Yoroshiku onegaishimasu !

Starting over is always hard. No matter how many times you do it, walking into a new workplace on the first day takes a bit of guts. Especially when that workplace looks a little bit like a prison. And 95% of the inhabitants don't speak your native language.

Even so, I've found my transition between schools has gone much more smoothly than I could ever have hoped. The students and teachers at my new base Junior High School have welcomed me with open arms. While not every class goes perfectly, and not every student loves English, by and large the experience has been very positive.

I think this is partly because I know a bit more about how the schools and classes operate than I did last year at this time. My Japanese, still not strong, has also improved to a point where I can make decent small talk with any kid who feels up to chatting with this crazy foreigner who has invaded their classroom. As well, my "entertaining Japanese school children" shtick has also improved.

I've made it a point to get a bit more involved too, popping by the ping pong and kendo clubs with some regularity. I have played a few games of ping pong, but haven't made any attempts at crossing swords with the kendo kids. Humiliation over a table tennis game is one thing, but those bamboo swords look like they'd leave quite the bruise!

The 2nd years, about the same age as an American 8th grade class, seem to form my biggest fan club so far. One impossibly cute girl can not see me in the halls without a high five, and one of the boys will always make me stop for a quick conversation. I've even got him saying "what's up?" instead of the omnipresent "How are you?" and it's "I'mfinethankyouandyou" reply.

The new school is a bit larger than Miyagi, with an extra class per grade I have 3 1st year classes, 4 2nd year classes and 3 3rd year classes, certainly enough to keep me busy. I don't have a dedicated computer terminal this time around, which keeps me a bit more focused on work, but can make days with no classes really drag.

The new elementary schools are also quite nice. I'm proving quite popular with the 3rd and 4th graders for my acumen at tag (called onigokko here) and piggy back rides. Though of course when playing tag, I seem to find myself "it" rather often. For all the frustration and occasional hardships that come with this job and lifestyle, getting paid to make kids laugh and smile, and sometimes speak English, isn't all that bad at all.

The Beginnings of Goodbyes

     I slipped quietly into the elementary school gymnasium so as to not disturb the singing sixth years. They were lined up, accordions in the front to flutes in the back practicing their farewell song. In a few short weeks they will graduate and move up the ladder of life to the middle school up the road.
     A short time later they filed out, and things got underway for the "goodbye party." Party seems like the wrong word, though that is what it said on my schedule. I'd call it a "farewell assembly." Each class had prepared a song to sing to congratulate the sixth years on their completion of elementary school. Even the youngest kids had instruments and had obviously practiced quite hard for the day. The fourth year classes even had coordinated dance moves!
     The fifth years did something a little different, with various skits reenacting the whole elementary school experience. They even managed to squeeze in some pretty pointed jabs at some of the teachers that had the whole audience laughing. At one point, a rather rotund young man came bursting out dressed in a toga to pose as the great Buddha statue at Kamakura. I am always amazed at the depths of creativity in these kids, especially as it doesn't always show itself in class.
     Even the teachers (sans me, who is only there once a week) got into the act, with a rousing rendition of the popular song Kiseki complete with electric guitar, violin and trombone! The whole thing was a lot of fun, even though a lot of it went over my still tragically limited Japanese listening skills.

    On the middle school side of things, I got a chance to go to the big end of year drinking party attended by staff from every middle school in Maebashi. The invite went something like this...

