Summer [School?]

It's the first day of summer break, and here I am sitting at my desk in the staffroom. Not because there's an influx of work to be done, but simply because I work for the government and must earn my salary by being here during the breaks. It's not so bad, though. Hopefully it'll push me to productivity more so than would sitting around for a month at home. And this room is air conditioned, which makes it a win-win on all sides! Coming home to my 5th floor apartment each day is like walking into a blanket of hot air, so I'll take all the cool I can get.

In the morning I spent some time looking over the summer plan. I'll have the next month worth of days to fill. There are a good deal of lessons I can work ahead on, show this new ALT around the school, go to an English Teacher's Conference, study Japanese, and write! There are so many avenues for that last one that I'm not sure where to begin. There's my diary, journal, letters, blog, and maybe playing with different writing prompts to spice things up.

This afternoon some students invited me and Thomas to eat lunch with them in their classroom. "Wait, why are the students at school over break?" you might ask. But do you even have to? It's Japan. They live here! Everyone has three 90 minute periods each day this week because 11 months of school each year isn't enough.

Granted, not all of those many days are spent in constant, hard studying. There are so many half days where the students leave around noon that you could probably add another month of summer vacation if they were condensed. Even when at school, there are plenty of assemblies to remind them of bike safety once again, or prep days for the culture / sports festival, and, you guessed it, ceremonies.

Although there is plenty of studying that goes on at school (and outside of it, mind you), Japanese schools have another function. They teach the students how to fit into the society and be good citizens. Students learn a group mentality by staying with the same 40 peers for 3 years of junior high, and another 40 for the next 3 of high school. They learn to all work together at sports day so their class can win. They fill out daily logs on studying and sleeping habits to have a good life. Counseling is given as much importance as classes to help them onto the right track for college. Sometimes it seems like the school is more influential on them than the family unit. They certainly spend more time here. When there is a typhoon, the homeroom teacher has to call each of their students to make sure they got home alright. And the parents often leave all the disciplining up to teachers.

So, school is a lot different here than in the US. I've gotta say that Japan certainly has a fair many good points. But when I think back to those 3 months of nothing but pure summer vacation, I think I got a good deal.