the Agrarian society, the civil war, the ku klux klan and Southern lynchings, Emmitt Till, King’s philosophy of non-violence and the conflicts between SNCC and SCLC.

Obviously I went a little overboard, but I was convinced that using my Japanese as well as my English I could convey all this to the students. However when the time for the class actually came, the Japanese teacher talked about grammar for almost the whole class. Then with two minutes before the bell the teacher said to me, “now, could you tell the students a little bit about Martin Luther King?”

All I really had time to say was, “Yeah, Martin Luther King was a great guy. We like him a lot in America.” And then the bell rang.

Because of the yearly teacher transfers, I’m working under a different Japanese teacher this year and she’s given me good 20 minute blocks to talk to the class about King. And I’ve really enjoyed that. The students, being typically Japanese, do not ask questions or interact in any way, but they do listen, and put up amazingly well with my accented stuttering Japanese.

The students also wrote English essays on the topic of Martin Luther King, which I was given the job of proofreading and correcting. Most of them went something like this:
“I can’t forgive white people for their cruelty. In Japan we don’t have discrimination, so white people should stop it.”

Depending on how you look at it, Japan is arguable the most racist country in the world because of their perceived connection between ethnicity and national identity. For example, the descendents of Korean slave labors, imported to Japan during the war, are not allowed Japanese citizenship despite having been born and raised in Japan. Many of them have never left Japan in their lives, and don’t speak a word of Korean, but they are not Japanese citizens and if they travel must do so on a Korean passport.

Even a half Japanese child is not granted citizenship unless the Japanese parent acknowledges the child before birth.

The immigration policy is racist as well, because it allows in day laborers of Japanese descent only from Peru and Brazil.

And of course this is to say nothing of the Burakumin, the occasional violence against students attending Korean schools in Japan, and Japan’s racist colonial past in China and Korea, The Rape of Nanking, Yasukuni Shrine et cetera.

Despite all the bitching I do on this weblog, I usually make it a point not to criticize Japan to Japanese people. I don’t think people react well to outside criticism. If I want to talk about social problems I talk about problems in the United States instead. But when I saw all these compositions claiming that Japan has no racism and white people can’t be forgiven, I couldn’t hold myself back and wrote some replies to the students asking them about Koreans and Burakumin.

(But I do of course realize these are only 9th grade students, and their grasp of social issues is still developing.)

Link of the Day
I've really been enjoying Phil's weblog lately. He's got a nice writing style which makes it a pleasure to read even when he's talking about nothing. If you're not checking it regularly, you're missing out.

In particular I liked this entry:

When I first decided I wanted to be a writer, I argued endlessly (and predictably) with my parents about what's appropriate to describe: Should characters be depicted in the act of cussing? violence? sex? Since I was raised fundamentalist I actually felt like I had to expend energy defending the position that not every character in a work of fiction needs to talk and act like a nun. People who don't grow up fundamentalist don't have to waste their time on such a stupid question, though there are parallel types of censoriousness that turn up among other groups--people who don't want kids to read anything frightening, Marxists who seem to want us to confine our reading to Louis Althusser, people who want Huck Finn removed from the school library, etc.

I write only as a hobby, but I've experienced the same delimma growing up. When I was younger I used to make up my own swear words to avoid this problem, before eventually deciding that it is silly to assign any moral equivalency to words.