Showa Women's University (I)

Our project didn't begin properly until October, by which time we had comfortably settled in to life in the city and worked out some knowledge of the unnecessarily complicated train system. As of that month, the semester began for the university students which presented us with the opportunity to meet new people our own age and begin working with our new responsibilities.

Unlike many of the projects you'll hear of from Project Trust volunteers, ours is unusual in the way that we're in such a large city, and Showa Women's University holds international prestige. A private institution, it is known across all of Japan, and students come here from many different neighboring countries to study (I've made friends from Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Vietnam, India, Poland, and Australia). The students - both at the university and its associated schools - are very normal people from very normal backgrounds. However, if you get to know them (just like anyone you will meet) they showcase a fantastic array of talents; I have found teaching to be a wonderful symbiosis of me teaching my students and my students teaching me. Upon our arrival in Japan, we were met at Haneda Airport by a group of select Showa students who helped to show us around the city, and we've been close friends ever since (they even got me a cake for my birthday!) Future volunteers, count yourself as extremely lucky; working with the students at Showa is easily one of the best parts of living here.

One of these new responsibilities at the university has been to arrange two half an hour English sessions per week. These can be on any topic we like and are entirely at our creative control, yet should be fun as attendance is voluntary; participants should not feel like they are in a standard English class. I've gone as far as creating my own Hogwarts Sorting Hat game to meet the students' demand. More than that we tend to focus on giving students a cultural exchange; western culture is often met with awe and enthusiasm as everything is so wildly different in Japan. Another reason this is enjoyed is because the majority of participants are in their first year preparing to move to Showa's Foreign Exchange Campus in Boston for their second; they're as excited to learn about the Western World as we are about the East.

"I'm interested in other countries' culture, so the English Lounge was fun for me because I could know a lot about other countries (I really liked the Christmas one when we looked at the John Lewis adverts!) I also really love Liz and Teiba." (Yuino Keta, English and Communications Student, that last bit are her words not mine, honestly).

Most of the work my partner and I do here is as an assistant language teacher in the elementary classes. Honestly, I wasn't sure about this at first as most TESOL projects allow volunteers the opportunity to host their own classes. The classroom teachers present a role for us to play which can vary greatly in significance from one lesson to another. I think though, as an ALT, it's important to understand where you are needed and choose what role you personally want to play in the classroom. For me, my purpose came with the realisation that the class sizes are too big for the main teacher to be fully conscious of how each individual student is performing. 

As there are up to forty students in each forty minute class, the teacher usually presents their lesson at the front of the room as they have prepared it, leaving the students the responsibility of choosing whether or not to learn. As effective a tactic as this is for the majority, there are so many more complications with those who don't understand, those that would understand but consistently find themselves distracted, and the disruptive individuals who tend to be doing the distracting. I've definitely noticed the difference my presence as an ALT can make in these situations.

For example, there is one young lad in the third grade called Kyodo-kun who loves to be mischievous. He'd never do any of the work, enjoyed shouting, often refused to bow in and out of lessons (an important practice symbolising mutual respect between student and teacher) and distracted anyone within a three chair radius. Customarily, the classroom teacher would do nothing about this until the end of the lesson, after which they would take him aside and exchange words hoping next time he'll be better behaved. In these lessons, I took it upon myself to begin observing his behaviour and talking to him to try and develop an understanding of him as a person. 

Whereas most students sit upright and do all of their work quietly, Kyodo adores attention and is incredibly fidgety. His pencils are chewed down to the lead and he cannot concentrate when sat still at a desk. His notebook is completely empty but he keeps a plethora of small colourful drawings in his pencil case and takes great pride in them. I began working more closely with him. Forming a closer relationship with him by simply talking to him about his interests meant that he began to listen to me and appreciated the help I could offer. I encouraged Kyodo to enjoy taking notes by using his coloured pencils to include appropriate illustrations, and requested to the classroom teacher to increase the number of kinaesthetic learning activities in lesson plans. These small steps can make a massive difference to the education received by individual students and cannot be undervalued. He's still cheeky and loves attention, but now, whenever you ask Kyodo-kun a question on the work, he next to always knows the answer. Like the others he is exceptionally bright; his work thrives on receiving the right praise, and that's where I come in.

(part I, because there's so much to be said but if I don't publish this now it might not get published until May).