Visiting Schools

Koki

At Chatham Grammar School for Boys the pupils who study Japanese practised their Japanese greetings with us. I really enjoyed meeting them and they were very friendly and helpful. I observed classes in Maths, Design and Technology, Spanish and Art. In the music class, the students were very quiet and did exercises wearing headphones. They used computers to compose music. I have never seen such a class. The classroom also had an interactive whiteboard and a smart board. The best part of the visit for me was the Maths class because the students were aged 12 and 13 and I was able to understand and answer some easy Maths questions in English. It was useful and interesting to see the difference between Japanese and English schools.

Kohei

This grammar school was established in 1817 and has approximately 1200 pupils. The pupils and staff were very friendly to us and behaved “like gentlemen”. We visited the school for 2 days and I observed many different lessons including IT, Maths, Design and Technology and Spanish. I particularly liked the Spanish class because I study 2 hours of Spanish a week at Chaucer College in my option class, although this class was at a high level and was too difficult for me to understand everything. I noticed that in England the students are very active and they raise their hands a lot to ask questions whereas in Japan students are very quiet and mainly copy things into their notebooks. It was very interesting to compare the different teaching styles in Japan and England and it made me think that in the future I could try different ways of teaching.