Some of my colleagues ask the first and second graders to fill a page of their English notebooks every day, usually with words or phrases they have recently been studying. Since the teachers don't have enough time for marking and the students don't have enough time for additional homework, the benefits are, to say the least, questionable. Ploughing through a mountain of beginner's English every morning does occasionally throw up some oddities, though: one student filled five pages of his notebook with a single word, 'custom', and another filled eleven pages with just the days of the week. But easily my most bizarre - and let's be honest, genuinely scary - discovery was this:
Which definitely wasn't taken from the textbook.
In case, like me, you are now concerned for this student's safety and mental well-being, my fellow English teacher tells me that the school makes a point of keeping an eye on her, so with this in mind, I marked the page with a big, friendly spiral (ALTs beware: in Japan, ticks are used to denote incorrect answers) and passed no further comment on what she had written.
(Incidentally, and as you've no doubt already realised, 死 - pronounced shi - is the kanji for death. Never let it be said that this blog isn't educational.)
In case, like me, you are now concerned for this student's safety and mental well-being, my fellow English teacher tells me that the school makes a point of keeping an eye on her, so with this in mind, I marked the page with a big, friendly spiral (ALTs beware: in Japan, ticks are used to denote incorrect answers) and passed no further comment on what she had written.
(Incidentally, and as you've no doubt already realised, 死 - pronounced shi - is the kanji for death. Never let it be said that this blog isn't educational.)
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