Kumini Middle School

Thursday, October 23, 2008
Today we visited a middle school – Kunimi Middle school, about an hour away from Unzen. When we arrived we were greeted by the entire staff. The staff has a common office, where each teacher has a desk, this helps with collaboration efforts among the staff. The teachers are required to be at school from 8:00 to 4:45 – the students leave at 3:45 – but many of the teachers are there until 7:00 at night – as they sponsor clubs after school – usually sports or cultural activities (art, music, etc). They do not have an official plan period like our teachers, but they don’t have extra duties – they don’t watch the kids over recess, which is 45 minutes after lunch, the kids just patrol themselves. It works here.
First we introduced ourselves to the staff and students, then the students gave an assembly. The assembly was student led, the choir sang many songs, there was a kumini drum performance that is reminiscent of ‘stomp’ that was awesome , and there was a demonstration of sword fighting called ‘kindal’ which is an ancient samurai custom that was also very interesting. This school is famous for soccer, and has won Japan’s youth league many times. For this reason, some parents who have children that are very good at soccer actually relocate so that their child can play soccer at the ‘best’ school.
Some of the classes that are offered during the day are different from our middle schools. They have calligraphy class, English class, technical arts – wood shop, math, science, social studies, Japanese, music, and physical education. There is a home economics department where students were learning to sew, and the art department. I was impressed with the supplies their art department had – oil paints, canvases, gouache paints. Things that our art depts. in the states cannot afford. The work the kids were doing was fantastic. I noted that there were only girls in the section I observed, which is unusual for our middle school classes. The kids seem to have more grounding in the arts, as they are required to take calligraphy and origami in elementary school. This extra experience was evident in the quality of work they were doing.
We also observed a calligraphy class at the middle school level, and we each made a Japanese symbol and wrote our name. I wrote ‘peace’ and the children gave me a paper crane to put on it.
At lunch we each went to a classroom to ‘try’ to visit with the teacher and students. Lunch was a soup with eggs, shrimp, and other unidentifiables that I could not eat. There was rice, a banana, pickled vegetables, a milk, and some trail mix. The banana was really good, and I tried the trail mix until I discovered dried fish (anchovies) in it.
The afternoon was spent in discussions with the principal, and later the teachers of the school. We talked about curriculum, discipline, assessment, the regular teacher stuff.
This evening we went to a ‘noodle shop’ which is next to our hotel. I’ve been living on granola bars and apples, so real food sounded good, but everything here is in a soup like form – mine had a claw – with tentacles – so that was it – back to apples and granola bars! It’s hilarious, on the way back from the middle school, everyone was day dreaming about American food – you don’t know what I would pay for a salad or a turkey sandwich right now!