5th grade students at Otomo Elementary School, in Tono City, Iwate Prefecture, taught our delegation how to write, or rather draw calligraphy, an ancient Japanese art form. The students guided our strokes step by step, with a final applause and a "good job!" for our feeble attempts. What an enjoyable experience it was, and a first for me!
This school has only 47 students and 10 teachers, which is very typical for schools in the Iwate countryside prefecture. They were so excited to greet us, that they gave us a tour of the whole school at each grade level. We saw students learning everything from math, to social studies and science. Surprisingly, their class sizes were fairly smalll, varying from 3 to 15 students per class. Yet they seemed to enjoy the same sense of community as the larger, more metropolitan schools.
One main advantage of a school this size is obviously the small student to teacher ratio; the disadvantage is students are not used to larger group settings. English is taught about once a week, for a total 35 hours a year. We thought it was interesting that teachers offen switched schools every 3-5 years, a feature we found across all Japanese schools we visited. The reason explained to us is that it was meant to balance off both the teacher and student populations across metropolitan and country settings, meaning that teachers my have to physically relocate to a different part of the prefecture to allow for a reasonable commute. We thought that was very interesting, and made a lot of sense, but may present its own challenges.