Section 90 Entry 0001. Date: 2004 January 29 Thursday
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Life in Japan continues to be busy as usual, and recently I've been doing a very wide range of different teaching activities, everything from teaching adults with highly trained technical minds and pretty good English to going to elementary school.

At an elementary school last week I was exhibiting one of my visual aids, a heavy woollen bush jacket from New Zealand. It's not obvious that the thing is made of wool. It doesn't look as if it's been knitted. Rather, the fabric is a solid slab of camouflage green, rather like a carpet.

I asked my usual question: what animal's fur (in Japanese, "ke") is this made of? And from the kids (who were aged about six or seven) I got the usual speculative answers: elephant, crocodile, kangeroo, rhinoceros. Then one small girl child surprised me with an innovative suggestion:

"Unicorn?"

Actually, where I come from, there are no unicorns, but, despite my best efforts at explanation, the kids don't always have a clear grasp of my geographical origins. At one school, after I announced that I came from "New Zealand," one kid, having at least caught hold of the "land" bit, asked:-

"Disneyland?"

When it comes to teaching very young kids, the most useful technique I've been taught is what we might call the striptease technique or (let's invent a more formal-sounding name here) the staged revelation technique. (I suppose there's a textbook somewhere with established names for this kind of technique, but my own elementary school training has been hands-on rather than textbook based.)

The idea is that if you've got a picture of a fish you don't just show the kids the picture. They've seen a fish before, and so what? (In fact, lately little kids have been showing me their Nemo souvenirs - not only have they seen a picture of a fish, but they've also seen the movie.)

Instead of just showing your trophy, what you do is that you cover it. Then you invite speculation. What could this possibly be? And, as the kids guess, their interest builds up.

I put this technique to good use yesterday at an elementary school where my mission was to teach the kids about cultural differences between Japanese kids and New Zealand kids.

First, I established that every New Zealand kid takes a bag to school, then I invited them to guess what might be in the bag, and approved suitable guesses, such as "pens" and "pencil case" and "notebook." Then, finally, I got the guess I was looking for, which was "boxed lunch." (In Japanese, "bentō.")

Having super-approved that guess, I established that THERE IS NO SCHOOL LUNCH SYSTEM IN NEW ZEALAND SCHOOLS!! (Gasps of shock and disbelief from some quarters of the audience ... incredible revelations about unknown parts of the universe ....)

Then I told the kids that when I was a kid I took my own lunch to school, and, what's more, in my bag, the bag right in front of their own eyes, there was exactly the same lunch, and what might that be? Rice? Good try, but not rice.

After some guesses, I started doing the progressive revelation bit with the article in question, gradually drawing it out of the depths of my black knapsack. And suddenly there was a rush forward and I was swamped knee-deep in kids, all eager to accelerate the revelation.

(The revealed object, the unguessable alien artefact, was a plastic bag freighted with peanut butter sandwiches. I did indeed take these to school every day when I was a kid, and on some days, even now, they constitute my lunch.)