From: Thomas Seay Subject: Re: In Japan, classrooms collapse
>
> Charles,
> I found this article to be very interesting. Could
> you tell us what you make of the situation?
I think a lot of it really is attributable to reconceptualization of existing school problems and greater honesty in reporting what goes on at schools. For years 'ijime' was reported as the dominant problem. 'Ijime' gets translated most often as 'bullying' but it could even refer to rather mild teasing from other students. Still, there seems to be an 'ijime' system at some schools, similar to a basic training unit in the military, where a teacher (like the drill sergeant) manipulates certain dominant students into then manipulating the other students. This might result even in violent incidents if some students refuse to cooperate with the system of domination and the bullies use violence to clamp down (often the violence takes place away from school). Again, this is much like basic training in the military (at least as I experienced it--see the first hour of Full Metal Jacket).
It would seem that now teachers find themselves the victims of 'ijime', though it might be the case that the teachers who are now the victims didn't themselves use the 'ijime' system of manipulation and domination that I described above.
Twelve years ago I taught at a vocational high school and you could say the entire school had collapsed. From what I heard, this was typical of mostly male vocational high schools everywhere. It only became a nationally recognized problem, though, when it moved downward in age into the junior highs and elementary schools, and over into the academic senior high schools. Some teachers liked working at those vocational high schools because they didn't have to teach so many extra classes and could leave at 5 in the afternoon (at junior highs and at academic senior highs, many teachers stay late, even on Saturdays, and work over vacations).
Also, university classes can look fairly 'collapsed' at times. The ministry of education wants the conduct of university classes to become more serious in teaching and evaluation, but they sure didn't take that up with a lot of the students, who had heard from older brothers and sisters what a blast university life was.
I don't use much discipline in teaching university classes. If I lose my temper what students will remember is a foreigner got angry but they couldn't understand why. I find the serious, capable students and direct my teaching at them (but without better placement based on aptitude, ability, and prior education, it's impossible to avoid getting not so serious or not so capable students).
Here, by the way, is how a colleague and I reported 'classroom collapse' over a year ago to 'American Language Review' This is really from an earlier draft. Excerpt follows:
Classroom Collapse Charles Jannuzi and Bern Mulvey Fukui University, Japan
At some Japanese schools students have rebelled against their teachers to the point that further instruction has become impossible. Called "gakkyuu houkai" in Japanese, "classroom collapse" is coming to be seen as a crisis of nationwide proportions cutting across socioeconomic lines. Experts think classroom collapse is a separate problem from truancy, disobedience, bullying and violent misbehavior. Nevertheless, since the statistics on these traditional problems have generally trended upward in the past decade, it is tempting to correlate classroom collapse with the apparent increase in these entrenched problems. Still, since traditional problems have often been thought of as individual cases and isolated incidents, "gakkyuu houkai" refers to something more: the sudden refusal of an entire class to obey its teacher.
"As a national characteristic," explains Dr. Kiyotaka Tachi, former head of the Cross-Cultural Studies Program at Fukui University, "we Japanese tend to be group-orientated. 'Gakkyuu houkai' is but a manifestation of this, albeit a negative one. Typically, a few dominant students in a class will decide, for whatever reason, that they dislike a particular teacher. Suddenly, because of peer-pressure, everyone feels they must dislike that teacher. What is more, they [all] ignore or even attack that teacher. And because of the shame involved, not to mention the lack of a peer-support network at many schools, the teacher doesn't know where to turn."
The concept has entered the public discussion of schools and what is wrong with them. One teacher tells about trying to get his students to do the traditional greeting (where students stand up and bow) at the start of classes, only to be told, "Shut up" or "Who do you think you are talking to us like that?" Another relates a more shocking tale of a female colleague dragged outside and tied upside down to a fence! A public junior high teacher in a rural area of southern Japan says, "The last school I was assigned to was the worst. It wasn't classroom collapse. It was school collapse. And no matter how bad things got, the staff didn't communicate among themselves to try and solve the problems. Instead we went to school each day and pretended it wasn't happening."
Even if the problem is now being discussed, solutions are not so apparent. "As things stand now, there's just not much one can do [when a class collapses]," says one education professor (who requested anonymity). "You can't kick out students for academic or disciplinary reasons in primary or middle school in Japan. Even in high schools [where students can be expelled], if you were to try to kick them out for disciplinary reasons, the school's reputation would suffer. People would say that the school's teachers could not control their students. Hence, no one takes action, and most teachers are unwilling to talk about it, especially with other teachers at the same school. Students know this and take advantage."
Japanese teachers in public schools have been the main victims, but that does not mean that instructors from overseas assigned to teach subjects like EFL will never experience the problem. Programs like the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme bring thousands of Assistant Language Teachers (ALTs) to work in junior and senior high schools all over the country. ALTs may find themselves team teaching with a teacher whose classroom has collapsed. One ALT with ten years experience teaching at secondary schools in Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe says "there are at least two things different about the problems now: (1) they aren't just limited to working class schools and (2) they seem to have spread to lower and lower age levels."
-------- Posted by Charles Jannuzi