John W. wrote:

> 8>< schnitt: introductory stuff

> So the question is: does the average Japanese elementary school kid
> routinely (her word) have that amount of homework in a single subject
> (or even altogether)?

Caveats:  I don't think we qualify as a "normal" family when it comes to 
education.  I grew up in a western suburb of Minneapolis where our 
public education was completely bilingual (German and English) through 
the tenth grade.  My Japanese wife has been speaking English since grade 
school, attended private schools, and spent her school vacations on Long 
Island from the age of 10 before attending UC Long Beach.  (She is the 
niece of the woman who became Japan's first full-time female employee of 
the Gaimusho [circa 1935] where she was a translator in German, Russian, 
and Manchu during WWII, and every on of the 17 kids in her father's 
generation of his family is, at least, bilingual.)

Answer: Our daughter is eight and in second grade at a Japanese school, 
thanks to a father who has many US clients who don't pay their bills in 
full or on time.  As an aside, we'd prefer that she was not 
Japan-educated and I am taking steps to ensure that she'll be in a 
US-style school for the start of third grade ... but that doesn't answer 
the question you presented here.

She seems to have homework in 2~4 subjects every night, mostly kanji, 
math, and her diary (sakubun), which is checked daily by her teacher. 
Most evenings she requires about 15~20 minutes per subject and is 
usually done in an hour or less.  Most of it seems like busywork to take 
pressure off of parents who might otherwise have to actually speak to 
their children but the kanji stuff always seems to me like work she 
should have done in school instead of learning another screechy, off-key 
song or new finger-painting techniques.

In addition, we have her studying non-Japanese using the "Hooked on ..." 
series (from the "Hooked on Phonics" people) structured learning series 
for Phonics (English), Math, and French which take about 20 minutes per 
unit each night.  She's about a year ahead of the other kids in math 
(can do her multiplication tables up to 20 and is starting division) and 
is reading English at a second-grade level.  It has also affected her 
Japanese as she writes book reports at a far more organized level than 
her classmates and her teacher says her written work is far more readable.

She can't leave the breakfast or dinner table without completing at 
least five pages (five questions per page) in a "Brain Quest" series 
pack -- her request.  We started her with the Second Grade level stuff, 
but had to dial it back to Kindergarten and First Grade because that 
series is very Ameri-centric (specific references to US kids books, some 
of which she has read, some she hasn't read in English, and some she 
doesn't know) and references US money, with which she is unfamiliar. 
Since I now do a lot of work for the Seventh Fleet, we have bills and 
coins laying around, but I don't think any Japanese family could pull 
that off without some work.  The folks who publish Dr. Seuss seem to 
have had a big hand in formulating a number of "reading" questions and 
they all involve books in the series that we haven't bought her ... yet.

The upshot is that she's becoming comfortably multilingual.  The 
downside is that I think I am going to have her spend a couple hours at 
the local gym where a friend -- who was once up for the Japan 
light-middleweight crown before he lost most of his hearing to mumps and 
was disqualified from professional boxing -- has offered to teach her 
how to counter some of the bullying she gets from local kids who are 
barely functional in Japanese.

-- 
CL