5 December 2003 (10 Kislev 5764)
In my opinion the best way to improve your teaching is to have other teachers observe your class and receive comments from them. For some unknown reasons that must be related to the very essence of Japanese society, however, this seems to be a kind of taboo in Japanese universities; you are not supposed to visit your colleagues' classes, which some may consider as infringement of their "territorial" rights. Even before you are employed as a teacher, whether full-time or part-time, you are never asked to demonstrate your teaching in front of the interviewers or send them a recorded sample of your teaching, except in very rare cases.
I believe that under such circumstances the second best thing is to have your teaching evaluated anonymously by your students. Anonymity is very important, for otherwise students will hesitate to write what they really think. Although this is almost universally implemented now in Japanese universities, there were fierce oppositions from certain teachers when it was first introduced; even now I hear some teachers complain about it. One of the claims they make criticizing it is that students are not mature enough to evaluate them. Judging from the kind of comments I have received, whether positive or negative, in the past several years since this system was first introduced, however, I can say that the majority of them, at least in the universities where I have been teaching, are mature enough to evaluate us teachers.
I am rereading what my students wrote anonymously about my courses in English. I am aware that my highly interactive method of teaching may not be for everyone, especially for those who hate interaction. I am all the more happier to find positive comments about my teaching from more students than I expected. Every year I start my courses with fear that most or all of the students have some serious deficiency in communicating with others because of their fixed facial expressions. Although a few of them turn out to be deficient in this respect, it is always a pleasure for me too to find that as I try to make the atmosphere cozy with a lot of spontaneous jokes, many of them start feeling comfortable enough to show emotions in class, including laughter, and seem to be finding pleasure in communication.
This confirms my conviction that essentially every human being has an instinctive desire to communicate with others. The problem with the majority of students in Japan is that they have never been taught how to communicate, nor have seen anyone who is really enjoying verbal communication. The fact that this instinctive desire of theirs is dormant and not realized does not mean that it does not exist nor have disappeared. In recent years it has become one of my goals in teaching in Japanese universities to help my students realize the pleasure of verbal interaction. Once they have (re)activated their dormant instinct, they need no teachers to go further.
12 December 2003 (17 Kislev 5764)
"Recycling" the same thing in teaching, not from ready-made materials as they are in publicly available textbooks but from custom-made materials culled from different sources, can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it saves you a lot of time to prepare something new again, and you are more or less familiar with the organization and details of the material included there. On the other hand, however, overconfidence in your familiarity with the material, especially if a long time has passed since you originally prepared it, can lead to a fiasco in the classroom.
I experienced such a fiasco this week in one of the courses I teach. Since I had used the same material three or four times before, I seemed to have too much confidence in myself. Partly because I was too busy, which cannot of course be an excuse, I did not even go through the material before the lesson. It turned out that I was too optimistic to believe that I could successfully teach the same material under this different condition.
The result was the worst disaster I had caused to myself in the classroom in the past several years. I simply ran out of words in the middle of speaking, and had to keep silent for several minutes looking for words. I could not even look at my students as I always do in my interactive style of teaching. When I managed to get over the sudden loss of words and finish the lesson, I suddenly felt unsurmountable fatigue, both physical and mental.
19 December 2003 (26 Kislev 5764)
I may be too sensitive not only as a teacher but also as a human being in general and take everything too seriously. I often get angry with myself as I am easily influenced for the worse by my own mistakes. It took me several days to overcome the physical and mental fatigue resulting from the fiasco I had in the classroom last week.
As the day of this course drew near, I thought I would have to be prepared to find no student in the next lesson. Before opening the door of the classroom this week, I became quite nervous. To my great relief, I found more or less the same number of students. Having learned a lesson from the mistake I made last week, I went through the material which was also used before in other courses. I managed to avoid repeating the same fiasco and restore my style of interactive teaching, though somewhat timidly.
That day happened to be the day when my students were supposed to evaluate my course. I may be too pessimistic, but naturally I expected some mention of my fiasco, which might be fresh in their memory. This time I was wrong. Their comments were quite positive as a whole, though there were of course requests for some minor improvements. As in the other courses in the other universities I also received generally positive feedback on my interactive teaching. This has strengthened my conviction that although students in Japan are said to be inactive in the classroom, most of them can enjoy interaction. This has also confirmed me that it is mostly up to us teachers to make an appropriate atmosphere that will enable students to express their opinions freely in the classroom. Criticizing students unilaterally must be a sure sign of a bad teacher.
26 December 2003 (1 Tevet 5764)
I arrived in Akita this morning to spend my winter vacation at my parents'. On my first day here I already see again clearly how difficult it is to live here or probably in any other small town in Japan in general as an individualist as one is not allowed to be different from others or do something that has no precedent. I remember suffering in my childhood for violating these taboos. I fear that if I should live here, I would probably be ostracized in a short period of time as I often violate these taboos more severely and do not consider this a bad thing.
There are, of course, good things here, too. I like the fact that people know and help each other in the same town. I am often surprised that even after spending more than twenty years away from here and growing a beard and a mustache, there are still many people who can immediately recognize and greet me on the street. But this positive characteristic of knowing and helping each other can often do more harm than good to the inhabitants.
Except among family members, close relatives and friends, mutual help can take the shape of a fossilized ritual, thus of social obligation that one has to do even again one's will and often ceases to be helpful to anyone, including those who are "helped". This is especially the case with various ceremonial occasions of life. I have heard many people, including my parents, complain about certain negative aspects of these fossilized rituals that might have made contributed to people's happiness but make few happy now. But anyone who openly claims the abolition of these rituals will be ostracized, so if one wants or has to live peacefully here, one is forced, or at least pretends, to follow them.