I never had to learn any in Calculus. We usually left them in exact form for elegance and precision. Rounding was frowned upon.

Edit: "exact" meaning leaving the square root of 2 as the square root of 2 (in math symbols of course). Any rounded form with an arbitrarily long number of decimal places would probably make the teacher think you had cheated with your calculator. Incidentally, good calculators can also solve things in exact form...

We're derailing from "school in Japan" into "math".

Knowing the numeric approximation of irrational roots is mostly useful for engineering/physics just to save time (after you've seen e, pi, and the square root of 2 a few thousand times they just tend to be remembered). And yes, its best to leave irrational roots in their symbolic form during the entire solution process. But then I'm not fond of allowing calculators at all into the learning process until the fundamentals are understood. The new symbolic calculators are indeed wonderous things though :)

Personally, I'm all for calculators in math classes. I'm also all for designing problems so they're useless. :p

(On a more cynical note: I'd be happy if the kids even took the time to learn to use their calculators. That'd be progress. I've yet to see a kid who could use his machine but didn't understand the math behind it.)

I thought they WERE already included in class? Besides, how did this become a math topic? I never liked math in school.

Slight derail... back to "school in Japan" and the joys of grade level kanji memorization.

That sounds like Chinese school @_@.

Do you have to pay tuition to go to public high school or are the costs included in taxes?

So in Japan, school begins in April and end in late January-ish?:confused::heh:

The Japanese school year begins in early April and ends in late March.

The longest break is from mid-July to the end of August—the hottest days of the year, where being in the classroom is pretty much unbearable—but students have summer homework, and pick up where they left off when they come back.

They get about a week for "winter vacation" (over New Year's) and a week or two for "spring vacation" between the end of one academic year and the start of the next, but both of those have homework, as well.

Also, club activities never really stop. When students have vacation, it's not like they don't come to school at all. They still have to attend whatever extracurriculars they're normally involved in.

that's like learning about school life from watching "The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy"....

A lot of what is seen in anime relating to school life is drawn from the writer's memories of *their* life in school -- so you need to subtract 5-20 years. OTOH, the system and the students change rather slowly so lot remains consistent. About the biggest impact to school life that is only recently being portrayed in anime is the overwhelming social changes due to cellphones. Uniforms are still the norm rather than the exception --- though the flamboyant uniforms seem to be less popular.

Recently the Japan education system has finally (about 10 years too late) started to grapple with the problem that cellphone usage has become a huge distraction from the educational process. There are movements to ban cellphones on campus --- though imho some updates to the teaching skills and process might be more effective :P :)

Just send the lessons by SMS... :p

Why just SMS? Japanese cell phones are equipped with email...

Yeah, as far as I know in Japan SMS are not even exist anymore, it was replaced by email years ago.

As far as I'm aware, students in most if not all countries have homework and club/extracurricular activities during vacations, so it's not a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. In Hong Kong, I had school orchestra practice right through summer and also a nice pile of summer homework (despite the fact that I went to an international school). Even my cousins in the US have marching band practice during vacations and need to analyse at least a dozen books for various AP courses before the start of the school year.

I wonder why mobile e-mail is not more popular in other countries. GSM/UMTS phones have had the capability to support mobile e-mail for several years already. It's a lot more versatile than SMS and packet communications are, on a per kilobyte basis, cheapter than SMS too. Definitely doesn't require fancy 3G technology like the rest of the Japanese mobile scene...

SMS is the biggest con game in telco history in the US. It costs nothing (piggybacks on existing tech) and they charge a fortune unless you flat rate it.

edit: sorry, I seem to be off-topic a lot lately....

Aye, afterschool activities are very common in the US (but you aren't encouraged to join a group or club whereas its kind of expected you will in Japan). Personally I think both the Japan and US educational systems could learn from each other.... (though usually school systems seem to glue on to the worst practices rather than "best practices")

Really? From what I heard from my cousins and friends, it appears that the pressure of college expectations usually does the trick of forcing American high school students to take on an insane number of extracurricular activities (they also seem to join lots of clubs in name only: members without contribution).

In the UK, on the other hand, extracurricular activites other than sports seem to be a whole lot rarer than in the US and Asia. Of course, my impressions might be down to the fact that my image of the UK was formed from interactions with provincial locals whereas most of what I know about life in the US comes from the Asian-American community.

Yes and no. It's a different kind of pressure: your peers don't expect you to (literally) "join the club" or else be seen as a slacker loser, so it's a do whatever you want thing on that front. But colleges do seem to like people with lots of activities, even if they keep telling everyone that they "want people who seem really passionate in a few activities" (uh-huh).

Frankly I think a few of them are rather pointless. Sports, bands, debate clubs, esoteric interests (anime ;) ), all those stuff are fine. But just how many of the students who join volunteer organizations do it with their hearts and not their calculating heads? I mean, when every goddamn scholarship wants you to be a goody-two-shoes with an exemplary track record in feeding the homeless or waste your Saturday mornings organizing useless marathons for one cause or another...

Yah, Lawful Good Paladins wins all.

I'm curious, though, do colleges in Japan even care about extracurricular activities at all? Or is it the exact opposite of the US, club membership an expected norm but doesn't play much of a role in college applications? I've had experiences with Asian schooling systems and they seem to care much more about your test scores from the "Big Entrance Test," and I hear Japan's the same. In a way I almost miss that kind of hardcore fit-everyone-in-a-box compared to the -- to me -- occasionally distasteful businesslike undertone of American higher education.

This topic is old but I felt I'd rather contribute to the general knowledge than start a new one.

I am interested in the age of teachers who work in Japan. Students usually graduate at 17, 18 or 19 years of age but become teachers requires baccalaureate degree or certification? Is teaching first job or? How old is the youngest when they can go back to teaching elementary, middle, high school? Is your senpai from last year possible teacher the next?

Curious also being is for transfer of teaching staff to school in same city. If you are middle school teacher, and you decide middle school is brat, can you transfer to high school teaching in a year with same district?

Also, do teachers stick with the same students throughout their high schools, or do they change every year like in United States?