Improved Approach to Learning by Ms. Karimata

 Jul. 12, 2022

This morning I saw a very interesting program on TV about an instructor who teaches junior high school students about one of the fiercest battles between Japan and the US during the second world war--the battle in Okinawa. 

Ms. Karimata is not a public school teacher. She is an outside speaker. She is invited to school and teach a lesson. Before she was invited, local war survivors would tell students stories of the battle. But with each passing year the numbe of story-tellers has been decreasing as one passed away after another as time went on.

Local school teachers were not able to come up with a good alternative to story-telling when Ms. Karimata offered an helping hand. 

Ms. Karimata (24) is an instructor who teaches about the battel in Okinawa. She uses active-learning skills to junior high and senior high students. She asks questions, gets learners to think, and makes them work in pairs and groups to exchange opinions. This allows them to learn a topic at deeper levels. She uses quizes to make it intereting, too.

Her lesson begins with a choice between leaving the island of Okinawa and staying there when America's landing was imminent. One student was asked which choice he would choose. He says, "Leave." Ms. Karimata asks, "Why?" He says, "'Cause I don't want to die." "Fair enough," Ms. Karimata responds. Immediately after this exchange, a short lecture was introduced to the students about the "Tsushima-maru Incident," in which a large evacuation boat named Tsushima-maru was sunken with　 a torpedo from a US submarine. One thousand four hundred eighty-four people lost their lives, 800 of which were children. The boy who had answered "Leave" a minute before dropped his jaw and remained speechless for a moment...

It's just a number of questions Ms. Karimata asks the participants to stimulate their imagination and get them to "think" in order to survive the harshest of situations.

Her lesson ends with a statement that there is no one correct answer that works for everyone, and that each one of us must think hard on what to do to survive.

Local public teachers were all highly impressed with the way Ms. Karimata had their students voluntarily engage in activities and they also looked tremendously inspired to see the young learners actively exchange their opinions and be inspired by their fellow classmantes' opinions.   

It is a new educational approach to learning about important topics that should be shared among many whose mission is transmission of valuable information.