To All My Students of Notre Dame Women's College, Kyoto, Japan

[Cover photo: Kenneth Wright]

TO ALL MY STUDENTS

By:

Kenneth Wright

[AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following short essay was written for my students at Kyoto Notre Dame University (previously Notre Dame Women's College) in Kyoto, Japan, upon my retirement in March, 2010, as a Professor of the English Language after teaching them for 37 years.]

To all my students from the very first to the very last and to all of you in between. When I received the letter from Sister Celine Matsumoto in December, 1972, officially informing me that I was to be hired as a full-time lecturer of English Language for the English Department of Notre Dame Women’s College, I knew nothing about you. But when I began to teach you in my Language Training (now Speaking and Listening) classes in April, 1973, you delighted me with your sunshine smiles and singing laughter in my classroom and your cheerful waves to me in the corridors.

During my 37 years of teaching you to communicate using the English Language, I have tried to make those tedious hours of repetitious pattern drills pass more enjoyably by talking about you and your lives and getting to know you. In my Conversation I and II classes, as we could talk much more about each other’s lives, I got to know you far better and learned that sometimes your sunshine smiles on the outside hide cloudy tears of sadness and anxiety on the inside. And finally I was able to discuss various issues with some of you in the more formal atmosphere of my English Discussion Course in the MA program and learn all the more that you have beautiful minds to match your sunshine smiles. Most of you came in as girls but left as young women. Watching you grow during that beautiful season of your lives has been a great joy to me.

But just as Notre Dame Women’s College has changed over the years into Kyoto Notre Dame University, you also have changed. You no longer wear the brown uniform of “cockroaches”. Most of you now seek jobs instead of husbands upon your graduation. Some of you have become my colleagues and good friends on the English Department faculty or on other faculties. Some of you have become office department heads here at Notre Dame. Some of you have become teachers at our Jogakuin [middle and high school] or elementary school or at public high schools and middle schools in various prefectures throughout Japan. Some of you have greeted me in your flight attendant uniforms as I boarded one of your flights at Kansai Airport. Some of you have even founded your own companies. And some of you are the mothers of some of you that I have taught recently.

But just as you have changed over the years, so have I. And at the end of March of this year [2010] it became my turn to “graduate” from Notre Dame, too. As you go on with your adult lives, I hope that you will remember me in some small way. I know I will never forget you.

So, thank you all for the 37 years of wonderful sunshine that you have brought into my life. But thank you most of all for being . . . YOU!

[Author's Note: If you found the above interesting, perhaps you will be interested in my short novel, An American Love Song in Survival Japanese, that I have posted on Booksie.com as well and based very vaguely on my many experiences of living more than 40 years here in Japan.]