Sukegawa Junior High School

Sukegawa Junior High School
Sukegawa Junior High School began by borrowing a school building, Nissei Seinen School (currently Hitachi Kougyo High School) in 1947. In the following year, it merged w ith Ose Junior High School on September 10. This day became the anniversary of the founding of this school. In 1951, the school moved to the present premises. The principal of the school is Mr. Shigeyuki Kashimura. His ideals for the school are introduced in five simple phrases, which are, “cheerful”, “no-bullying”, “beautiful”, “filled with smiles” and “compassionate”. We noticed that the hallways and classrooms were very clean. The students were very polite during our visit. Isn’t it difficult to teach junior high school students to have such good manners? Mr. Kitazawa, the vice-principal answered our question. He said it is not like imposing rules or teaching strictly, the teachers only tell the students the essentials, then trust the students and watch them warmly. These attitudes cause a chain reaction of trust between teachers and students. Regarding information technology(IT) education, the school had been the designated school by the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology from 2001 to 2003. IT education is one of the areas which have been worked on eagerly at the school. They have 6 personal computers in the hallways so that any student can browse homepages freely, and 42 PCs in the computer room for IT classes.
Mr. John Noland from Birmingham, USA, has been the ALT of the school. He assists with every English lesson. We took a look at the 2nd year’s English lesson. The students repeated new words and phrases after Mr. Ikenaga, the English teacher and Mr. Noland. During a role-play, they scattered and found partners to practice dialogues. Mr. Noland also moved around and helped students with expressions and pronunciation. Mr. Ikenaga thinks that thanks to Mr. Noland, the students have less of a mental barrier towards speaking English. There are ten kinds of extra curricular clubs. More than 90% of the students belong to one of the clubs. The sports clubs are baseball, soccer, volleyball, table tennis, soft tennis, judo and kendo. The cultural clubs are brass band, and “culture activity club” which works on various cultural things like drama and pottery.

Some informations: The gyms of the school are open for local people after school and on holidays. The PE festival and the choral singing contest in autumn can be observed.