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2012 J-LEAP REPORTDECEMBER, 2012: BREEZE ISSUE #62
A FREE MONTHLY E-NEWSLETTER FOR FRIENDS OF JAPAN & TEACHERS OF JAPANESECHIGUSA IZUMIBooker T. Washington High School
Tulsa, OK
Hello. My name is Chigusa Izumi and I work at Booker T.
Washington High School (Booker T.) in Tulsa, Oklahoma asa teaching assistant of Japanese. It has been over 3
months since I started working for this school.
The most striking feature of Booker T. is its diversity. The
school has over 1300 students: 40% White, 40% African
American, 8% Hispanic, 8% Native American and 3% Asian.
It is very interesting as the school is located in Tulsa, Oklahoma where the majority of the population isWhite. You can feel different cultures harmonize with each other at Booker T. Also the variety of foreign
language courses at our school also symbolizes its diversity. Students are required to take foreign
language classes for 2 years and they can select from 8 different languages including Spanish, French,German, Greek, Latin, Russian, Chinese and Japanese. Booker T. is the only school which offers aJapanese language course at the high school level in Oklahoma.
Our Japanese course has four different classes. Japanese 1 and 2 are beginner classes, which are mainly
for freshmen and sophomores. Students learn how to write in Hiragana and Katakana in Japanese 1, andlearn basic conversation and simple Kanji words in Japanese 2. Japanese 3 and 4 are the upper levelclasses and we focus more on preparation for the IB test than normal conversation.
My supervisor is a very open-minded person and he lets me try a lot of things in our classes, such as oral
practice, different activities and making homework or daily quizzes. He also lets me introduce Japaneseculture to the students. We just had a holiday lesson about “Shichigosan (七五三)” the other day and madethe traditional candy called “Chitose-ame (千歳飴)” in class. Students were excited to make Japanesetraditional candy with the ingredients that are also available in America. I would like to introduce as much
culture as possible not only to the classes but also to other students who are not taking Japanese courses
while I’m working for Booker T.. I have had a couple of presentations about Japanese culture outside ofthe Japanese classes. After giving a presentation about Japanese archery, some students came up andasked me questions about it. I appreciate that I get to talk to more students through these culturalinteractions. Although these presentations are not directly relevant to language education itself, I believethese activities will let students feel closer to Japan. Accordingly, it will be one of the motivations forPrivacy
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students to learn the Japanese language. It is not a very big number, but there are some parents atBooker T. who have Japanese backgrounds, and there also is a local Japanese friendship club too. I wouldlove to have these people involved in the course and would like to share more aspects of Japaneseculture with the students.
Although I love and enjoy teaching Japanese to Booker T. students, it also has been a great challenge forme to teach them. I have found out that the teaching method or belief that I had gained through myJapanese as a second language (JSL) teaching experience in Japan does not work very well for thestudents here since they live in the area where they seldom have opportunities to talk in Japanese.
However, I regard this challenge as a good opportunity to study new ideas, beliefs and teaching methods.
I will work hard to grasp both the goal of the course and the needs of each student, and be a wellrounded teaching assistant.

Breeze #62

2012 JET-MIP Report 5/8

2012 J-LEAP Report: Chigusa Izumi

2012 J-LEAP Report: Katsura Shimano

2012 JET-MIP Essay: Hillary Nguyen

2012 JET-MIP Essay: Indica Sur

2012 JET-MIP Essay: Jennie Ju

2012 JET-MIP Essay: Jenny Trieu

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