SLOW Eigo with Anne-sensei | Audio: Reader Series: Stories from an ALT in Japan

12 Chapter 12 - Summer Homework

Anne Roop Season 1 Episode 12

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 2:35

After the summer break, Kate discovers that students in Japan have a lot of summer homework. She also learns that the school year starts in April, which changes how she thinks about summer vacation.

Download PDF: Chapter 12 SCRIPT & GLOSSARY

The SLOW Eigo series is created and hosted by experienced ESL teacher Anne Roop-Takata. (See Bio for more information.)

SLOW Eigoシリーズは、経験豊かなESL教師アン・ループ・タカタが制作・配信しています。(プロフィールはこちら 

Connect with Anne-sensei | アン先生にメッセージを送る

Thank you for hanging out with us at Slow Eigo. Keep listening, keep learning. 

Podcast Website: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2355349

Speaker 7

Slow Ego Audio reader. Book one stories from an A LT in Japan, part two, settling in chapter 12. Summer Homework on the first day at school after the summer break. The students were let off early and went home before lunch, but it was a full day for the teachers. After the students left, Modi Sensei returned to the teacher's room with a huge stack of papers. She plopped them on my desk. What are these? I asked? Summer homework. Mortis, sensei replied, summer homework. I repeated eyeing the mountain of papers. Yes. The students are kept busy over the break. We don't want them to lose momentum. They have homework for most subjects. You can help me correct the English homework. Wow. I thought to myself that is a lot of homework for the students and a lot of correcting for the teachers. In Canada, we are encouraged to read a book or two during the summer break, but other than that, we don't typically have homework. This might be because our school year starts in the fall, so the summer is like a clean break between grades. I was surprised to learn that in Japan. The school year starts in April, so the summer vacation is a break in the middle of the school year. It makes sense that teachers want to keep up the momentum. It's funny how I just assumed that September was the start of a new school year. Everywhere. Living in another country makes you notice things. That you never thought about before? Every day in Japan, I was learning something new.