Wow. That's about the best way I can describe the past few weeks. So much happens these days that I've fallen way, way behind on reporting them. The trouble with that is I don't want to make an entry about one thing without having talked about something that happened before it. That's put me in the predicament I'm in now: I've got about thirty stories I could tell, each of them worthy of their own post, but I have neither the time nor the energy to fully explore them. Maybe I'll do that on my 18-hours-of-flying travel day. At any rate, I've decided the best way to update all of you and the future me is to just give teasers. Hopefully the spirit will move me and I'll come back and make posts expanding on each item, but if not, at least there'll be enough information to jog my memory.
1) I spent Thanksgiving in Fukuoka, with four of the other Tsushima JETs. Fukuoka is in fact an awesome city, and we spent our time shopping and eating at Mexican, Thai, and Indian restaurants. The Indian place advertises itself as the oldest in Kyushu, and on its 0-50 curry hotness scale, 4 had me sweating. I also took the jetfoil instead of flying, which marks the first time I've ever been on a boat in the open sea. 2 hours of no seasickness leaves me encouraged to try the six-hour slow ferry sometime.
B) I turned 24 the next weekend. The event was low-key--the American JETs came down to celebrate with me by taking me out to a ramen shop. I had an awesome time because nobody got wasted, and we found a great bar. I even taught the bartender how to make an Angel's Smile!
0) I was feeling brainy, so I signed up to take the GRE when I'm home next week. Woo!
iv) I learned the planets in Japanese! They're named for the five Chinese elements: water (Mercury), metal (Venus), fire (Mars), wood (Jupiter), and soil (Saturn). Uranus is literally "sky king star," and Neptune is "sea king star." Pluto's is "underworld king star." Yes, I still consider Pluto among the planets--My Very Energetic Mother has to have Just Served Us Nine somethings.
.) In following that geeky-lingo-in-another-language vibe, the teacher to whom I've been directing all such inquiries found two books she was given when she was in school in Ireland. One is for math, and the other is for science; they both give each subject's key vocabulary in Japanese, English, French, and German. I giggled like a schoolgirl and spent the rest of the day learning how to say things like "herbivore" (草食) and "coefficient" (係数, lit. "related number"). She was amused, to say the least.
π) I taught my group of seven high school seniors a unit on rhyming. An entire lesson was spent in a misguided attempt to teach them basic red-said-bed-head rhyme. It didn't completely flop. The follow-up, however, fared much better: we spent two weeks learning and singing "A Whole New World." (Yes, the one from Aladdin.) We began with listening to the song, following along with printed copies of the lyrics, and circling each word that rhymed. This was followed by roughly translating each line, something that worked surprisingly well: half the class had seen the movie, and that half included the kids who normally would be apathetic and hardest to reach. Once they jumped on board, and were spouting out perfect translations of each line, the kids whose correct answers normally dominated the class perked up and tried to match them. It worked beautifully. The teacher (the one who rocks for many reasons, not least of which is giving me those math and science books) coached the girls on singing, while I took the guys. I won't dare say that half an hour of practice produced perfect pitch, but they all got the gist of it, they got the hang of rhyming, and the guys even learned to harmonize!
e) As you've probably noticed from the pictures I've been posting, I stopped shaving after Halloween. It wasn't so much for fashion as it was necessity: it's awfully windy here, and I do a lot of walking. It got no small amount of attention from, well, everyone: guy teachers said it looked good, girl high schoolers giggled and said "beard" in Japanese, and the elementary kids touched it every chance they got. When students would ask teachers in our classes why I grew out my beard, I replied in simple Japanese "because it's cold." This always got a laugh. Having shaved this weekend for the concert, I can safely say that a beard does an astonishingly good job retaining heat. It's almost as though it's been selected for by nature.
