Everything Under the Sun
Everyday at school, we have a little event that I affectionately call "Souji Time." What does it mean? Well, "souji" means "clean," and I think you can figure out the rest--everyone cleans, students, staff, teachers. In fact, it is the only substantial cleaning that goes on at school, as no cleaning staff is ever hired. Period.
Now, we have lots of people-power (formerly, "man-power"), with approximately 700 people cleaning a building about an eighth the size of the Louvre. The bulk of the responsibility falls to the students (or "proletariat," as I call them, on a good day), as they make up over 90% of the cleaning force. That keeps things interesting. So please permit me to describe their general cleaning procedure in my English conversation classroom, where I am the self-appointed supervisor ("oppressor").
Anywhere from 4 to 8 students come to clean my room (or "serfdom"). They have different responsibilities ("division of labor"), though the divisions occur with unflagging reguard for gender ("entrenched gender roles"). There are often disagreements and even squirmishes among the various proletarian groups, which help distract them from recognizing their shared oppression. Though useful, sometimes these tommybrooks ("expressions of lower class angst") can become disruptive to the cleaning of the room ("economy and wellbeing"), in which case, I myself interrupt to put an end to the dispute at hand. I attempt to do so in such a way as not to alienate the affections of either group, but sometimes hard feelings do arise.
Okay, enough of that. Here's what we do.
First, we push all of the desks (40 of them) to one side of the room. Then two or three people, almost always girls (with the wildly inappropriate exception of me), use brooms to sweep. It isn't sweeping the way I was taught--careful, methodical, thoughtfully brushing along a pile of dust, making sure not to miss any. Basically, my girls just attack the floor with the brooms. Their only method is that they attack whatever dust they happen to see at any given moment, and as half of the dust in the room is swirling in the air within three seconds, that's not much. They do make some kind of effort to sweep the dust toward the not-being-cleaned portion of the room--i.e. directly at the misplaced desks. I keep trying to show them that, when we do that, half of the dust just gets pushed back onto the already-clean portion of the floor when we move the desks, but that must be, on Piaget's chart, one level above their peak capabilities at 3:30 in the afternoon--cause they ain't gettin it!
After a sweeping job as random as a two-year-olds efforts to "stay within the lines," two other students have races across the floors, holding dirty, old rags to the floor with their hands and running. I don't understand how those filthy rags are supposed to get anything clean, but it hardly matters, as the students make no attempt to actually cover the surface area of the floor--they merely race one another back and forth across the same strip of floor.
At some point, I say, "Okay, that's enough," or "Finish," or something, and we push all of the desks (and a lot of dust) back onto the "clean" section of floor. Then the sweeping manque resumes, followed by more floor races, and alas, the final placement of the 40 desks.
While the sweeping and all-important floor races are being undertaken, if there are more than 4 or 5 students to help, the other students will engage themselves in beating the dust out of the chalkboard erasers, changing the dates on the board, or attempting to teach me inappropriate Japanese words (which, unfortunately, are generally not in the dictionaries to reference).
A few final notes.
I can't say I fault the students for their sloppy sweeping, as the floor is composed of wooden tiles that have half-a-centimeter gaps between them, little spaces which of course catch an insane amount of irretrievable dust.
Besides the bathrooms, where 90% of the cleaning is accomplished with nothing more than a water hose, I have never seen anything chemical be used to clean the school. And I am of the mind that that is probably a bad thing.
In all fairness, the schools in Japan cannot be judged quite by the same standards as, say, America, because they take their shoes off before entering school (everyone does), which keeps out a lot of the nastiness that we track in 20 times a day.
My classroom is becoming a souji-time hang out, which is good in that the students like me and are learning at least a hair more English than otherwise, but bad in that, it makes cleaning time longer and longer...
These kids really do crack me up.
Grace and peace!
Now, we have lots of people-power (formerly, "man-power"), with approximately 700 people cleaning a building about an eighth the size of the Louvre. The bulk of the responsibility falls to the students (or "proletariat," as I call them, on a good day), as they make up over 90% of the cleaning force. That keeps things interesting. So please permit me to describe their general cleaning procedure in my English conversation classroom, where I am the self-appointed supervisor ("oppressor").
Anywhere from 4 to 8 students come to clean my room (or "serfdom"). They have different responsibilities ("division of labor"), though the divisions occur with unflagging reguard for gender ("entrenched gender roles"). There are often disagreements and even squirmishes among the various proletarian groups, which help distract them from recognizing their shared oppression. Though useful, sometimes these tommybrooks ("expressions of lower class angst") can become disruptive to the cleaning of the room ("economy and wellbeing"), in which case, I myself interrupt to put an end to the dispute at hand. I attempt to do so in such a way as not to alienate the affections of either group, but sometimes hard feelings do arise.
Okay, enough of that. Here's what we do.
First, we push all of the desks (40 of them) to one side of the room. Then two or three people, almost always girls (with the wildly inappropriate exception of me), use brooms to sweep. It isn't sweeping the way I was taught--careful, methodical, thoughtfully brushing along a pile of dust, making sure not to miss any. Basically, my girls just attack the floor with the brooms. Their only method is that they attack whatever dust they happen to see at any given moment, and as half of the dust in the room is swirling in the air within three seconds, that's not much. They do make some kind of effort to sweep the dust toward the not-being-cleaned portion of the room--i.e. directly at the misplaced desks. I keep trying to show them that, when we do that, half of the dust just gets pushed back onto the already-clean portion of the floor when we move the desks, but that must be, on Piaget's chart, one level above their peak capabilities at 3:30 in the afternoon--cause they ain't gettin it!
After a sweeping job as random as a two-year-olds efforts to "stay within the lines," two other students have races across the floors, holding dirty, old rags to the floor with their hands and running. I don't understand how those filthy rags are supposed to get anything clean, but it hardly matters, as the students make no attempt to actually cover the surface area of the floor--they merely race one another back and forth across the same strip of floor.
At some point, I say, "Okay, that's enough," or "Finish," or something, and we push all of the desks (and a lot of dust) back onto the "clean" section of floor. Then the sweeping manque resumes, followed by more floor races, and alas, the final placement of the 40 desks.
While the sweeping and all-important floor races are being undertaken, if there are more than 4 or 5 students to help, the other students will engage themselves in beating the dust out of the chalkboard erasers, changing the dates on the board, or attempting to teach me inappropriate Japanese words (which, unfortunately, are generally not in the dictionaries to reference).
A few final notes.
I can't say I fault the students for their sloppy sweeping, as the floor is composed of wooden tiles that have half-a-centimeter gaps between them, little spaces which of course catch an insane amount of irretrievable dust.
Besides the bathrooms, where 90% of the cleaning is accomplished with nothing more than a water hose, I have never seen anything chemical be used to clean the school. And I am of the mind that that is probably a bad thing.
In all fairness, the schools in Japan cannot be judged quite by the same standards as, say, America, because they take their shoes off before entering school (everyone does), which keeps out a lot of the nastiness that we track in 20 times a day.
My classroom is becoming a souji-time hang out, which is good in that the students like me and are learning at least a hair more English than otherwise, but bad in that, it makes cleaning time longer and longer...
These kids really do crack me up.
Grace and peace!
posted by Peter Rice at 3:09 AM
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