Neglected Students

I’m troubled on how to best teach my classes, both for myself and for the students. Today, the teachers told me that it is not uncommon for my high schoolers to have trouble distinguishing Bs from Ds (both upper and lower case), and that they don’t remember words. Some of them can only remember the order of the ABCs because they have never developed the ability to use letters like building blocks. Forget about pronunciation, they told me.
There is something seriously wrong with kids being forced to learn stuff that they have no interest in or use for. Even if I do bust my ass working on a great lesson, most of them will not appreciate it, because they will be sleeping or in their own little worlds.
It’s really scary to think that I can’t even use the same elementary school lessons in high school because they’re too advanced, and the high schoolers are harder to control. I don’t think anyone will be able to convince me that the education system in Japan is better than ours back in the U.S..
Their time and the educational funding would be better used teaching the kids what they need to know for life after high school. Classes in parenting and birth control, time and money management, and trade skills that they can use in the real world are what they really need. I can see that many of them are destined to go through much suffering, because they will not be adequately prepared for their futures (the seniors are graduating in December).
It’s too depressing to think about the education program as a whole in Japan, pertaining to teaching English. After shogakko, the majority of the students will develop a distaste for English, and will be conditioned to lose their self-confidence. I shudder to think what will happen when standardized English lessons will be implemented across Japan in a few years. It could make things better, but the track record suggests otherwise.