ə) Just before my birthday, I taught at my elementary school for the second two-day stretch. When they weren't patting my beard and asking me if I knew such-and-such-a-word in Japanese, the kids were awesome. I realized they were just skittish my first two days. The teachers routinely overestimate my Japanese ability, which leaves me in the dark, but not enough to be seriously problematic. I'm consistently on the penumbra of the light of comprehension, you could say. If you were a nerd, like me. Anyway, we (students and teachers) ran for six minutes to begin my second day, which is apparently routine, even in 40-degree weather. I let slip on the first day that my birthday was that weekend. The next day, three of the fourth grade girls came to me during recess with a Santa gift bag that had, in order of ascending cuteness: a Santa candle, origami, and one of those little paper fortune-telling games you hold in both hands that looks like a flower. I also learned from the school's tea lady (the lady whose chief job is to serve hot tea to the teachers) how to say "the Earth revolves around the Sun" versus "the Earth rotates about its axis" in Japanese. Granted, she got some help from one of the office workers, but it worked.
θ) I hiked my second mountain this past weekend! It's Tatera-san (the title for mountains sounds just like you're calling it Mr. Mountain, but is in fact a different symbol), it's 550 meters high, and it's silly to climb it on a blustery Saturday in December. My companions were the other two JETs in my town, the Northern Irish JET from the northern part of the island, and two adult Japanese students of English. The view from the top was definitely worth all the trouble getting up there. (Isn't it always?)
Σ) A week ago, as I was changing my shoes at the school entrance and bundling up for my walk home down the mountain, the science teacher asked me if I sing. This was purely to start conversation--he only approached me because he'd heard me singing in the halls (which I still do, all the time). It turns out that he's the school chorus conductor. His English isn't great, but by our powers combined, I understood that the chorus was learning English Christmas songs, and would I mind joining them for practice to help them with their pronunciation. This was one of my big goals in coming to Japan--to be involved in the music/singing programs at my school--so I happily agreed. The 14-member chorus has one or two first-year students that I know, but the majority are second- and third-years. All of them were thrilled when I poked my head in the room the next day. Their Christmas set consisted of Joy to the World, Angels We Have Heard on High, O Tannenbaum, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and Amazing Grace. I did a doubletake at the last one, both because I've never seen it filed under "Christmas," and because it's one of my favorite Christian songs. The group's sound is fine, and after a few minutes of coaching, we worked out the most egregious of their pronunciation errors. (Those were a proper "th" instead of s/z, and "v" instead of b, both of which had combined to produce "how sweet za sound, zat sabed a wretch like me.") They were awesome through it all, and at the end I asked if they had a concert. They told me about one coming up the next weekend in the city's church. I asked the conductor about it later, and they weren't kidding--there is indeed a small Christian church in town. Anyway, "would you come to our concert?" turned into "would you join us for our concert?" when half the group's bass section (well, one of the two basses) got sick and couldn't make it. I'm going to have to give this its own post, so here's the rest in condensed teaser format to jog my memory: church choir prayer roxy karaoke elementary kid.
Ack! That's roughly half of what I've been meaning to write down. As you can probably tell from all this, I love it here. I'm going to repeat that, as much for myself to read later on as for the rest of you: it's the dead of winter, and I still love being here!
I'm also officially going to be in Missouri from December 22 until January 3. I fly to Atlanta on the 4th, and will fly from there to Japan on the 7th. That means I'll be in and around Georgia for a little over two days. Those of you Georgians who read this probably know me well enough to know this, but I still worry and feel the need to repeat it: I love all of you guys, and want nothing more than to see each and every one of you one-on-one for hot chocolate/Choo Choo/Waffle House/hamburger helper/Guitar Hero/Smash Bros. That being said, I will have neither a car nor enough time to do that. I still don't know how I'm going to work this out, but there will probably be a big get-together one night that weekend. Details will follow, I promise.
Anyway. I'm going home in three days, no current Braves were named in the Mitchell Report, and the US delegation caved in at the Bali talks after being called out by Papua New Guinea! Hooray!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Overdue posts on dated events, part 2
My baptism by fire in teaching continues, with this week's feature being planning, writing, editing, giving, and grading a test. Once again, I was told of this with a few weeks to think about it, but nobody told me anything further. I'm getting used to this, so it was fine--I simply tracked down each of my teachers and asked them for their suggestions. From what I've gathered, the English final is portioned into three parts: 10% comes from the speaking test, 20% from the listening test, and the remaining 70% from a written test. I'm involved in the listening test portion of the first-year students' final exams, and I'm wholly responsible for their speaking test. It's only 10%, sure, but I was given more or less free reign over it. The teachers took a look at it first, of course, to make sure I wasn't doing anything crazy. I look at them as the quality control department--I'm fairly certain that, once I get the hang of things, they'll interfere less and less.
