Why all the shouting?

I think I've mentioned it before, but the teachers' room in a Japanese school is quite different than what comes to mind when you hear those two words back home.

Let's go back in time a few years, when I was walking the halls of McLoughlin High School in Milton-Freewater, Oregon. Besides the administration office -- from where the school is run, from where discipline falls, from where announcements are born, to where sick notes are delivered -- besides that, in an infrequently traveled section of the hallway there was a secretive teacher's room. Students are left to wonder what goes on inside. Our intelligence reveals that they have vending machines, maybe two. A fridge. A microwave. Perhaps a coffee maker. Traces of inside jokes, things too naughty for the the students being shaped and molded and taught to be good in the classrooms that surround it.

The teachers' room, in the states, is off limits.

Cut to: Japan, a few years later, where at 8:25 in the morning, five minutes until the morning meeting in the teachers' room, uniformed students scurry in and out to check something with teachers, grab something for class or deliver a late assignment.

Back home, the teachers' room is really just a "break room," only noteworthy to students because they can't go inside. In Japan, the teachers' room is the nerve center of the school. Instead of keeping desks in their own classrooms, teachers keep desks here. Students stay together in the 40-person homerooms, most of their classes taking place in their home classroom with various teachers coming in for different lessons.

The teachers' room, then, feels like a hyperactive office environment, with teachers rushing back and forth between classes. The grouping of the teachers in one place (well, not exactly one place as there are several teachers' rooms in larger schools; there is always one "main" teachers ' room) reflects the communal aspect of Japanese culture, which gives preference to the group over the individual.

Back home, teachers, along with students, are encouraged to be individuals. Teachers have their own classrooms, which they can decorate as they please within reason. They can choose to hang maps or flags or comics to lighten the mood. In Japan, everything happens out front, in the teachers' room, within and among everyone else. Quick meetings take place from across the room, with people shouting their side of the conversation without looking at the other person. It can get incredibly noisy at times, which is really quite annoying, and some things that I would think should be discussed privately just unfold on the stage.

Another annoying aspect is the hovering. Oh, the hovering. Nearly every day, a woman from the administrative office across the hall comes in to the teachers' room looking for someone. If this person is not readily available, which they often aren't, she stands there waiting, hovering, making those of us not used to this environment go on edge, looking over our foreigner shoulders to see if there's anything we can do to help the hovering office lady (there isn't).

Yes, I could do without the shouting and the hovering (and of course the lack of freedom and independence that is inherent in this system, but this is Japan and we bid farewell to independence when we got off the plane). But I do like that teachers and students can interact freely. It can be fun to chat with students who have stopped in. Often they're curious to know what their ALTs are up to (and often, the answer ... is nothing).

Although I've never experienced the back-home system from the teachers' perspective, I feel that I would prefer it. Having your own classroom to shape as you wish, essentially your own really big office, is appealing. And I would rather not be tossed in to the middle of so many on-the-spot meetings at unnecessarily high volumes.

But this is Japan, and we teachers and ALTs work together as a unit, not as a independent operators. So it goes.