"Grant sensei, are you coming to the party on Friday?"
"Uh.. this Friday?"
"Yes"
"Uh... sure."
"Ok, be there at 6:00"

     So I was expecting just a normal staff party, with just people from my school and a nice, casual dress code. What I got was 200 people in suits, and me in jeans and a t-shirt. Oooops. Luckily once the beer starts to pour, nobody cares, and honestly as a foreigner, they don't really care anyway. The before party speeches did drag a bit, looking around I saw a great many teachers had nodded right off!
     As always with a big event like this, the food was excellent, and the beer was plentiful. During Japanese drinking parties you never pour your own drink, you allow others near you to pour for you. Also, people will often get up and walk over to an authority figure to pour their drinks as a sign of respect. Well, I was sitting next to the Vice-Principle and a lot of people came over to pour his drink, then went ahead and topped me up since I was right there. Being that I am by nature a thirsty person my glass was often in need of some attention. (Seriously, it doesn't matter what I'm drinking, water, coke, juice, beer, margaritas... I drink lots and a drink fast.)
    One nice thing about this particular shindig was that since every school was in attendance, I wasn't the only foreigner for once. Several good friends were also there, so I got to have some nice chats in something other than broken Japanese.

     The school year is rapidly winding down, and everybody is in for some big changes over the next few weeks. Good thing too, without change life just wouldn't be interesting would it?

School Lunch

              A bright point of any work day is lunch. The day is at least half over, and a nice break with good food is always appreciated. Working as an ALT, eating Japanese school lunches, lunch becomes both a break in the day and a bit of a game of roulette.

             

              In some ways I am luckier than a great many other ALTs, in that I have always made learning how to read Japanese menus a high priority. At the beginning of every month all the teachers receive a list of every lunch for that month with a nutritional break down. For those who can’t read much Japanese this is not a big help, and every day brings a new surprise.

              I can usually read most of what is coming, and at least figure out if the lunch will be good or bad. This being Japan, there is a lot of fish on tap, though it is usually a random hunk of cooked fish, a meal that rarely appeals to my landlocked taste buds. The variety is actually rather amazing. Naturally most of the time lunch is Japanese food, but there are plenty of meals inspired by Chinese, Korean and Western cooking.

              I say inspired by because like most things here, these cuisines have been filtered through that uniquely Japanese sense of taste. Things that should be spicy have been robbed of all pep, and beware of anything that should have cheese in it.

              Each lunch is actually quite balanced though, with fruit, veggies, protein and carbs. Really, aside from the occasional bad tasting clunker, the lunches are pretty good. The real problem for the ALT is that each serving is intended for a growing young junior high school student. They pack a pretty big punch calorie wise, and yet the serving size rarely seems like quite enough, which makes seconds a tempting but risky proposition.

              As someone who never ate school lunch growing up, I have nothing to compare my lunches too, but I think that generally they do a good job. Not every lunch is a winner, but that holds true when restaurant hopping in downtown Denver too.

Festivals Both Sporty and Cultural

In Japan festivals aren’t limited solely to religious celebrations; every school also has a few festivals of their own throughout the year. In September every school has a Sports Festival. The basic idea is like the American Field Day, with races and fun sporty activities for the kids. However, the sports festival is a much bigger deal here. The schools practice for weeks ahead of time. Classes are canceled in the afternoon while the kids practice every aspect of every activity.

When the day comes, there are opening and closing ceremonies with speeches, and more. One of my schools even had food vendors set up in the parking lot! At the elementary schools the marching band took the field after lunch for a quick display for the assembled parents and siblings. Being September, and being that we were coming off a blisteringly hot summer, I didn’t envy those kids tromping through the sunny field in their full dress uniforms. 

In addition to the old field day standards like the relay race, they have more unusual events like whole class jump rope. One of my favorites was a team event where four kids would support one on their shoulders. The top kid would have a hat on, and their job was to collect the hats of the other teams, without surrendering their own hat. It was fun to watch and looked fun to play too!

The other, more recent, festival was the Culture Festival. Each school does something different for their Culture Festival. My junior high school set it up so each class (there are 7) wrote and performed a play. Each play was about 20 minutes, and they were wildly different.

One involved a young girl who gets a bad grade on her test, and commits suicide. She doesn’t die right away though, and has time to regret her choice. At the end though, she died anyway. It was beautiful and grim all at once, and absolutely fantastic even if you don’t consider it was written and performed by 13 year olds. Another featured a love story set in the turmoil of the Meiji Era, and climaxed with a sword fight vs the Shinsengumi.

