A foreign English teacher in charge of an English class at Shumei Yachiyo Junior High School is facing criticism after it emerged that the teacher drew pictures of a person being hanged (a la the game "Hangman") when students answered incorrectly in class. In 2008, a student at the school hanged himself, but the teacher allegedly continued using the game regardless.
The parents of the student who killed himself, meanwhile, are angry. "This kind of teaching is a problem," they have said.
Hangman can be particularly insensitive at schools and in certain cases like this, but I always hated hangman anyway because I disliked the violence inherent in it, and didn't think it appropriate imagery for an ESL class. I would also caution that "Battleship" would be an inappropriate game in South Korea, too. But when students would occasionally clamor for a game I'd put up __ __ __ or __ __ __ __ and finish things quickly, since they were never able to guess "fox" or "jazz" in time.
This was brought to my attention via a Dave's ESL Cafe thread, which brings up a few salient points. The Mainichi Shinbun article itself is pretty flimsy, with only loose, at best, connections between the foreign teacher and the suicide, and in spite of the headline "English teacher used 'hangman'-like game at school where student hung himself" goes on to say
no causal link has been made between the student's suicide and the teacher's drawings or any instruction on the part of the school.
When searching for reasons a middle school student would kill himself in a country with as high teenage suicide rates as Japan and South Korea it would be more productive to first look at school bullying, corporal punishment, and academic pressures.
The original poster on Dave's writes
If Japanese schools are anything like Korean (I only taught at an ekaiwa there) then there is a good chance the teacher didn't even know a student committed suicide.
Native speaker English teachers in South Korea know they're the last ones to hear about schedule changes, holidays, tests, and other arrangements, and we can safely assume a lot more information doesn't pass through the language barrier. One of my former middle schools had a dark side that I knew about because I followed local news pretty closely and because I could understand enough Korean to know what was said in the teachers' office. For example, a student was one of five who drugged and raped a girl on her way home from her cramschool. Another beat a classmate badly enough to put him in the hospital. Others were in trouble for sexually harassing female students. The student council president ran away with her boyfriend, and another officer attempted suicide the morning of midterms.
9 comments:
After a couple years of teaching in Korea, whenever my students really wanted to play hangman, I'd play "parachute man" instead. I'd draw a stickman wearing a parachute with a bunch of straps, and erase a strap for every wrong letter. I might draw a shark or something underneath the stickman, and draw a more and more worried-looking expression on his face as he lost straps. The imagery was still violent, but in a less realistic way, I think, and the younger kids got really into it.
But either way, I never much liked those games, personally, because they really don't promote communication at all -- I found the students usually just guessed letters at random, without even thinking about what the whole word might be. It's fine as a reward, or when you simply have 5 minutes to fill, but an educational tool it ain't.
Native speaker English teachers in South Korea know they're the last ones to hear about schedule changes, holidays, tests, and other arrangements, and we can safely assume a lot more information doesn't pass through the language barrier.
I think most of the time, such information gets lost along the way just because we are assumed to already know. But sometimes the information blackout is deliberate, mostly to protect the NET against the less positive aspects of Korea.
A (foreign) teacher killed himself at my last uni. Had we not been there watching him being taken away, we never would have known... the school's official stance on said teacher was that he ran off and went back to the UK.
Looks like you're getting those stupid Chinese comments too... Wish there was a way to block those...
I suspect the information gap is meant to keep NETs compliant. The bosses know we won't just do as we're told just because we're told to; if it's made to sound like we have little choice or don't have time to react, it's a lot harder to turn it down. That's probably not the only reason; does anything really have a singular reason?
Word games are useful and provide a stress-less opportunity to put problem-solving skills to use and illustrate not only phonetics but also syntax and grammar points.
Hangman has a reputation as a way for lazy teachers to kill time in the classroom, and this is reason enough to avoid it - however, it's easy to modify it in ways that more directly reinforce that day's lesson (and if you modify it enough, it doesn't even look all that much like a game to someone glancing in the classroom).
My version of Hangman doesn't look much like it - I use entire sentences, or a question that the students have to answer in a full sentence, and they need to give a full correct sentence to win. Guessing is encouraged, but guess wrong and you're out.
I like Peter's "parachute man" idea, but there's still some death in it, isn't there? Some students have committed suicide from jumping, after all. I just draw a small caricature, a piece at a time ...
I think the point Brian's making is that suicide among students is more common in this part of the world, but it's absurd to suggest a teacher could be blamed due to a game in the classroom - saying that, perhaps we can be more sensitive about the topic, and not use it as a source of humor?
I've been lucky in that I've never had one of my students commit suicide. I think. And that's the point. I might not know about it.
Very much agree with all the comments. Hangman is both violent and lacking in any communication in its original form. I wrote a whole article on possible variations:
http://edition.tefl.net/ideas/games/hangman-variations/
I honestly can't believe you guys feel that playing hangman is a bad idea in that it promotes suicide or violence. Socially maladjusted children might be prone to act out as a result of this game, but I have to disagree.
In North America, myself and millions of other children grew up watching cartoons such as "The Road Runner","Bugs Bunny" etc. There was plenty of "cartoonic" violence to be had in those programs. Did watching these programs cause 2-3 generations of North Americans to mass suicide or murderous rampages. Probably not. I highly doubt that the classroom atmosphere is any more influencial than watching TV or playing video games for any child on this planet. I use hangman as a time filler sometimes and I also let the students take the helm from time to time. I've had students draw breaching sharks, hot bowls of raymeon on a burner, massive bon fires and alligators under the gallows . All kinds of interesting things It's a game, it's for enjoyment.
Those children who commit suicide in East Asia were probably well on their way to doing so before viewing some teacher drawing a man with the top of his head connected to a verticle line. Who draws an actual noose when playing this game? The gallows don't look very intimidating to me. Three to four lines drawn horizontally and perpendicular to each other.
I respect all your comments, but in my opinion, there are many more elements of East Asian societies that are the main culprits in their children's suicides.
Kindy kids love hangman. They get a real kick out of seeing the guy being drawn.
At that age it's great for phonetics, and I use it to repeat vocabulary from stories learned during class. They usually end up spending 2-4 minutes extra on a piece of vocabulary vs other focused vocabulary used during the story and I find their retention on those words much higher than other words.
phonetically they learn to put certain letters together. One kid says C and that isn't it, so the next kid figures out it must be a K.
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