Even though Japanese children get a month's worth of vacation that doesn't mean they are home free to do anything they want. Since the school year runs from April to March, the teachers assign summer homework to their classes.
It's been a long time so I don't know if I remember this right but as I recall my kids brought home workbooks with pages of drills to do. They had calligraphy homework and book reports. There was an art project of making a poster to encourage civic awareness and they also were assigned an independent research project.
I always took my kids out of school about a week before summer vacation began mostly because I was trying to avoid paying the exorbitant airline prices. The school never gave me a hard time with this though maybe I just didn't hear about the raised eyebrows.
"The Watanabe parents think it is important that their kids spend as much time as possible in America during the summer (and they don't have a lot of money!) so Takumi and Leiya will be absent the week before summer vacation actually begins."
One problem with this was that often the drill books wouldn't be available for my kids to take along with them. The teachers assured me it wasn't important for them to complete (then why assign them?!) and that the answers were all in the back anyway. I think they did the art projects but maybe not the book reports.
"The homework doesn't matter. Have a good time in America."
I wasn't completely unconcerned about my children's education and each year I would make sure the kids did their independent research project on something connected with America.
One year Takumi researched the then new non-smoking trend in America. That was an excellent research project. He interviewed smokers and non-smokers, got facts on damages to health, took pictures of No-Smoking signs.
Another year one of the kids did their project on American houses and again interviewed my friends about which rooms in their house they liked best, drew floor plans of the various houses they visited and wrote about the differences between Japanese houses and California houses.
There was one year when one child just focused on cultural differences. How American's kiss all the time. How they praise each other about the smallest things. How clerks and waiters in the supermarket, the post office, the restaurants are all friendly and talk a lot.
There was a year when they researched money, a year when they researched volunteering, a year when they researched rocks and California terrain.
All in all I think Takumi and Leiya got very good training for researching and writing reports. I also remember a lot of struggles to get them to sit down and write out index cards, take pictures and write out their thoughts when summer was supposed to be FUN and meany mom was making them study!Yesterday, on crosswalk duty I noticed all the neighborhood kids loaded down with homework projects to take to the new semester of school. I thought, "Ah, those were the good ol' days!"
I had homework this summer too! Can you believe as part of my crosswalk guard work I was required to wander around the neighborhood for 30 minutes looking for children to caution every day during the summer!? Let me tell you. In this summer's heat there were NO children! And everyday I wrote in my traffic log about how my job had gone that day. There are not a lot of different ways to say "No children around. Everything is the same as always. It is hot."
I'm sending in my "homework" papers today. The new semester has started.
5 comments:
Summer homework??? Wow! Love the sound of the projects they did, though. I'm a mean mom myself, we homeschool year-round. Always have- but we take off when we want to do something fun.
Hard to believe you had homework too, Tanya - that's funny! No children. HOT. LOL!
Thanks for your help Tanya. I want my DGDs to read this blog ... they have been in school 2 weeks now and were given reading assignments and book reports to do 1 week before school. You world think someone had asked for blood with all the comments. !!!! Funny, I would have too until I read your blog today.
Although I taught in primary school for many years I could never really see the relevance of homework most of the time. I think that we were required to set it to satisfy the parents. I always felt that regular reading was all that should be expected, and never felt that the children benefited much from the homework. The occasional research project was useful for them, but most of the time I thought they should be outside playing, being children and getting as much fresh air as possible.
Oh, I will never forget the asagao homework that my daughter had in first grade in Japan. Also, the "enikki" where she had to draw a picture with a diary entry. She did have some worksheets and drills, too, but what we both remember most is that asagao (morning glory) project. (It was raised from seed and she had to observe it everyday and what flowers had bloomed etc.)
The research projects sound wonderful. I really enjoyed doing research projects, and looked forward to the day I was out of school (graduated), so I could research and write about things I wanted to. I guess I do do that, with genealogy, but sometimes it seems like it would be interesting (though dorky) to branch out.
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