While a lot of the more intricate plot details escaped me, my Japanese listening needs a lot of work, I still had a great time watching my kids give these plays their all. After the lunch break there was an interlude of traditional dances from a local dance troupe. That was followed by a musical presentation by some of the students. The elementary school students came in around then, in time to watch the last two plays. Some of them spotted me sitting in front and I could here whispers of "look, its Grant-sensei!" behind me. Like any proper movie star, I looked back and waved at my adoring fans.

              Both festivals were a lot of fun, a way to really experience some of the differences between growing up in America, and growing up in Japan.

A few more stories from school

     One of the really fun things about living overseas is seeing how different cultures approach things differently. The other day I was in the teachers room for lunch, and a fly had been buzzing around the curry rice and generally causing a ruckus. One of the teachers grabbed a fly swatter and sent the little bugger to meet his maker. Now, so far so normal, after all we have fly swatters in America too. Swatter meets fly, fly gets smooshed, we all live happily ever after (well, except for the fly, who got smooshed.) However, in Japan, rather than use a tissue or even just your hands to transfer the recently deceased to the trash can, the teacher removed a pair of special, fly handling chopsticks from the handle of the fly swatter. What a genius idea, it’s quick, easy and relatively clean. The tips of those chopsticks did look pretty heinous though.
     That same day I saw the groundskeeper fire up a mini flamethrower to burn weeds. The thing sounded like a mini jet engine, and looked like both a chore and sorta fun too. Anytime you get to light stuff on fire you can have at least a little bit of fun. I have since decided that perhaps burning weeds is more common than I had thought, but for me it was an entirely new phenomenon. After all, it is so dry in Colorado that if somebody sneezes too hard you can start a forest fire that consumes thousands of acres. Burning weeds back home would be like swimming with sharks, without the shark cage and with an open cut!
     As I’ve mentioned, I live in the countryside. My schools are all even further from the city center, such as it is, than I am. A few weeks ago at one of my elementary schools they did a schedule change, because the 5th graders were planting rice. Of course, in modern Japan there are all sorts of agricultural machines that obviate the need for the backbreaking task of planting rice by hand, but I guess the school felt that it would be a good experience to have. Perhaps as a way of seeing just how people lived up until pretty recently. I wasn’t there to see the planting, though I did drive by the field on the way to work, but I did see the aftermath. The kids were drenched in mud. Now, I’ve never planted rice, though looking at those water filled paddies I can imagine its messy work, but I think that you could probably do it without looking like a victim of a spa mud bath gone horribly wrong. I saw that as a (responsible?) adult though, not as a hyperactive 5th grader. I suppose that if you took my 12 year old self and dumped him in a rice paddy planting those little shoots, I would have ended up much the same way.
     Many buildings in Japan have what is called a genkan, an area at the entrance for taking off and storing your shoes. Houses, schools, some hotels, restaurants and more all have this uniquely Japanese architectural addition. The idea of course is to keep the indoors cleaner by not tracking in mud, dirt and dog poop. The reason I bring this up is that it really didn’t matter that the mud drenched young rice farmers took off their shoes. It didn’t even matter that they had all been sprayed off outside, there were still little footprints of water and mud making a trail from the entryway to the changing room on the 2nd floor. I did an inform poll though, asking if their trip out to the fields had been fun, and 100% of respondents said yes!

Domo-Kun is Dead, a few tales from class

We do a listening test at the start of every third grade junior high school class (9^th grade by American counting). I read out a series of sentences that they have studied, and they write them down. However, the other day I accidentally read the wrong sentence and I saw 30 Japanese students looking up at me with their best `huh?` faces. I felt bad, but I couldn’t help laughing a bit inside, they just all looked so adorable in their puzzlement. 

