Cleaning Time
Everyone at school is responsible for keeping the school clean. There are no janitors…instead, there is a 15 minute ‘cleaning period’ during which teachers and students will clean the school building and grounds.
Everyone is always very careful about how they dispose of their garbage. In the staff room, there are over 6 different kinds of bins. When I first got here, I had to check with teachers before I could throw things away. (ie ink pens, scotch tape, etc.)
Teachers oversee groups of students who are assigned to different areas of the school, and cleaning supplies such as brooms, vacuum cleaners, garbage bags, wipers, toilet paper, rakes etc..can be found in closets spread around the school.
All the garbage must be separated into burnables, non-burnables, plastic, and other. Once garbage bags are brought from all areas of the school to the garbage area behind the school, one of the groups of students’ job is to sort through the bags and make sure garbage is correctly separated.
The idea of having ‘cleaning time’ is so engrained in how Japanese work here…it starts when they’re in pre-school. It makes the kids become more responsible for their actions in regards to littering.
I’m responsible for the cleaning in the Oral Communication room. Some of the cleaning that’s done in the OC room: chairs are pulled to one side of the room in order to vacuum the carpet, while some students clean the windows, dust the TV and VCR, erase the whiteboard, make sure the markers for the whiteboard work, change the garbage, clean the shoe shelf, etc. There's usually very upbeat music playing over the loud speakers during cleaning time…I guess that’s one way to motivate everyone to move faster!
Here's a couple of pictures from today's cleaning time with the 1st year students who are assigned to the OC room:
Everyone is always very careful about how they dispose of their garbage. In the staff room, there are over 6 different kinds of bins. When I first got here, I had to check with teachers before I could throw things away. (ie ink pens, scotch tape, etc.)
Teachers oversee groups of students who are assigned to different areas of the school, and cleaning supplies such as brooms, vacuum cleaners, garbage bags, wipers, toilet paper, rakes etc..can be found in closets spread around the school.
All the garbage must be separated into burnables, non-burnables, plastic, and other. Once garbage bags are brought from all areas of the school to the garbage area behind the school, one of the groups of students’ job is to sort through the bags and make sure garbage is correctly separated.
The idea of having ‘cleaning time’ is so engrained in how Japanese work here…it starts when they’re in pre-school. It makes the kids become more responsible for their actions in regards to littering.
I’m responsible for the cleaning in the Oral Communication room. Some of the cleaning that’s done in the OC room: chairs are pulled to one side of the room in order to vacuum the carpet, while some students clean the windows, dust the TV and VCR, erase the whiteboard, make sure the markers for the whiteboard work, change the garbage, clean the shoe shelf, etc. There's usually very upbeat music playing over the loud speakers during cleaning time…I guess that’s one way to motivate everyone to move faster!
Here's a couple of pictures from today's cleaning time with the 1st year students who are assigned to the OC room:
I had my camera in the classroom because the period before cleaning time was when the last class was doing their Cultural Presentations. I took pictures of each group that presented, with the intention of blowing up the picture of the best group in each class to stick up in the OC room.
Anyways, since I had my camera, we took some pictures :)
posted by Meeshe at 4:27 AM
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