End of First Week of Teaching

As you can probably tell by the unimaginative title, it's the end of my first week of teaching. It was pretty awesome, overall. I went to the fourth school today, and it was great. The kids were all really into it, even the 6th graders, who had been kind of apathetic at the last school. The 2nd graders in particular thought everything I did was funny. They kept asking me questions, which is great, because it is pretty easy and means I don't have to really lead the class or just do pronunciation, and I kept responding by imitating their crazy flailing to get attention and saying things in the crazy Japanese voices I can manage. My Japanese is just good enough to answer most of their questions, which usually range from, "what food do you like?" to "what bugs do you like?" The little kids are especially fun, and generally the kids will shout what little English they know as they run past in the school and try to get me to play with them at recess.

I also went to a special ed. class today, which was actually alright. They were all supposed to say "Hello, my name is ___," which is pretty standard for Japanese English classes. Most of them managed to do it, which was surprising. They also had to shake my hand. I am going to be crawling with diseases, so I make sure to wash my hands whenever I get a chance. One kid in this class held both my hands and kept talking to me in incomprehensible mumbled Japanese, but he was obviously interested in me, and the teachers thought it was hilarious. He didn't stop until they interrupted him.

I played basketball with some kids at recess, and they were amazed that I could almost dunk on what was probably an 8 foot hoop. A note about Japanese elementary schools: they are very weird.

Elementary schools are actually very organized, and the amount of English that the students are capable of is pretty surprising, but you wouldn't know it from first glance. The kids are given a lot of leeway and spend a lot of their time running around the school, essentially unsupervised. They clean the schools and serve the lunches, which I will probably explain further in a later post. A lot of their time seems to be spent doing things that have no apparent educational value, but they manage to learn all sorts of team-building skills in the process.

So, basically, I am completely tired today. I remembered that I had a camera in this computer, though, so I looked around a bit and figured out how to take pictures using it. So, I'll post my first picture from Japan, of a new beer that I found tonight from Asahi, which turned out to be pretty good.



That stuff in the plate by it is dried squid, which is really very good, but generally kind of expensive as snack food goes, so I don't eat it much. But, this was on sale, so I bought it to ease into the weekend.