Page 8 - SASTA Journal 2017

6 SASTA Journal Number 02 / 2017
Day 5: How Does It Feel being an Educator in Australia? - by Tanya Riach
Wow what a trip, when I signed up to be part of the Latitude Japanese exchange, I didn’t realise how much I would learn, not only about schools in another country but also about myself. It has been a trip of many rsts with a lot of self re ection of my teaching styles thrown in for good measure.
In lieu of World Teachers’ Day, I am going to re ect on the differences of a Japanese teacher compared to an Aussie. For starters, on the surface, time spent at school.
In Australia we have the trust of our various Education Departments to
have an online medium to work from, from home. It may be marking,
lesson planning or student data. We have our long day at school which
for me as a parent of young children, get to school a little after 8 and leave a little after 4 and spend the nights working after they go to bed.
In Japan this is not the case, no student work, no of cial documents are to leave the school grounds. This is determined by the Japanese Government because of their rules about privacy.
This means that all teachers we have met arrive at school about 6:30 am and leave at 8 pm or later. In my family, my husband is also a teacher, for us, if we took those hours back to Australia family life, as we know it would be unsustainable.
School students at Government schools attend 5 days a week; however, students of the Super Science School which we visited, attend 6 days. Teachers work a rotation of 5 days and may have a week day off to replace the Saturday.
Class sizes are a lot larger with 41 being the size I have seen the most and the size I was provided to teach, where in Australia my largest class was 32 and only after being asked by the principal if I was willing to take on the extra students.
Teachers don’t have permanent tenure at a speci c school, most seem to have a maximum 7 year rotation. This I feel is both good and bad. As a teacher who has been teaching all her life in the same school, I have invested many hours of hard work into helping make the school the best it can be for our students. I know my students, I know
my community and I have not found anywhere I would rather live, they are like my extended family. To build the relationships needed to work the extreme days, it would be hard to continually leave and have to build more at each school.
The second issue that I feel is related to their cultural love of life. The teachers stated that they tried to teach the love for knowledge as a speci c idea and not as a carrier for their lessons. Approaching it as a speci c skill they teach rather than the underlying theme of the lesson as I would. For me to extend a love of teaching I would be making sure to incorporate the 5E’s allowing engagement and exploring then explaining etc.
They assess 4 main streams:
1. Attitude - interest, willingness and love of learning
2. Thinking and judgement and expression
3. Understanding
4. Knowledge - knowledge being separate from ability.
Using these streams they then teach the 4 content bases: in Elementary School - Energy, Earth, Life and Matter, in High School - Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Geology.
In the varied schools we have attended, students do not see the one teacher for science. At the regular high school, students had one teacher that taught 2 hours of chemistry then swapped to biology for the year and a second teacher that took the physics and geology.
In the Super Science School, teachers were speci c, the students studied 2 hours with the Biology teacher, 2 hours with Chemistry teacher, 2 hours with the Physics teacher and then in year 11 had the option of 2 hours private research.
I am also nding that here, and don’t get me wrong, it happens in Australia as well, that the teacher has speci c ways of teaching content, this is exactly how we learn this item and there is no deviation from the plan.
In Government schools all classrooms have the same access to the same resources. The same computers, same text, same furniture and in the primary schools, same nutrition as students are provided lunch.
In the Super Science School, this is not the case. Due to the Super Science School categorisation, schools are provided extra funding to cover new equipment. Teachers teach the individual content items and styles of research but there is a lack of linkages. Japanese teachers provide the individual facts but there is less to no relationship between this knowledge and how it affects society and how students may use it in their daily life, the why behind the knowledge that provides students a context for learning the materials, and no links to application.