The Debate: We should study English
On Friday, I vented about my students stating that they shouldn’t have to learn English because they are Japanese and they live in Japan. Today, the students took those statements a step further and I found that I liked how they changed them.
Today the parents were able to visit the school during fifth period and Tsukune Sensei decided that she wanted to do a debate with 3-2. During third period, we had the students break into two groups. The first group agreed with the statement we should study English and the second group disagreed. From there the students then had to break into smaller groups and they had to write down their reasons for agreeing with the statement.
As I said the students, who said they shouldn’t learn English because they are Japanese revised their statements. One group said, “We shouldn’t study English because we are Japanese and we should value Japanese more.” The second group stated, “We shouldn’t study English because we are Japanese so we should study Japanese and Japanese culture first.” I liked the revised ideas and I told the students that. The teams worked very hard and I was impressed with how much they got done during the period.
Tsukune Sensei and I decided to give the teams animal names. One group chose their name “Team Mountain Gorilla” and Tsukune Sensei and I picked the rest of the team names. We had Team Goat, Team Panda, Team Koala, Team Hippo, and Team Kitty. I think Team Kitty was my favorite because it was a team of all boys.
Fifth period came and we set up for the debate. The students did AMAZING! They listened to what everyone was saying and figured out how to respond. They were all writing down sentences to make sure they wouldn’t forget the different points that they wanted to make. It went like this:
Team Goat: “We think that we should study English because English is the International Langauge.”
Team Kitty: “We disagree because we are Japanese and we should study Japanese and Japanese Culture.”
Team Panda: “We agree with team Kitty. We should study the basics.”
Team Koala: “Team Kitty, you said we should study Japanese but to get into High School we need to study English also.”
I was impressed of course there were a ton of pauses and the students had to have Tsukune Sensei and I help them but once they figured out what they were doing they got into a rhythm. I think the parents were very impressed with the lesson.