The speaking test consists of a one-on-one interview. We've got 20 students in each class, with a total of 8 different classes of first-year students. The speaking test was slotted for one 50-minute class period. That gives an absolute maximum of 2.5 minutes to each student, and that's assuming they teleport from their seat to my little interview table in the hallway. As it turns out, my school does not in fact own a working teleporter, so the students had to walk to and from the interview table.
My supervisor, who is one of the English teachers, told me the test should be from memory. Having no idea how much time it would take an average student to finish an interview test, how much an average student can memorize, or how difficult to make the material, I came up with a dialogue from one of our lessons (in this case, talking on the telephone). The dialogue consisted of about six lines, and was the second in a pair dealing with taking a message and returning a call. The first of the pair had A calling B asking for C, but C isn't around, so B takes a message. The second has C calling B back, explaining why they missed their call ("I was busy ~ing"), B asking C to do something, and B turning them down with a reason ("I have ~ practice"). Preferring to underdo it instead of overdoing it, I only wanted to use one of the dialogues, and have each student only read one part of the dialogue with me. My supervisor felt this was too easy, and suggested including both dialogues, and having each student read both parts. She's the veteran, and I'm the newbie; I went along with it.
One of the other teachers agreed that it's good to push the students, but the other two teachers were worried it'd be unmanageable. Before anything could be changed, though, I had to give the test to the first batch of students, so I went with the existing configuration. Once it's been given once, the exact same version has to be used for the remaining seven groups. (An interesting footnote: the two teachers who were for the harder version teach primarily higher-level students, with the other two teachers spending more time with the lower-end ones.)
Just for the sake of clarity, this is the dialogue:
A: Hello?
B: Hi! This is __. May I speak to __?
A: I'm sorry, but __ isn't here right now. May I take a message?
B: Would you please tell (him/her) to call me back? My phone number is __.
A: I'll give (him/her) the message.
A: Thank you! Bye.
B: Bye.
B: Hello?
C: Hi, __! This is __.
B: Hey, __!
C: I got your message. Sorry I missed your call. I was busy __ing.
B: That's okay. Would you like to go __ing tomorrow after school?
C: I'm sorry, but I can't. I have __ practice.
B: Okay. Bye!
C: Bye!
The students were free to use any names they wanted, though they had to use the correct pronoun. They could also use any phone number they wanted, and could say any kind of practice. For the "busy __ing" and "go __ing tomorrow" parts, I made cards with three pictures: shopping, fishing, and swimming. Each student would draw one of the cards, and use that word.
To recap the test setup, each student would read each part of each dialogue with me. That comes out to four dialogues per student. You've probably noticed the glaring problem this version presented: four dialogues in less than two and a half minutes comes out to no more than 30 seconds per dialogue. Try timing yourself having a six-line telephone dialogue that includes long, reasonably complex sentences. Now imagine it's in a second language, you're in your first year of high school, and you're not allowed to use a script. (I did: at a decent pace, with short pauses between lines, I read the dialogue in just under 30 seconds. That's with roughly 23 years of speaking experience, and using a script that I wrote.) You can see where this is going.
Not surprisingly, the average time for the students was about 6 minutes. Very few of you understand how painful it is to listen to an ESL student stumble through reasonably difficult memorized English in a cold hallway. After beginning class, last-minute recaps of the test, passing out grade sheets, working out who would go first, and getting my little table set up, 50 minutes turned into barely 40. Each class averaged 8 students left over at the end.
Despite the logistical catastrophe, everything went fairly well. Nobody got mad at me for running over on time; we simply had the extra students come after school and take their test. The worse groups of students averaged 6 or 7 minutes of stammering, broken English, but the better ones did indeed come pretty close to the 2'30" mark. It also gave me the chance to talk one-on-one with the students, a first in most cases.
