Is Mr. Rabbit Stingy?

Unexpected excellence in a 5th grade classroom.

I’m am not a fan of the Japanese education system.  Not a fan of what we now have in the US either, based upon what that system has been churning out recently.  A couple of decades ago, Japan decided to import the US model of education, at least in part.  As an outsider, it seems that the worst of the preexisting domestic system and the worst of what the US has to offer are blended into something truly awful.  That does not mean that what we have in Japan is all bad, however.

Last weekend the 5th grader’s school had classes so that parents could observe.  We have these often.  As the kids and teachers are in class on Saturday, Monday is a school holiday.  We got to see two lessons this time.  The first was sewing.  Yes, you read that correctly, sewing classes for 5th graders.  Both genders practicing the same stitches.

The second class started out with at least one father, me, completely confused.  My Japanese never being all that great, my understanding of anything spoken in it is highly dependent upon my understanding of the topic so that I can use my background knowledge to fill in what my ear does not catch.  Not knowing the subject of the class, I could not understand what the point of the conversation was; why were they saying that Mr. Rabbit was stingy?   Did he or did he not give Mr. Fox a birthday present?  If he did, was an old, dingy book?  What did it matter?  What a waste of time it seemed to be.  What is the subject of this class, even?  But I continued to strain to find meaning, a purpose behind all this talk of Mr. Rabbit, his alleged stinginess and who, he or Mr. Fox, should be pitied.  Oh, and why does the screen look like an idiot phone’s screen?  That should have been a clue, but it was not obvious to me at first, I do not have an idiot phone.

Then two words entered the conversation, “fact” and “opinion”.  “OH, he is teaching them the difference between facts and opinions!”  Is this a new topic for elementary school?  My medical students certainly do not know the difference.  After eliciting lots of responses from many students on whether certain statements were facts or opinions, they were given a quiz.  After the quiz, the teacher asked for a show of hands of the students who had idiot phones, about half did.  My kid does not and claims they are the only one in the class who doesn’t, as an aside.  Then the conversation was expanded to what if the negative opinions posted online of Mr. Rabbit are not true.  Can we even know if they are?  Ending with, when reading and posting online, be careful to not take opinions as facts and do not spread rumors.  I was impressed.  Now, if only my medical students would have had such lessons before entering med school.

Unfortunately, 13 of the 28 students were masked as were 2 fathers and 3 mothers. None of the masked parents were marked to other masked parents.