Today I had my first day over at West Elementary. Oshima is not very large but there are two elementary schools because there is a big ol' mountain in the middle of the island. Kids in junior high can ride the bus by themselves, kindergarteners get picked up and dropped off, but elementary school kids are kind of stuck, so they keep West Elementary open for those kids on the other side of the mountain.
All 53 of them. The first grade consists of exactly five boys. Grades two through six are a little more substantial, but not by much. It is kind of ridiculous.
The teachers at West are all really nice overall, but especially Yamaguchi-sensei, not to be confused with Yamaguchi-san of the BOE, who is the team-teaching coordinator. Yamaguchi-sensei is a woman, Yamaguchi-san is a man, although the endings / titles have nothing to do with gender. Anyway, she gave me a timetable with the periods for the day and when I would be teaching but she ALSO gave me a sheet with a diagram of the staff room with everyone's name on it (in English!) and a map of the school on the reverse, something that was completely unprecedented. It will certainly make learning everyone's name easier.
The three classes I had were the standard self-introduction lesson that I have been doing for the last month and will continue doing until October, abouts. In my last class though, the sixth graders, I got a very nice surprise. Hasegawa-sensei is the sixth grade teacher and probably the best at English in West Elementary, or at least the most enthusiastic about it, and I think he was the driving force behind what happened next.
I walked in and Hasegawa-sensei said that the class wanted to sing me a song to welcome me. He puts a cd in and the kids all break into "Take Me Home Country Road" by John Denver. And they were good, let me tell you!! They had a sort of echoing / harmonizing thing going on, it was great. They had obviously put a lot of practice in and I was really touched by their gesture.
It's even funnier because on Tuesday Kawaguchi-sensei, at the junior high, asked for my help in teaching that same song to one of the second-grade glasses, so I was familiar with it when the West sixth graders started singing it to me. Now of course it is stuck in my head and I find myself humming a John Denver song. Life can be pretty strange.
country-lovin' from the FUTURE,
-greg.
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