Kathleen Graves
(1979-80, 85)
I was at LIOJ from June 1979 to June 1980. I taught university students in the summer, then in the residential program for business people as well as the community program for adults. My strongest memory of that year is the camaraderie among the teachers, among the students, and among all of us together. I shared teaching ideas with all my colleagues, drank Penny James' single malt scotch and shared stories and bad jokes with Donald Freeman, Warrick Liang, Joyce Yukawa, Howie Gutow and Bill Robbins among many others. We ate suspicious looking hotate gai in the LIOJ dining room with the students, and then went out with them to drink beer and really learn about each other's cultures.
We had a lot of freedom in the classroom: freedom to soar and freedom to fall. When I work with teachers now I often tell the story of how I sat my very first group of university students in a circle, plunked a tape recorder in the middle and asked them to have a conversation. The frozen silence spoke volumes... I had so much to learn about Japan and how to help learners feel comfortable with each other in English. Eventually I did figure out how to help students generate their own texts by setting it up as an interview on a topic of their choice. One student chose to be interviewed about his baby daughter and revealed under questioning that her name was the name of a former girlfriend! I also asked students to write short texts. I saved the interviews and the texts. Here is one written by a business student: "I'm very happy. After dance party, I drank beer until 1:00 AM. I had a everyday hard schedule like VIP. I never go to bed before midnight since I came to LIOJ. And I drink more whisky than at home. But of course I study twice as much as drinking. Don't worry."
One of the university students from my first class, Naoko Kimura, became a good friend. Her family had a fish shop in a town on the Daiyuzan line and Donald and I visited them regularly for halting, but heartfelt conversation in Japanese and delicious fish dinners. Naoko came to Vermont to visit us some years later.
LIOJ and Odawara were my introduction to Japan and I have felt a lasting bond with Japan and Japanese culture ever since.
February 2003
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