School Spectacular

I have been meaning to put up some more stuff about the schools, but I have been sort of busy at night for the last couple days, so I haven't gotten around to it. So, this should cover the last few days.
On Wednesday, I was at one of the schools that's pretty far out in the country, which also happens to be probably the most hardcore about learning English. It is a great school to work at because they have lessons set up for pretty much the whole year and mostly just ask for suggestions or want me to do easy stuff like actual classwork.

The classes were all pretty much standard stuff. Usually there is some pronunciation practice/new vocab, and then we play some sort of game involving the stuff they just learned. I wish I could remember more about what happened in class since I know that is what people like to hear about, but I don't think there was anything too interesting. But, some cool stuff did happen at the school. By cool stuff, I mean free food.



One of the people who works in the office there brought in two plates of onigiri, which are riceballs at the end of the day, as well as a plate of Japanese-style pickles, and all the staff got to have some. The picture above is of the rice balls, and the one below is of the pickles. They even insisted that I have an extra rice ball, which was super nice of them, and appreciated, as sometimes I get hungry from work, especially at the end of the day.



They had the rice balls because the rice harvest just finished here, so this was new rice. The word for this is shinmai, which I looked up using my pocket electronic dictionary to check the Chinese characters. Apparently, it also means a newcomer, so when I was talking to the first grade teacher, I pointed to the riceballs and said, "shinmai," then pointed to myself and said, "shinami." She looked at me blankly for a second and then got it and thought it was hilarious. When somebody else came, she made me tell the joke again because she thought it was so good, I guess. A good time.

On Thursday, I went to one of the bigger schools. This is the one where the police came for whatever demonstration they were doing. I had a bunch of classes that day, a couple of which were more self-introduction, one to third graders and one to fourth graders. The third graders were very excited to see me and look at my stuff before class actually started, but then during the actual introduction, they weren't really paying attention. It was weird because usually kids are either really interested or just bored out of their minds, but these kids just weren't paying attention. It was like they had other things to do and kept talking to each other for some reason, which was a little weird to deal with, but no big deal.

I also had class with the special ed kids. It seems kind of pointless to be trying to teach them English, but I have to say it is about the most fun class in the whole town. There's this one kid who either doesn't know how or just doesn't care how to shake hands, so instead, he just holds both my hands and keeps mumbling Japanese, which the teachers and I think is funny. He won't stop until somebody physically makes him sit down. We also sang "If You're Happy and You Know It," or in Japanese "Shiawase something or other," and he decided that clapping would be less fun than shrugging and saying "mo" which I don't think means anything. He also kept doing that for the rest of class. Then we played a game of memory with cards featuring pictures of everyday objects. At the end of class, he decided to sit on my lap and give me a hug. Later, he gave me another hug while I was in the hallway saying goodbye. His hugs cannot be stopped by mere words, either.

At noon recess, I played dodgeball with kids of various ages, which was pretty awesome, because, as I think I have noted before, I am way better at sports than little kids are for some reason, so they think it is awesome when I can hit kids on the other team with the balls and catch their throws pretty much all the time.

My last class was supposed to be with sixth graders, but I didn't have a schedule, so I was just waiting in the office for students to come get me as I usually do. The teacher forgot to send them, I guess, so I didn't get called to class until it was mostly over. It was a fine, class, though, as the teacher is pretty good at getting the kids, who would normally be pretty shy and unwilling to participate, to get into it. I said I was sorry I had missed most of the class, but he said he forgot to send anyone, so it was ok. All in all, it was a good day, but very tiring.

On Friday, I was at the smallest school, which I started to realize is really sweet. Since there are so few students, the classes are all combined, meaning there are only three classes, so I get a bunch of rest time during the day.

In the morning, I went to the first and second graders' class to tell them about Halloween, which they didn't seem particularly interested. Fortunately, the teacher is very good at English, so I didn't even have to try putting words like costume and ghost into Japanese on my own. The kids got really interested, though, when we got to make Jack O' Lanterns. I'm not sure if that's how that should be punctuated. We used these little gourds/squashes instead of the classic American pumpkin, which made cutting them a little hard, but it worked out surprisingly well. The one lady who works in the office and whatnot even put candles in them, so here are some pictures:



There's the teacher cutting up one of the pumpkins, the Japanese word for which is kabocha. She did most of the cutting, which is probably good considering how good little kids are with knives.





There are a couple pictures of the kids with their Jack O' Lanterns. Sorry that the one picture is sideways. Like I've said, I don't know how to fix that on here and I had to take the pictures with my cellphone, so the quality is probably not the best. But, whatever.

The next class was with fifth and sixth graders, which was just a standard but good language class. The teacher of this one is pretty hardcore about learning proper pronunciation and stuff. I was pleased because we actually got the kids (all three of them) to say "th" properly, which is usually a struggle for Japanese people. A lot of teachers will just let the kids pronounce the words like katakana, so "the" becomes "za" and "this" becomes "disu" or something equally hard for native speakers to understand. When I told the teacher after class that the pronunciation was so good, he said that he listened to English radio programs to practice pronunciation. Cool.

Then we had gym class for the whole school, which was high jump, led by the fifth and sixth grade teacher and the vice-principal. The smaller kids used little jumping boards to get over a smaller height, but the bigger kids did actual high jumping, and I did it with them. They all thought it was pretty incredible that I could jump the one meter height, but I suppose it isn't that hard when you are about a foot taller than the tallest kid. But, it was really fun.

In the afternoon, I had class with the third and fourth graders, which was seven students, I believe. I just talked about Halloween for a while, and when we got done with that, since there wasn't really anything else planned to do, we just did whatever the kids wanted, which meant playing baseball and then kickball outside, despite the fact that it was drizzling rain at the time. This was another case of kids not getting that kickball is really easy when you are an adult playing with kids. Hilarious, but so much fun.

After that, I just had free time, which I was initially using to study, with the help of refreshments that the office lady kindly gave me for no real reason. But then she asked what my hobbies are, so I said music, and I ended up playing harmonica for the people in the office. I usually play a song called "Akatonbo," meaning "Red Dragonflies," which I did this time, to everyone's delight. The principal showed me her book of Japanese songs, and had me play one called "Umi," meaning "The Sea." So, that was pretty much my week. Whew.