7 moments from a Japanese elementary school
I’ve been teaching at my elementary for almost four months now. Let me show you seven funny, odd or thought-provoking moments of it.
1. There are boys in my classes wearing T-shirts that say babydoll. While I’m not trying to shame anyone, you surely understand why it’s sometimes difficult to keep a straight face.
2. The kids use rulers a lot. Like, a lot. For drawing tables and notebooks on the worksheets, for underlining words and, most bafflingly to me, to connect answers when the exercise is formatted into two columns. Ain’t nobody got patience for that where I’m from.
3. The Japanese language works in syllables and there’s this thing called katakana pronunciation, where tawaa is tower, souru is Seoul and harii pottaa is Harry Potter. A girl was asking me how to spell kiyui in English and after five minutes of confusion I gave up and asked the Japanese teacher. Kiwi. It’s kiwi.
4. We play gesture games where the first in line gets a word (swimming, judo, playing the piano) and has to send it, silently, to the person behind them. One day, we started with cooking, and apart from correct answers also got badminton and kendo – Japanese sword fighting.
5. Elementary schools apparently don’t really do tests in English, but we did have a few, and once some kids finished early, every single one of them pulled out a book or a manga to read. Imagine my surprise and sheer delight.
6. We were writing about summer holidays and one boy had I slayed Hiroshima as his thing-I-did. He meant I stayed in Hiroshima, but the first version is admittedly much cooler and it took a lot of self-persuasion before I corrected him.
7. My last name isn’t easy, but my favourite attempt so far is by a fifth-grade girl who made haribokuma – a Harribo bear – out of Hrivnacova. I’m down.
I’m finishing here, but do check in some other day – maybe I’ll have a new stash of moments.












