Foreign English Teacher Under Attack For Playing Hangman Game
My head hurts after reading this Mainichi article. Apparently a foreign English teacher is being attacked for using Hangman to help students learn English at a junior high school where a student committed suicide by hanging in 2008. Apparently somebody dug through the student’s school papers and found some hangman drawings from English class(shown above), giving the parents of the student an excuse to blame the school for their child’s death:
The parents of the student who killed himself, meanwhile, are angry. “This kind of teaching is a problem,” they have said.
The testimony of several current and former students led to the discovery. According to the students, since at least 2007, the teacher has used the drawings on the blackboard, adding a line and circle to the picture every time a student can’t answer a question or answers a question incorrectly, gradually forming a complete picture that resembles a person who has been hung.
According to the parents of the third-year junior high student who hung himself on school grounds in November 2008, in his school notes there were also pictures that looked like hanging victims. At the wake for their son, the parents showed the picture they had found to their son’s friend, who told them that it resembled pictures drawn by the English teacher in class, the parents say.
One graduate of the school said, “I considered it a part of a game, a harmless black joke. But, now, thinking about the fact that someone killed themselves, I don’t think it was a good idea.”
Another student said, “It was also going on in 2009 (after the suicide).”
[...]
According to Professor Kazumi Fujimori of Musashino University, a clinical psychologist and author of the book “Gakko Trauma to Kodomo no Kokoro no Care” (School trauma and care for the minds of children), the use of the pictures could almost be considered a form of “power harassment,” when a person abuses their position of authority to harass others in the workplace.
There is evidence that the student mentioned in school that he had been browsing suicide websites, but most of the focus seems to be on the terrible foreigner who drove the child to suicide with “power harassment.” A Yomiuri article states that the parents are suing the school and demanding a considerable about of money.
Hangman is a game in which the objective is to save someone from execution. It is widely used at schools in the United States, where nobody associates it with suicide or harassment. Nevertheless, using the hangman game in class after the suicide was probably not a good idea, assuming that the foreign English teacher even knew about the suicide. In most cases, a Japanese teacher would have to approve lesson plans before use, so it’s hard to imagine why the hangman game continued after the suicide. A lot of ALT’s are told practically nothing about what goes on outside of their English class, and ALT’s who aren’t fluent in Japanese often work inside a virtual bubble, relying on Japanese English teachers for most of their information about conditions at schools. Also, given the high turnover rate for ALT work, it’s quite likely that the English teachers who used the hangman game after 2008 were not even teachers at the school at the time of the suicide.
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