Bizarre Teaching Moment #12: Skirting the Issue

~The last couple of weeks have been a little sad for me, because it's the end of the school term and I've had to say goodbye to some of my students. Fortunately, since I'll be here three weeks into the new term, it isn't nearly as hard-hitting for me as it is for most of the teachers, who suddenly leave all of their students at once. The only ones I've had to say goodbye to are those who haven't renewed their contracts, for one reason or another.

Today's Bizarre Teaching Moment comes courtesy of one such student, a high school girl who is graduating and will be attending a university (and is hence unable to continue English lessons here in Nagaoka). She's the girl who won the prefectural speech contest a few months ago, and our lessons have always been great fun. Today, for our last lesson, we worked with adverbs, such as how to change an adjective (like "happy") into an adverb ("happily") and use it in a sentence.

We were playing a game where you select an action card and draw an adverb card, and act out the action modified by the adverb. The other person has to guess the adverb being used; for example, "You are studying nervously!" One of the adverbs she used was violently, and I asked her if she ever did anything violently. She thought about it, then said no, but added that yesterday her father had slammed a car door shut violently after they had argued.

What, I asked, had they argued about? It turns out that her father had noticed that the skirt his daughter was wearing with her school uniform was shorter than it's supposed to be. The dress code at Japanese schools is notorious for making girls wear short skirts, and many of them take it literally as far as they can. Considering Japan's male-dominated culture, I can see why this policy remains "popular" and unlikely to change anytime soon. On the other hand, when I saw high-school girls wearing short skirts in the middle of winter, it always looked to me like they were freezing cold. Oh, the sacrifices people will make to keep up appearances...

As for my student, she was amazed when I informed her that in most American public schools, there are no uniforms. She was also shocked that American girls are allowed to wear earrings; in Japan, schools don't allow students to have piercings of any kind and severely restrict what, if any, jewelery can be worn.

Girls, consider yourselves lucky that most of you didn't go to a school with this kind of dress code. Guys, consider yourselves deprived that most of you didn't go to a school with this kind of dress code. ~Oyasumi!