Flu Season, Government Updates, Absences

Hello!

I hope that you had a nice week.

The flu is making its way through schools in Japan, causing classes to be cancelled for some grades. I do not remember flu being much of an issue last year in terms of closing classes but the focus then was more so on COVID.

Related to illnesses, the big news in Japan recently was that the country is planning to downgrade the official view of COVID's severity to make it equal to other seasonal illnesses. While that change is not due to happen until May, another modification coming in mid-March is that the government will no longer recommend that people wear masks.

If you are interested in reading more about that, this article mentions both points.

At our schools, students and teachers still wear masks all day. I would imagine that will change in March to be in line with the government recommendations, but I have not heard official news.

It will also be interesting to see what the general public here does with regards to masks. At the moment, nearly 100% of people wear masks. With the recent updates, however, I have been seeing more people not wearing masks but these folks are in an extremely small minority.

On another topic, I have written before about how my school handles teacher absences. Usually if a teacher is absent, there are teachers within the school who will work together to cover the absence. We have several teachers that have a looser class schedule, so those teachers along with the assistant principle will usually substitute for absent teachers.

It was interesting, though, that recently a teacher had to leave school for a training event after lunch, meaning that she would miss the last hour of school. Rather than having another teacher cover the classroom, the class functioned without a teacher for that hour.

I think the teacher gave the students a worksheet and some independent work to do. They worked on that for the full class period on their own without a teacher in the room.

Another topic of discussion at our school has been class scheduling. I only learned recently that my school is unique in how it handles classes for the 5th and 6th grades.

For these grades, there are three classrooms of students and so there are three "homeroom" teachers that manage those classrooms.

Usually in Japan (and similarly in America, as I remember it), the homeroom teacher will teach all subjects to his or her classroom, except for arts and crafts and music. Those two subjects are taught by separate teachers who specialize in those areas.

However, at my school, what happens is that they allow homeroom teachers to specialize in subjects and teach those subjects to all the classes of that grade.

For example, there is one 5th grade teacher who teaches English to all three 5th grade classrooms, while another teacher teaches PE, another teaches science, and so on. So rather than a teacher teaching all of the subjects to his or her classroom, a teacher will focus on teaching 2 (or so) subjects to all the classes in his or her grade.

Kobe appears to be moving towards this model for its teachers. Before, there was concern about teacher burnout so they experimented with this new model to reduce the teacher workload.

Teachers I have asked about it seem to like this model better - it allows them to focus on a subject and not have to worry about preparing for all the subjects.

By the way, the subjects here are similar to America - Japanese elementary students take math, science, Japanese, and social studies in addition to arts and crafts, home economics (in which they learn to cook, among other things), music, PE, moral education and probably others that I am forgetting.

Until next time,

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