I did an activity in class where the students broke up into groups and created a news interview based on a few options I gave them. Among the possible interview subjects I came up with were Tokugawa Ieyasu, the founder of the Tokugawa Shogunate, a rock star, and Domo-kun, the cute fuzzy mascot of NHK, a Japanese TV broadcaster.

Most groups basically followed the example pattern I had laid out, but one group took the basics and ran for, and past, the goal line. While their reporter was interviewing Domo-kun in Tokyo Dome, a rock star came up from behind and shot him in the head! The nonplussed reporter then continued the interview with the assassin. I was absolutely flabbergasted at this unexpected turn of events.

Later in that same class, we were reviewing the sentence structure "Have you ever…"  and I asked "Have you ever seen Godzilla?" I pronounced it the American way, rather than the Japanese Gojira, and they didn’t really get what I was asking at first, so I did my best T-Rex/ Godzilla impersonation complete with sound effects, and the whole class just lost it laughing. There were quick calls for, "one more!" so I took an informal poll, and over half the class wanted more Godzilla, so I tucked away my pride and did it again. Ill be keeping the king of the kaiju tucked away, ready to dust him off if I need to.

A Day's Work

Well, I finished my first full day of actual work today, and I must say that it felt good. The first day of school was last Wednesday, but I didn't teach as much of the day was spent on welcome ceremonies. My base school that I will be spending three days a week at is a Middle School, or in Japanese a chūgakkō　中学校.  In the Japanese school system elementary school covers six grades, middle school three grades and high school three grades. So I will primarily be teaching middle school first, second and third graders aka ichinensei　一年生, ninensei　二年生 and sannensei　三年生. 

The day started with a welcome ceremony for the second and third graders with a good number of speeches, including a short one from yours truly that had my legs quaking something fierce. I don't know why, I've never really had anxiety speaking before, but one minute of introduction to a hundred Japanese kids had me terrified! That assembly was followed by a far more lavish ceremony for the incoming first graders.

The auditorium was filled with teachers, students, parents, local community leaders and more, and the youngsters paraded down the center of the seating with almost military precision. There followed more speeches, introductions and a rousing rendition of the school song and the national anthem.

However, once the ceremonies were over, my job was done for the week! In all the hubub of getting the new school year started nobody needed any input from the assistant language teacher, so I was left to plan lessons for this week and study the name kanji of the teachers. Doing nothing while appearing to do something is actually very hard work, and yet is also excruciatingly boring.  By Friday I was well on the road around the bend, and only a fantastic weekend saved what little is left of my sanity.

Luckily, today was a much more productive and fun day. I used the lessons I planned last week in four classes, both sannensei classes and both ichinensei classes. Finally making it to the classroom was fantastic, the kids were a lot of fun, full of curiosity and enthusiasm, well except for the girl who slept through part of the class. Simply getting out of the teachers room and DOING something was more than enough to turn my frown upside down, and the whole day passed much more quickly than any day last week. I have four more classes tomorrow, followed by a mere two on Wednesday, though these will be the first actually taught from the textbook rather than introduction lessons drawn from my own life and imagination. Thursday and Friday will bring an entirely new adventure, as I see just what teaching elementary school is like!

Merry Chris

Santa came to Kanazawa a little bit early this year! Of cousre depressingly enough I was Santa. I didn't think I was really old enough to play Santa yet, but our kid's Christmas party proved me wrong. *sigh*

Itchy beard aside, we had a pretty great two hours. The kids all got to make a 3D Christmas Tree Card, play Christmas Bingo, and of course exchange gifts.



We had them write a message on their cards, "Merry Christmas, Love From ______." One of them ran out of room so his just said "Merry Chris." Stickers ended up all over the cards, tables, and sometimes faces! One of our students, a mere two years old the poor thing, got as her gifts a pen and stationary set. Oops!



