Knowing Differences

By Yuko

I went to Cheney High School and met my pen pal whose name is Manrit Kaur. Manrit took me to her Spanish classroom. To my guess, the classroom was about thirty-six square meters and had three big windows and many posters such as the poster which their aims were written. There were seven boys and fourteen girls in the class. As hearing Manrit, the class is so hard to understand.

A teacher who taught Spanish in the class was so energetic woman, and spoke in a loud voice that everyone in the class could hear the teacher was saying clearly. The teacher also used many body languages to make her students easier to understand what the teacher wanted to teach in the class. The teacher used the OHF to show her Microsoft Word document which is put in her desktop computer to the board which was in front of the class. The board and handout were also utilized. Most of the time, students took notes or solve questions alone which were written on the board or the handout. Half of the students paid attention to what the teacher was saying, but the other didn’t pay attention to the teacher so much. Almost always, the teacher asked their students to answer the questions or fill out the blanks. The students replied the teacher by just speaking up what they were thinking or raised their hands to show they were trying to say the answer. But, most of them just spoke out to answer the questions. Students rarely interact with each other because they focused to think the answers by themselves.

What I was surprised while I was observing the class were that some students put their juice or snacks on their desks. They drunk or ate their juice or snacks when they wanted to drink or eat. To add more, not only students but also the teacher ate some snacks while she was talking to her student. When I went to the schools in Japan, we’ve never been allowed to drink or eat the juice or snacks, so that sight was a little bit shocking to me. Except drinking or eating the juice or snacks during the class, I found more differences about how the teacher taught and students learned in the Spanish class. They were surprising for me, but knowing difference of how the class went between the U.S and Japan was interesting.