I should have cut each student off at 2'30", but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it. I eventually saw the futility and made a deal with myself: if they were silent for more than 10 seconds, we moved on to the next line, but as long as they were talking--no matter how slowly--we'd keep going. As you can imagine, it's that last part that killed me. I'll fight tooth and nail to keep the kids from having to learn that much material for such a short test session again.
After the initial planning, the test became entirely mine. The most the teachers talked to me about the test was when they'd ask how it was going, or when I'd ask them for their thoughts on the setup. They weren't anywhere near me when I gave the test, so I was able to grade the students entirely on my own. This allowed me to judge what were and were not acceptable deviations to the script--"Hi" instead of "Hello" was fine, but "would you like go to fishing" wasn't, etc.
Afterwards, I collected the grade sheets, and made a spreadsheet out of them. The kids also get participation points during class, and those points are factored in as a bonus on their final exam score. I added those points to the same spreadsheet. It's very simple procedural stuff, sure, but it's nonetheless my first experience grading a test. The overall average is about 80%, which is no doubt helped by the fact that the students were given about double the time originally planned for the test.
Man, I'm learning a lot about this whole teaching thing. I'm still terribly inexperienced, and in no shape to be a fully independent teacher, but I'm so much better than I was in August, and I'm absolutely loving it here.
The speaking test consists of a one-on-one interview. We've got 20 students in each class, with a total of 8 different classes of first-year students. The speaking test was slotted for one 50-minute class period. That gives an absolute maximum of 2.5 minutes to each student, and that's assuming they teleport from their seat to my little interview table in the hallway. As it turns out, my school does not in fact own a working teleporter, so the students had to walk to and from the interview table.
My supervisor, who is one of the English teachers, told me the test should be from memory. Having no idea how much time it would take an average student to finish an interview test, how much an average student can memorize, or how difficult to make the material, I came up with a dialogue from one of our lessons (in this case, talking on the telephone). The dialogue consisted of about six lines, and was the second in a pair dealing with taking a message and returning a call. The first of the pair had A calling B asking for C, but C isn't around, so B takes a message. The second has C calling B back, explaining why they missed their call ("I was busy ~ing"), B asking C to do something, and B turning them down with a reason ("I have ~ practice"). Preferring to underdo it instead of overdoing it, I only wanted to use one of the dialogues, and have each student only read one part of the dialogue with me. My supervisor felt this was too easy, and suggested including both dialogues, and having each student read both parts. She's the veteran, and I'm the newbie; I went along with it.
One of the other teachers agreed that it's good to push the students, but the other two teachers were worried it'd be unmanageable. Before anything could be changed, though, I had to give the test to the first batch of students, so I went with the existing configuration. Once it's been given once, the exact same version has to be used for the remaining seven groups. (An interesting footnote: the two teachers who were for the harder version teach primarily higher-level students, with the other two teachers spending more time with the lower-end ones.)
Just for the sake of clarity, this is the dialogue:
A: Hello?
B: Hi! This is __. May I speak to __?
A: I'm sorry, but __ isn't here right now. May I take a message?
B: Would you please tell (him/her) to call me back? My phone number is __.
A: I'll give (him/her) the message.
A: Thank you! Bye.
B: Bye.
B: Hello?
C: Hi, __! This is __.
B: Hey, __!
C: I got your message. Sorry I missed your call. I was busy __ing.
B: That's okay. Would you like to go __ing tomorrow after school?
C: I'm sorry, but I can't. I have __ practice.
B: Okay. Bye!
C: Bye!
The students were free to use any names they wanted, though they had to use the correct pronoun. They could also use any phone number they wanted, and could say any kind of practice. For the "busy __ing" and "go __ing tomorrow" parts, I made cards with three pictures: shopping, fishing, and swimming. Each student would draw one of the cards, and use that word.
To recap the test setup, each student would read each part of each dialogue with me. That comes out to four dialogues per student. You've probably noticed the glaring problem this version presented: four dialogues in less than two and a half minutes comes out to no more than 30 seconds per dialogue. Try timing yourself having a six-line telephone dialogue that includes long, reasonably complex sentences. Now imagine it's in a second language, you're in your first year of high school, and you're not allowed to use a script. (I did: at a decent pace, with short pauses between lines, I read the dialogue in just under 30 seconds. That's with roughly 23 years of speaking experience, and using a script that I wrote.) You can see where this is going.
