S-san

Looking over a few of my more recent posts, I’ve noticed a trend toward depressing or angry entries. I need some happy to get over all this sad, so I’m just going to talk about how awesome one of my students is. Since I’m going to talk at length about a single student I won’t be using her real name and will substitute in “S-san” instead. S-san is a second grader at my junior high who not only has far and away the best English of her peers, but shows an active interest in learning anything and everything she can about it. She takes extensive notes in English class and actively seeks out students from the other half of class (we divide each class between two teachers) to incorporate differences in their notes into hers.

Talks with her are very easy and usually flow quite naturally. As a result, I have probably learned more about her than any of my other students. She has told me about the classes she likes and the one’s she doesn’t and, more importantly, can tell me why. I know when her birthday is, her favorite foods, why she plays volleyball, what she wants to be (an English teacher or an archeologist), and why she always draws herself as an adorable fox on all her class projects. When I have a question that I have to repeat a few times for other students or say in simple (and sometimes incorrect) English, S-san responds the first time without any hesitation. Her passion for learning inspires me and gives me hope that what I’m doing here has some meaning.

I probably first saw S-san fairly early on in my teaching career. She would have been a first grader at the time I arrived in Japan. More than likely, she was very quiet in class and I’m a bit ashamed to say I really didn’t take notice of her until a full year after arriving here. I consider our first meeting to be the volleyball game I went to last summer. There, she worked up the courage to start a conversation with me, an occurrence so rare among my students that it really stuck in my mind. She didn’t have perfect English, but I could understand her meaning easily. She asked if I could read kanji. When I told her I knew a little, she asked if I could read their headbands, which had the kanji 心 (こころ, kokoro) which means heart or spirit. The smile on her face when I talked to her was priceless. She was so happy with such a simple conversation that I really felt I needed to get to know her better.

At the time, I wasn’t aware of just how good S-san was at English. Or perhaps the simple fact is that she wasn’t. I get the sense talking with my various grades that second grade is the time when students really buckle down and pick some subject or skill that they really want to excel at. After all, they need to have a high school picked out by the middle of their third grade year and most of those are rather narrow in focus. For instance, I know of at least one teaching high school in Kumamoto and there is an engineering school in Hondo. My point being that over the next three months or so, while I did have fairly regular conversations with S-san, I was not actively seeking her out to talk with her. I only gradually became aware of how much simpler it was to talk to her, how she would help her friends by translating what I said, and how she was always at or near the top of the class in English.

It’s a difficult thing, sometimes, to see so much potential in a student. On one hand, you want to nurture their talent, help them get better, and push them to try new and more difficult things. On the other, you don’t want it to appear like you’re favoring them over the other kids. So while I admit I’ve made time for S-san, by speaking with her after school or periodically joining her cleaning group, I try to do the same with my other students as well. The key differences are what I’m able to talk to her about and the fact that she will come to talk to me.

Recently, S-san has begun writing in a special English journal once a week for me to read. I get it from her after cleaning time and return it after school. I’ve tried to make it clear that I will do the same for any student, and I’m hoping the extra interactions between S-san and I will encourage other kids to do the same. In her first entry, S-san asked for my email address, which I gladly gave her. Of all my students, I feel like S-san and I are friends. In her first email to me, she told me she was very happy. And you know what, I am too.

Update: S-san wasn’t able to keep to her journal for too long and is now a third grader, which means even more time has to be devoted to study. I still e-mail her occasionally and she responds in English, but I haven’t seen much of her lately. She still seems to be doing well in class and is as enthusiastic as always, but is shy around others and will use her amazing English only in one-on-one conversations with me.