Often when children begin physically fighting or acting out in Japanese classrooms, the teacher will simply ignore it, or verbally reprimand the combatants if things are getting too out of hand but still stand to the side and not actively get involved. Professor Joseph Tobin of Arizona State University said that the teachers aren't being lax. Instead, acting as if they don't see the fighting is "a performance intended to encourage the girls to relate to each other and solve their own problems rather than" turning to the teacher. One American teacher who taught in Japan told Hopgood that she was concerned that sometimes Japanese teachers didn't interfere when they should, but Hopgood tried letting a few physical arguments her daughter had with other children run their course, as long as they weren't getting too violent, and found that the children often resolved the issue themselves.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
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