Attitudes of Limited English Proficient Students and Their Teachers. Learning Environment in Mathematics Classes

The result is schoolrooms filled with rebellious, rude, even dangerous kids-the exact opposite of what the repressive educational program set out to create! Karl Taro Greenfield, author of Speed Tribes: Days and Nights with Japan's Next Generation, describes his experience as an English teacher in a high school south of Tokyo, a low-level school whose students were not going to college or aiming at white-collar jobs. «These kids were friendly, jovial, and totally uninterested in learning English,» Greenfield writes. «Most of them slept during class, others kept up a steady stream of jabber, and when I tried to quiet them, they simply walked out. This was the vaunted Japanese educational system? The condition I had stumbled upon, a sort of kireru – the nihilism that animates many left-behind Japanese kids – was broader than I realized.» If tattoos and pierced tongues meant a liberation of the spirit, then all this might bode well for Japan. But what we are seeing is not necessarily a flowering of individualism ...»