We had the morning meeting, as usual, and then everyone went off to fill up the school gym for the opening ceremony of the second term. I am not sure if I have explained already, but the Japanese school / civil servant year starts in April, making the first term of the school year April - July, second term September to December, and third term January to March.
The Vice-Principal spoke and then the Principal took me and the school's new dietician (the old one is on maternity leave) up to introduce ourselves. When I originally talked to the Elementary school teachers, they asked me to make my introduction 3-5 minutes, so I wrote out something beforehand and asked my Junior High teachers to check the Japanese for me. After a little revision, I was pretty happy with the result.
You can imagine my surprise then when the new dietician went up and said maybe three sentences before finishing. What?! Well, I had written it out and practiced it, so I'll be damned if I wasn't going to say the whole thing. I said where I was from, how New Jersey was next to the ocean, and what I studied in college. I threw in my hobbies, because that's what everyone always asks it seems, and some hopes for a good year.
We stayed on the stage after our respective introductions and two third grade (ninth grade equivalent) students came on stage and stood opposite us at the podium. The first student read what I assume was a welcome to the dietician, and then it was my turn. The student who welcomed me was none other than Haruki, who you maybe remember from my story about my first interaction with the students. If you don't, Haruki was the crazy one that was reaallly friendly.
I stood there, expecting to simply nod and smile and not understand a word, but to my surprise he started to read in English!! He was much more subdued than outside of class, but I thought it was really sweet that they wrote something in English. I mean I'm sure Kawaguchi-sensei or Kita-sensei helped, but it was still nice.
After that, I was whisked away to East Elementary, where I was to participate in their opening ceremony as well. I trimmed a little bit out of my speech and obviously changed the names since I was not at the Junior High. Afterward I returned to the Junior High to finish preparing my lesson plan that I had to discuss with the Eastern Elementary teachers at 3pm.
Your first thought might be "Wait, you've been there that long and you were doing the lesson plan the day of?" Well yeah man, it was vacation, there wasn't anyone here, I didn't know what I was doing. Maybe the second thing you would think is "Why were you going back and forth so much? That's ridiculous!" But really, the two schools are maybe three minutes apart on my bike, so it's pretty great.
Lunch was... interesting. Now that school has started all of the teachers eat the school lunch, which is generally very nutritious (dietician!) and really cheap (around 200yen or about $2), which is great overall. Yesterday though, lunch included these little crunchy fishies that I had seen before and wasn't overly thrilled about:
Not the most appetizing looking thing in the world for a boy from Jersey, but I sucked it up and crunched them all down. They tasted about how I expected them to, but I just chalked it up to eating healthy and experiencing new things.
My meeting with the Elementary teachers at 3pm went well. I got a tour of the school as well, which was nice. Ueno-sensei is the coordinator for team teaching, so he was the one that took me around. We stopped to chat on the stairwell and watched the sixth graders practicing the 30-leg run. They all have to run fifty meters, but their legs are all tied to the people next to them, so they really have to coordinate and work together. It's a really interesting concept.
It was interesting communicating my lesson idea to the 5th and 6th grade with their limited English and my limited Japanese, but with some perseverance, circumlocution, and my handy dictionary, we worked everything out.
It's gonna go like this: the teacher and I will demonstrate a basic "What's your name / Nice to meet you" dialogue and then I will practice it with the class. Then I will do my self-intro, talking about New Jersey, where it is, the different seasons, and the different features (beach, mountain, city, farmland), with accompanying pictures. There will also be a family segment.
After that it's time to learn Rock Paper Scissors and the "How Are You? Song" with appropriate ridiculous gestures. Rock, Paper, Scissors is really important because Japanese people play it ALL THE TIME. Kids are seriously constantly playing Janken (their name for it) to decide things like who gets to go first or other random stuff.
I went straight from East to the car dealership, where I left my bike, precipitating the already described events of my previous missive.
in the FUTURE i'm a teacher?!,
-greg.
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