Made it to Tokyo without difficulty, though I ended up going to bed at 7:30pm Tokyo time (6:30am in New York) and waking up at around 4am (3pm EST). I went to the opening reception, chatted a bit with a couple of people, and then popped into a Lawson’s (one of three or four 7-Eleven style convenience store chains that are widely popular here in Japan) for some buckwheat noodles, rice balls, water, and iced coffee. Ah, the life.
Keio University has put us up in a brand new hotel that doesn’t really have very many amenities: no restaurant, room service, laundry, or bell captain. Just fine with me. The rooms are all newly furnished, and my room has this fantastic 5′ long desk that overlooks the Shinagawa rail yards and Tokyo vistas beyond. Flatscreen TV and free internet makes it a very hospitable and quiet environment in which to write and get things done (among other things I need to get done is my presentation for Friday…I didn’t even think to do a Powerpoint; how is that possible?).
On the plane ride over here I sat next to a couple of kids (their parents were in the row behind us), and I fell into a conversation with the younger child, a 3rd grader (which would make her about 9, I guess), who proceeded to give me the full rundown on her favorite movie, ‘The Last Mimzy,’ which was playing on the little video screens built into our seats. Then after the movie was done, she outlined to me her family’s travels (Barcelona, Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other destinations) for the summer and her feelings about school. Being in education, I asked her a few things about school, and she went on to give me a fine critique of No Child Left Behind, talking about the mandatory tests she has to take under the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) framework. The tests, she explained, are a battery of two weeks of tests preceded by one week of practice given three times a year. She now takes ‘more tests’ than ever before (under NCLB, CMT was extended from middle to upper elementary school), and the principal and the teachers are all ‘focused on testing, testing, testing,’ and make students practice more than ever before with promises of rewards (‘all we got was a pencil’). The tests that are given three times a year are ‘basically the same thing, they just want to see how much you can remember, it’s so useless.’ She said she and her classmates call the CMTs ‘TWTs: two weeks of torture,’ but then it came to her while talking that they should really call it ‘TWDTs’: ‘two weeks of double torture,’ since they have to practice relentlessly before taking the ‘real thing.’
What really mattered to her as far as schooling was concerned was her relationship with her teacher. She was looking forward to being in Mrs. Magruder’s (?) class in the 4th grade, even though Mrs. Magruder has a reputation for being tough. But ‘that’s just because last year she had tough kids so she had to be hard on them.’ But Mrs. Magruder, she decided, was good, and what was most important to her was the fact that Mrs. Magruder liked her and told her that she wanted her in her class next year. In this vein, she criticized her school’s previous principal, who had left (and it was ‘good that he left’) because he shifted a classmate of hers out of one classroom in the middle of the year to another classroom – even though “Bobby” said he ‘really liked Mr. Watkins and didn’t want to leave.’ I got the distinct impression for that this kind, school’s exasperations can be surmounted if the basic relationships are sound and are kept intact. Mrs. Magruder taught her older sister well, and she was looking forward to the same; the old principal disrupted a student’s relationships with his previous teacher and classmates, and was criticized for it.
Agree or disagree with her implicit critique of contemporary school policy, it’s apparent this kid wasn’t left behind.
