English Camp
Through my university here in Tokyo, I managed to score a teaching position at an English camp for Japanese high schoolers over a long weekend a few weeks ago. Naturally, I was thrilled to get a chance to be paid to spend a few days with Japanese teenagers.
Even more thrilling was that, in late October, I loaded six buses with a group of nearly 400 students, assistants and teachers, and took a five hour bus ride north, after nearly two hours of trains, to the rural Gunma prefecture (See English Camp Photo Album).
The final forty minutes of the trip, the buses muscling up the cutback roads that carved their way through the elevations caused by the lingering force of Gunma’s three famed peaks, Mount Haruna, Mt. Akagi, and Mt. Myogi, was my another splendid chance to be close to Japan’s rural arm. The colors of autumn were at their finest.
The camp itself was three days of my leading, along with some twenty other young assistants instructed by the school’s English teachers, the students of Yamato Nishi High School through games and speech contests. At the heart of the learning was supposed to be the students having the opportunity to interact and speak with native speakers: that’s me.
Yamato Nishi has the splendid privilege of receiving funds from the national government’s Education Ministry in an attempt to try new ways of teaching English. The result was that very English camp, hosted at the enormous Kogen Seminar Center of Tokai University, tucked deeply isolated in the middle of a deep rock face of Agatsuma-gun, Gunma.
With another assistant, I shared a room that was at least twenty tatami mats, large indeed. It allowed for the two of us to lie comfortably on our futons, wearing our yukatas, separated by a large coffee table, around which we sat cross-legged and sipped green tea. After the students were required to return to their rooms for nightly curfew, many of the assistants walked dark trails that led to a small stream or sat outside in the cold and laughed and told stories. In between that fun, I played geography games with a handful of new friends, four or five of us trying to name all of the U.S. state capitals or recall as many of the 54 independent African countries. Yes, I am that lame.
The English of many of the students wasn’t terribly coherent, and, I regularly admit, my Japanese is on level far below an average kindergartner, so sometimes conversation became stagnant. Still, I genuinely felt I developed a friendship with many of the students, most of whom I ate my meals with, stuffing my face with some of the best Japanese food I had had in the country.
They taught me Japanese table manners, and we tried to compare cultures. I made my students laugh, but also kept at least one group of students after one of my sessions after they didn’t meet my expectations for their collective presentation. It was all of the fun of teaching, without any of the headaches of paperwork and hassles. I was taken with how much freedom I was given, as I was left alone with ten or twelve high school students and asked to, in effect, teach them a language of 200,000 words.
I fell into only one tirade about the necessity for dreaming and pursuing those dreams, most of which was probably lost on my Japanese-speaking 15-year-old audience. I took more pictures than I could even begin to count engaged one student in a dessert-eating contest. The girls were beautiful and image-conscious, and the boys were self-searching and more hesitant to laugh at my jokes. They were, in effect, like any group of 15-year-old American children I have ever met.
How is it that I find myself into these remarkably rare and indefatigably memorable experiences? This was clearly another. I had been rereading Joseph Heller’s famed “Catch-22,” but I slept on the bus ride home as one of my young students, who had chosen to sit next to me, asked if he could try to read it. Likely, I won’t ever hear from any of these young Japanese students ever again, but that doesn’t mean their effect was lost.
Jaa mata,
Christopher
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