Not surprisingly, the average time for the students was about 6 minutes. Very few of you understand how painful it is to listen to an ESL student stumble through reasonably difficult memorized English in a cold hallway. After beginning class, last-minute recaps of the test, passing out grade sheets, working out who would go first, and getting my little table set up, 50 minutes turned into barely 40. Each class averaged 8 students left over at the end.
Despite the logistical catastrophe, everything went fairly well. Nobody got mad at me for running over on time; we simply had the extra students come after school and take their test. The worse groups of students averaged 6 or 7 minutes of stammering, broken English, but the better ones did indeed come pretty close to the 2'30" mark. It also gave me the chance to talk one-on-one with the students, a first in most cases.
I should have cut each student off at 2'30", but I simply couldn't bring myself to do it. I eventually saw the futility and made a deal with myself: if they were silent for more than 10 seconds, we moved on to the next line, but as long as they were talking--no matter how slowly--we'd keep going. As you can imagine, it's that last part that killed me. I'll fight tooth and nail to keep the kids from having to learn that much material for such a short test session again.
After the initial planning, the test became entirely mine. The most the teachers talked to me about the test was when they'd ask how it was going, or when I'd ask them for their thoughts on the setup. They weren't anywhere near me when I gave the test, so I was able to grade the students entirely on my own. This allowed me to judge what were and were not acceptable deviations to the script--"Hi" instead of "Hello" was fine, but "would you like go to fishing" wasn't, etc.
Afterwards, I collected the grade sheets, and made a spreadsheet out of them. The kids also get participation points during class, and those points are factored in as a bonus on their final exam score. I added those points to the same spreadsheet. It's very simple procedural stuff, sure, but it's nonetheless my first experience grading a test. The overall average is about 80%, which is no doubt helped by the fact that the students were given about double the time originally planned for the test.
Man, I'm learning a lot about this whole teaching thing. I'm still terribly inexperienced, and in no shape to be a fully independent teacher, but I'm so much better than I was in August, and I'm absolutely loving it here.
Overdue posts on dated events, part 1
(I wrote this a few weeks ago--honest!--and forgot to post it. Here it is, with relative times not adjusted.)
Last weekend the Tsushima JETs got together on the northern part of the island to celebrate Joey's birthday. (Joey's the one who reminds me a lot of Chuck when we first met.) Getting somewhere outside of my town without getting a ride from someone else is always an adventure, since I still stubbornly refuse to get a car. Thankfully, the island has a modest bus system, and it runs the same routes on the weekend as it does during the week. The plan for Saturday was for some of us to get together with Joey and hike Mitake, one of the many mountains around here, then have a barbecue and bonfire on the beach. So I woke up Saturday morning and caught the same bus I catch to my second high school. I made it there, met up with Mitch and Mike, who were driving up the rest of the way to Mitake. We hung out for a little while before taking off, and took our time getting there. Along the way, we found the best city park playground I've ever seen. Seriously, it was amazing, mostly because of its randomness: it's in the middle of Tsushima, which is very sparsely populated, even by the island's standards. The park features go-karts, a really cool playground, and two awesome slides. (Pictures)
We hiked Mitake, which is reportedly 492 meters tall. I've hiked about two mountains in my lifetime, so I had no idea how high 492 meters was. Turned out to be an hour or so up at a leisurely pace. Along the way we found a shrine beside a little brook, and several huge uprooted trees. The summit was adorned with little altars with stone figurines in them. The kanji written on them was apparently pretty archaic--Joey's Japanese friend from Fukuoka couldn't make out what they said. We found a more secluded outcropping alongside the summit that gave a much better view. (Pictures)
That night, we got together on the beach for a barbecue and a bonfire. We stocked up on hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and mustard, none of which I expected to find at a grocery store in rural Japan. Everyone brought various scraps of paper and cardboard which, combined with driftwood collected from the beach, made a toasty bonfire. Joey's little grill worked beautifully, despite having to use fireplace kindling to light it. (Nobody sold charcoal, and when our designated Kerosene Purchaser went to buy some lighter fluid, the grocery store staff talked him out of it.) Once we got it up and going, though, the whole setting was beautiful: roaring bonfire, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fireworks, and anglophones, all against a backdrop of starry autumn sky, crashing waves, and fishing boats on the horizon. (Pictures!)
