Most high school classes don’t end with students bending to bow, in unison, to their teacher.
Not in America, anyway.
It’s become routine in Room B-2 at Battle Ground High School this year.
“Arigatou gozaimashita,” say nearly 30 students, in thanks to Japanese language teacher Mary Metcalf after each lesson for sharing her knowledge.
The focus on grace, respect and formality is precisely what drew many Battle Ground students to Metcalf’s Japanese I class this autumn — the first time in 12 years the subject has been offered in the Battle Ground school district.
“Because it’s exotic, and not like America at all,” said Katrina Toews, a freshman. In Japan, people are “more polite. It’s rude to say ‘you,’ ” she elaborated.
Her sophomore classmate, Alejandro Mitchell-Keeney piped in, “There are 40 ways to say ‘sir.’ ”
But, really: The top draw for most students is the chance to feed their craving for all things Japanese.
Credit goes to Japan’s anime (animated films, pronounced ah-nee-may) and manga (comics and serial publications), which blend vivid, stylish art with complex story lines. The Internet and globalization have fueled an explosion of fans among U.S. teens.
“We just wanted to know exactly what we’re saying,” said Mitchell-Keeney. Like other big fans, she has picked up several words or phrases through her hobby. Oh, and, of course, first came the Pokemon craze.
“We were all freaking out about it, all the anime freaks,” said Emily Ann Cross, among the 50-plus students who quickly filled not just one, but two, class sections when schedules were issued last spring.
A big fan since third grade, the sophomore has filled several notebooks with skillful drawings of her own stylized manga character, Kia.
“It’s so different from American cartoons; it has all sorts of levels,” Cross said.
Senior Max Wike, a talented guitar and flute player, said that anime sound tracks inspire him to study Japanese musicians.
“It just sort of grew,” said Wike, whose Japanese vocabulary far outstrips that of most classmates. Headed to a music college next year, he plans to keep probing Japanese culture.
It’s a much different grasp than Metcalf, 50, had while growing up in Edmonds.
By her mid-20s, she didn’t know much at all about Japan when she jumped at a chance to teach English overseas. But over a five-year span, she would soak up its language and culture as an instructor there for a private firm, then in public schools.
After two decades teaching English in Alaskan and Washington schools, the last 13 years in Battle Ground, Metcalf felt a hunger to revisit Japanese.
“The farther away I got, the more I wanted to reconnect,” she said. “It finally dawned on me that I could combine my work and my interest. I’m getting to share a language and a country I really love. Win-win,” she said.
Principal Tim Lexow and other school leaders approved, in part because Marcia Christian, now in the district’s personnel office, had taught the same subject previously.
Since September, Metcalf’s students have dug into three complex alphabets that form the cornerstones of Japanese: Hiragana and katakana — which contain about 50 characters each — and kanji, which makes use of about 2,000 meticulous Chinese characters (whittled from a much larger base by the Chinese in recent centuries).
A mixture of all three is required to master contemporary Japanese. Metcalf chose to stress reading and writing, so that students could follow their textbook before they start conversational study. Sentence structure is a big deal, here.
“She’s done it pretty well. She’s taking time to really drill it in,” said Wike. The work is taking root now, and when he listens to Japanese songs, “I get more meaning out of it,” he said.
Freshman Erin Wotton, whose parents run a company with international ties, believes Japanese is a gateway to Chinese skills that could broaden her options someday. Some classmates have designs on a foreign exchange opportunity.
Metcalf said she’s trying to build fundamentals while weaving in the cultural backdrop.
A few days before Christmas break, her students crafted New Year’s greeting cards, a much bigger deal in (mostly) non-Christian Japan. She’s shown them an insightful documentary, “Japanland,” and plays a children’s sing-along “alphabet song” nearly daily.
She’s shared or explained food such as onigiri (rice balls), oden (a hearty stew) and coffee jello, among her personal favorites. On their own, students have discovered sweet pocky candy and snappy wasabi seasoning.
If all goes well, Metcalf will lead a student visit to Japan (not school-sanctioned or -sponsored) in March 2011, she said.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” she said. “I hope the students are. It’s making me go back and remember things; that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this.”