Even with the dash of insanity that you will have when you get a bunch of little 'uns in the same room, it was a success, and a lot of fun for all involved. A big thank yo u to Mo for coming out and helping us on a Saturday morning, without her it would have been a pretty poor party. (I have long ago learned that while I may have many useful skills, party planning is most certainly NOT one of them.)

School Stories

Christmas is coming soon, at least in Japan it is. Our Halloween Decorations came down and Sachiko had me brainstorm a way to make a Christmas tree. The finished product is minimalist but looks nice. I'm still bitter about it going up over two months before the holiday though!

The other day I was teaching superlatives to a pair of 9 year old girls. Big, bigger, biggest. Fast, faster, fastest. So I asked them if they could think of anymore, and they came up with a few, happy, happier, happiest; funny, funnier, funniest; Grant, Grantier, Grantiest.... What? Then they started debating, should it be Grant, Granter, Grantest, or Granty, Grantier, Grantiest. I leave it up to my loyal readers to decide what the proper superlative form of my name is.

A couple of weeks ago I was teach the Evil Class of Doom that I have. Two brothers, both of whom have a tendency to scream and generally carry on, luckily it's the only class that really gives me grey hairs. Anyway, we were playing Snakes and Ladders and the younger boy threw the dice at me to take my turn. They hit me and rolled to the floor, where I saw the magical 3 that I needed to win the game. So I didn't bother to reroll and just went with it, as class was already a bit over time. The youngest did not take this well. He took it so poorly in fact that he whipped down his pants and exposed his 'bathing suit area'. I felt suitably punished, and I think I said a very bad word and "Put that away!"

I have a class with a pair of two-year olds that can be a challange to teach. I was teaching them feelings, happy, sad, angry, excited and so on, and they got happy down pat. But when I flashed the card for sad, rather than use the English one of them just said "Happy ja nai!" Basically, Not Happy, in Japanese. I said, "Well yes but in English it is Sad. Sad. Sad."

"Happy ja nai!"

"Sad"

"Happy ja nai!"

"Sad"

"Happy ja nai!Happy ja nai!Happy ja nai!Happy ja nai!"

*Teacher Cries*

A real teacher?

I rarely talk about my classes and such, but I have a quick little story that I thought I should share.

I have one class with a pair of late middle school age girls, I think both are 13 or so. One has been in the class for 11 weeks now, and has of course gotten used to the hairy scary gaijin. She is also pretty sharp, and has a background in English study. The other girl just transferred to our school from Sapporo a couple weeks back. She is really shy anyway, and the move probably hasn't helped much.

Anyway, last week I had them write a short paragraph about their best friend for homework. The girl I've had for a while turned a perfectly fine paragraph, a few minor mistakes, but only 3 sentences. The new girl turned in a page. We are talking a mini-essay here. It was shot through with errors, but that didn't matter. She wrote this long piece on her friend that she left up in Sapporo, and how great her friend was, and how happy she was that her friend came to visit over vacation. I have to say it really touched me. I felt bad marking the hell out of it in my red pen, so I made sure to write a big smiley face and "great job!!!!" on it too. I was really impressed with the effort she went to, and it made me feel like a real teacher.

A fate narrowly avoided

This post is rated pg-13

ok, all the 14 and aboves gone?

good.

Among Japanese youngsters there is a trend where you attempt to "kancho" people. Now some of you may know what this is, but for the rest, a quick explanation. Kancho is when you take your finger, and try and jam it in another persons rear end. Why this is appealing I can not in truth say. However it is a fact.

Now I myself am lucky, most of my students are females above the age of 12. This is not the ideal Kancho demographic, that being boys between say 8 and whenever. Now I have a newish student, today was the 4th lesson or so, and since the very first I could tell he was a prime suspect for Kancho attempts.

I was right.

Luckily for my bum, he missed. Today. However I now know to keep my senses fully attuned, ready for any attempt. I intend for him to never succed, almost more for his sake than mine. Almost.