Drawing the Line (Strictness in the Classroom)

Warning: Due to adult language in the following post, reader discretion is advised.

One thing that has puzzled me since my arrival in Japan is the varying degrees of strictness shown in the classroom. Generally speaking, teachers do not put up with much guff from their students and are quick to scold, yell, or even slap upside the head students who talk out of turn or refuse to do as they're told. Corporal punishment is still very much alive here in Japan, although a recent outbreak of parents campaigning against teachers and the very education system itself is slowly putting a stop to that.

Conversely, though, teachers here seem to have no problem with children swearing in class. At first I thought that maybe my concept acceptable language just differed fundamentally with that of the rest of the teachers, which is fine, but it just seemed a bit odd for students be able to yell the Japanese equivalents of things like "son of a bitch" or "shut up" or even "shit" in the classroom.

The prime example of this profound difference came to me several weeks ago. During a Junior High lesson much like every other (read: I was doing nothing but reading flashcards) the teacher decided to let the kids play a game known as Renso, translated literally as "connected images." The premise of the game is simple enough; kids split into teams and, using a single word of my choosing, must take turns running up to the board and writing a word that is connected in some way to the previous word forming chain of thought, if you will. The word I choose was "tree." Innocent enough, right? Wrong. The first group ended with 8 points, making a chain that went something along the lines of "leaf, plant, bird, bug, sun, sunday, picnic, cake." A real cute, sweet little word chain. Group 4, however, took a decidedly different approach. Consisting mostly of basketball boys, their list was as follows:

tree
wood

house
bed
sex
sexy
enjoy
tired
sports
sex
sexy
baby sex

Though taking first place easily with a whopping 10 points (I refused to count "sex" and "sexy" twice), I immediately feared for the lives of these poor kids. Their teacher, an unusually harsh older lady, simply asked how they got from bed to sex and then, apparently satisfied with the answer, gave them all gold stars. Gold stars!! For writing what amounted to an amateur, albeit grammatically barren, erotic story on the board!

Personally, I got quite a kick out of it. That said, I was left to wonder what would have happened if this sort of stunt got pulled in my middle school. I imagine it would have been something to the extent of an hour of detention for each "obscene" word to be served consecutively on a day of the teacher's choosing. Hello Breakfast Club. Ultimately I realized that, given the choice and my propensity for cursing like a pirate and talking out of turn as a child, I would much rather have gone to school in strict, rigid, old-fashioned Japan.