The next weekend was Evelyn's birthday. She's much more low-key than Joey, so we all got together for a relatively tame night of dinner and bowling. The lowest score in our first game was a 120--and that wasn't mine! I got a 135. There aren't many pictures, but here they are!
I also bought my plane ticket home! (You don't want to know how much it cost.) My flight leaves Japan at noon on Saturday, December 22nd, and arrives in America at 10 am on Saturday, December 22nd. I won't actually get to Springfield until 8:30 that night, so by then I will have spent 19 hours on planes, and a total of 24 hours traveling. Hopefully I'll get adjusted to US time before I have to fly back here on January 8th. I'm also definitely stopping over in Georgia, but it won't be for very long. Better than nothing, though! Woohoo!
Last weekend the Tsushima JETs got together on the northern part of the island to celebrate Joey's birthday. (Joey's the one who reminds me a lot of Chuck when we first met.) Getting somewhere outside of my town without getting a ride from someone else is always an adventure, since I still stubbornly refuse to get a car. Thankfully, the island has a modest bus system, and it runs the same routes on the weekend as it does during the week. The plan for Saturday was for some of us to get together with Joey and hike Mitake, one of the many mountains around here, then have a barbecue and bonfire on the beach. So I woke up Saturday morning and caught the same bus I catch to my second high school. I made it there, met up with Mitch and Mike, who were driving up the rest of the way to Mitake. We hung out for a little while before taking off, and took our time getting there. Along the way, we found the best city park playground I've ever seen. Seriously, it was amazing, mostly because of its randomness: it's in the middle of Tsushima, which is very sparsely populated, even by the island's standards. The park features go-karts, a really cool playground, and two awesome slides. (Pictures)
We hiked Mitake, which is reportedly 492 meters tall. I've hiked about two mountains in my lifetime, so I had no idea how high 492 meters was. Turned out to be an hour or so up at a leisurely pace. Along the way we found a shrine beside a little brook, and several huge uprooted trees. The summit was adorned with little altars with stone figurines in them. The kanji written on them was apparently pretty archaic--Joey's Japanese friend from Fukuoka couldn't make out what they said. We found a more secluded outcropping alongside the summit that gave a much better view. (Pictures)
That night, we got together on the beach for a barbecue and a bonfire. We stocked up on hamburgers, hot dogs, buns, ketchup, and mustard, none of which I expected to find at a grocery store in rural Japan. Everyone brought various scraps of paper and cardboard which, combined with driftwood collected from the beach, made a toasty bonfire. Joey's little grill worked beautifully, despite having to use fireplace kindling to light it. (Nobody sold charcoal, and when our designated Kerosene Purchaser went to buy some lighter fluid, the grocery store staff talked him out of it.) Once we got it up and going, though, the whole setting was beautiful: roaring bonfire, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, fireworks, and anglophones, all against a backdrop of starry autumn sky, crashing waves, and fishing boats on the horizon. (Pictures!)
The next weekend was Evelyn's birthday. She's much more low-key than Joey, so we all got together for a relatively tame night of dinner and bowling. The lowest score in our first game was a 120--and that wasn't mine! I got a 135. There aren't many pictures, but here they are!
I also bought my plane ticket home! (You don't want to know how much it cost.) My flight leaves Japan at noon on Saturday, December 22nd, and arrives in America at 10 am on Saturday, December 22nd. I won't actually get to Springfield until 8:30 that night, so by then I will have spent 19 hours on planes, and a total of 24 hours traveling. Hopefully I'll get adjusted to US time before I have to fly back here on January 8th. I'm also definitely stopping over in Georgia, but it won't be for very long. Better than nothing, though! Woohoo!
