I’m resuming my report of last semester with the law students.
Law is a major that has evolved in terms of the personality of its students. It used to be a boring class. Students were serious—too serious—and, more importantly, too quiet. Some were just quiet and/or shy—not all want to be lawyers; many end up becoming office workers—but some were “passive-aggressively” quiet.
A few years ago, I taught an advanced class, and it was difficult to engage them. I thought I was unlucky and had ended up with a class full of shy students. Then one day, I ran into some of them in the “International Café” on campus. They were chatting with foreign students in fluent English. They just didn’t want to bother being active in my class.
However, law students have become livelier and friendlier over the past few years. Last year, they were probably my friendliest class.
This year, it felt like I had two different classes in the same room.
First, some majors — including law students — tend to segregate themselves by gender. This was the case this semester, too. Usually, and unsurprisingly in a country like Japan, the boys take up most of the space in the classroom, while the girls tend to huddle together. But this year, for some reason, it was the opposite. Despite the fact that the class was 60% boys and 40% girls, the girls occupied two-thirds of the classroom, while the boys squeezed into the remaining third. I’m not sure how it happened.
Everyone was friendly, but the boys were definitely a shy bunch. They were shy around the girls and with English, but not with each other, at least not in this configuration.
So I guess it worked. The downside is that while I got to know the girls a little, the boys were just one group to me. Apart from a few exceptions, I had a hard time seeing them as individuals. I’m already starting to forget some of them, despite the last class being a week ago. (I originally wrote this right at the end of the semester.)
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