Hello! I’m Narumin, an elementary school teacher from Japan! 👩🏻🏫🇯🇵
During my summer vacation, I spent two weeks at a public elementary school in Cebu, the Philippines. 🇵🇭
And I quickly realized that many things I had always considered “normal” in Japanese schools were not normal at all.
No school lunch.
No school bells.
A store inside the school.
Different languages being spoken in the classroom.
Eight classes in one day.
As a Japanese teacher, I found myself thinking:
“Wow… school can be this different!”
I’ll share more about these differences in my next posts.
But first, why did I choose the Philippines?
Why the Philippines?
The Philippines has always been special to me.
When I was in junior high school, there were three or four Filipino students in my class, and around fifteen in my grade altogether.
I became friends with many of them, and through those friendships, I became interested in Filipino culture and the wider world.
When I was fifteen, I visited Cebu for the first time.
Years later, I came back—not just as a traveler, but as a teacher.
During this trip, I also reunited with a Filipino friend I had first met in Japan when we were in junior high school.
We had not seen each other for about ten years.
Meeting again—this time in the Philippines—reminded me how wonderful it is to have friends around the world. 🌏
Why a Filipino School?
In my hometown in Japan, there are many children who were born and raised in the Philippines.
I love how cheerful, friendly, and open many of them are.
At the same time, I sometimes notice differences in the way we see things—especially in how we connect with other people and how we approach life.
And something else had made me curious.
At school in Japan, some of the Filipino children I have met seem less interested in studying and rarely speak up in class.
So I started wondering:
What were they like before they came to Japan?
Were they more interested in learning?
Did they speak up more in class?
What were their relationships with teachers and classmates like?
I wanted to understand the children I meet in Japan better.
And to do that, I felt that I needed to understand the world they came from.
So I decided to see a Filipino school with my own eyes.
The Philippines Is Only the Beginning
Those two weeks gave me much more than I expected.
Experiencing a Filipino school made me question some of the things I had always considered “normal” in Japanese education.
And it made me even more curious.
What are schools like in other countries?
How do teachers teach?
How do children learn?
What is considered “normal” in their classrooms?
I want to keep visiting schools in different parts of the world, meeting teachers and children, and experiencing education with my own eyes.
In my next posts, I’ll share what surprised me inside a Filipino public school and what I learned from the teachers and children I met there.
The Philippines was my first step.
My journey into classrooms around the world has just begun. 🌏👩🏻🏫
