Frustration

I wasted a beautiful spring day yesterday by spending it inside, marking homework. It was depressing. One of my classes this year is of first year students, whom I expected to be low level. They are the lowest of eight classes in a department not known for the brilliance of its students. I have been going very, very slowly, and ignoring the syllabus. If I tried to follow the syllabus they would be lost, and would stop cooperating. But unlike most low level classes, their problem is not one of attitude. It is often true that low level students are low level because they do not know how to concentrate, or have given up, and so spend class time doing anything except paying attention.

But this class is not like that. They seem to have decided to trust me, and are respectful and attentive. They want to learn. They try very, very hard, and I reward them by being very, very patient and trying to show them that English is not impossible. I can be very patient. I know how hard it is to learn a language.

The problem, though, is that they lack even the most basic skills in English. They have the sort of knowledge about English that makes them worse than beginners. They have NEGATIVE ability in English. They have learned so much wrongly that the problem is not how to teach them, but how to UNteach them everything they have learned wrongly. I wish I could tell them to forget everything their other teachers have taught them, but that would be like telling them to disrespect their other teachers. I don't think that would work, particularly coming from a foreigner.

In the homework I was marking yesterday, most of the students demonstrated that they do not understand the present simple tense. I had given them something from the workbook (the one I copied twice by mistake) which I thought at the time might be insultingly easy for them, but I was wrong, and it has reminded me that I cannot go too slowly for this class. They are completely baffled by English. They appear to use what they have learned almost randomly, as if they do not expect English to be logical or to have meaning. One of the exercises in the workbook was one in which students were supposed to write short answers to questions. Here are some examples of answers students gave:

Q: Are you from Osaka?
A: No, I don't.

Q: Is she a teacher?
A: No, she are.

About 70% of the answers were like this.

In another exercise students were supposed to fill in blanks with words provided. One sentence went like this:

Nice to ______ you, Tania.

The words they had to choose from were:

over, think, meet, too, that, am, is

When students choose think as the answer, you start to wonder if they actually understand what the words mean. This is BASIC STUFF. All these students have had English lessons at junior high school and high school, and this is their seventh year of learning English. What on earth were their teachers doing in the last six years? The other thing I wonder, when I get answers like this, is whether they were given a lot of trick questions in English exams. Nice to meet you is a formulaic expression that turns up in just about every English textbook in existence. How could they not know it? They must be choosing answers at random, because when they've given the logical answer before they've been wrong, tricked by something obscure chosen for an exam.

I can only imagine that their previous teachers must have been following the syllabus, whether or not the students understood what they had (supposedly) learned before. This makes me angry, not at the students, but at their teachers and at the system the teachers are following. What did they think they were DOING? What possible good did they think they were achieving?

And why is it continuing, even at university? When a student whose English is at this level approaches you after class and wants to know (in Japanese, of course) if you can help with some homework from another English class, and then shows you a passage from Ulysses (unabridged), which he is supposed to translate into Japanese, it makes you want to go out and strangle the criminal who is destroying any chance of that student ever getting any pleasure from learning.

But the Japanese professors who teach English will not teach basic English, at least not at this university. They are ACADEMICS, and they teach their idea of what 'academic English' is. They look down on the foreign teachers, who teach communication. We are not real academics. We are not even allowed to teach grammar classes. Grammar is an academic subject, so the Japanese professors teach that. We get the communicative classes, which they refuse to teach because communication is not 'academic.' (And besides, most of the professors are incapable of communicating in English.)

I spend a lot of time trying to teach grammar in a way that does not look like I am teaching grammar, which could get me into trouble. But then there is an additional problem of interference from their 'real' grammar classes, where the students are learning obscure 'academic' grammar constructions they do not know the meaning of, do not know how to use, and which are not taught in context. Students sometimes insert these at random into things they write or say in my classes. I am happy that they are trying to use what they learn, but unfortunately the grammar they are taught in their other classes is often literary, or obsolete. I cannot tell them to forget these things, because they need them to pass exams. Mine is only one of the three or four English classes they have a week. I am fighting an uphill battle.

The system is mad. Here we have, at this university, 60 or 70 fully qualified language teachers, and we are not trusted to teach all aspects of English because we are foreign. We are only given the communicative classes because they are second-rate (like us) and 'not academic.' We are only good for being native models of the language. We are not trusted to actually know about the language we are teaching, only to provide an example of what native English speakers sound like. We are not allowed to teach English as a whole language. We are only supposed to teach 'how to have a conversation.'

This problem is not confined to English. Last year, in one of my second year classes, a question came up in the textbook about how many languages you could count to ten in. I told one group I could count to ten in French - I remembered from my one year of French at high school. In fact, I told them confidently, I could count to TWENTY - but then I discovered that I couldn't. I had forgotten the French word for eleven. I knew one of the students was also learning French, so I asked him to remind me.

He looked embarrassed.

"We haven't done numbers yet," he told me.

He was in his second year of French and HADN'T LEARNED NUMBERS YET.

I asked him what they were doing in class, and he said they were translating paragraphs from literary texts. I asked if his professor spoke French, and he didn't know. He had yet to hear a word of French spoken. His professor was too busy being 'academic' and teaching 'academic' French, I suppose. I shouldn't have been surprised. After all, his teacher was a PROFESSOR and professors teach ACADEMIC, INTELLECTUAL things, not something as low status as actual language IN A LANGUAGE CLASS. And there are no native French-speaking teachers at that university, so the poor kid is not likely to ever learn numbers.

I should not think about these things. It makes me too angry. The students are cheated, and their natural love of learning is deliberately sabotaged. Many of the students want to learn, and they are instead demoralized into believing that foreign languages are difficult for Japanese people. I was actually TOLD this by a Japanese professor, one of the two (out of about 30) Japanese English professors who actually speaks to us part-time foreign teachers.

And that is why you hear so much cynicism in the foreign teachers' room, and why I am frequently frustrated (we all are), and why I sometimes feel such massive scorn for the Japanese professors that I have a hard time smiling politely at them when I see them, rather than sneering. When I smile and greet them - in Japanese - most of them do not respond anyway, or respond with a curt nod. I suppose this is because I am not a real academic and not worth acknowledging. I smile and greet them cheerfully anyway, no matter what. I am doing my bit for international relations. (Also, I can see it makes them feel uncomfortable.)

In case you haven't noticed yet, I am still feeling frustrated and depressed by my absurd job. But I will not mark any more homework today. That was enough for one weekend. The weather is beautiful, the scent of honeysuckle is drifting in through the window, and The Man and I are going for a bicycle ride to do some shopping. The yellow sand problem has gone (for the year, I hope) and maybe some sunshine and fresh air will make me feel better.