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Mid-Year Conference 2007
I had to bail early on pumpkin carving with my students last Wednesday because I had to make my flight to Nagasaki. Each year, all the JETs in each prefecture are brought together for a mid-year conference. There were about 166 of us for Nagasaki Prefecture. I met most of the other first-year JETs at the prefectural orientation back in August, but that already feels like years ago. It's pretty neat to observe all the cliques that have formed, and how people juggled time between ALT friends from their cities and other first-years they met back in August.
Evelyn's awesome, and booked most of our hotel rooms together. I am apparently the only one of the eight of us Tsushima JETs who had to work Wednesday, so the rest of them had spent most of the afternoon enjoying Nagasaki. There was typical craziness at a bar on the Dejima wharf, involving twenty Japanese college students who were celebrating four birthdays. Nothing too crazy, though.
The first day of the conference was kicked off with a keynote speech. The speaker was some guy who apparently heads up a camp around here for learning English. The content of his speech was probably pretty mediocre; however, having gone so long without such prolonged exposure to English, I basked in it. He talked about the history of Japan hiring foreigners to teach in the country, dating back to the Meiji Restoration, and went into a little philosophy, so the geek in me loved it.
All JETs, regardless of length of tenure, have to attend the conference and all its breakout sessions. This obviously leads to a lot of re-tread. I can understand the program's reasoning: something along the lines of rejuvenating the troops, trying to remind them of why they're here. I also can understand second- and third-years' being frustrated with being told the same thing time and again. So much of
what they tell us--even at the prefectural meetings--is woefully irrelevant to Tsushima. JET's mantra is "every situation is different," and with good reason. Gathering 166 people from different situations to try and teach them all the same discrete procedures seems kind of counterintuitive to many people, including me. However, we don't complain too loudly, for two reasons: a) the whole trip is paid for by our schools, and 2) we get to party with fellow anglophones.
With that in mind, I endured the first day's breakout sessions. I did in fact pick up a couple of useful game ideas. That I learned them from a pretty JET who loved to hear herself talk almost kept it from being worth the effort, though.
Oh, and JETs aren't the only ones who come to this conference. Also invited are our supervisors, the Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs). This becomes important later.
Anyway. The important stuff happened afterwards. There was a big party at a local bar back at the August orientation, with proceeds benefiting an English school in Laos. A sequel was planned for this conference, with a costume party tacked on. I hadn't brought my costume for two very good reasons: I didn't think anyone else would bring theirs, and I never really had a costume to begin with. Turns out, everyone else brought a costume. I wound up going as Guy in Pajamas, which worked well enough, in that I was the only guy wearing flannel pajamas and a hotel bathrobe. Other costumes in our little group included a pirate and Waldo. The girls in our group had planned costumes around some French cartoon or comic book or something. I dunno either.
The party was fun, but absolutely packed with people. Six or seven of us broke off from the main party and decided to find a quieter venue for some relaxing. After about an hour of "seriously, guys, it's just a little farther this way" from three different guides, we found the Panic Paradise. Our group had grown to about ten by then, and we were the only people in this cozy little bar. The bartender let us take over DJing, and most of the music played wound up being 80s rock. Everyone was singing along with Sweet Child O' Mine at one point. It was great.
The second day began with a third-year ALT leading a seminar on ideas for games. She'd had about six cups of coffee (by her own admission), and did not need the aid of the microphone she nevertheless kept pressed to her mouth the whole time. While Aaron and I were exchanging notes about how much we were suffering, I noticed that Evelyn didn't seem too bothered. In fact, she had a bemused little smile on her face. On closer inspection, it was revealed that she'd brought earplugs. I tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.
One of the breakout sessions that day was led by an anthropology student from UC Irvine. This marked the first time in the program that I've listened to an official who cites a background in anthro, so I was all ears. She was rather boring, but I didn't let it bother me too much (thanks especially to the frenetic lecture by coffee girl that morning). Her main point was the differences between Japanese and non-Japanese cultures. One of the highlights was the difference in attitudes regarding training and asking questions. Job training for most westerners entails a basic step-by-step outline to whatever the task is. We expect this, so we don't feel insulted by being led by the hand through something entirely new to us. According to her, in Japan, it's considered offensive to talk to someone as if they don't know what they're doing, even if they clearly don't know what they're doing. More on this later. Basic cultural relativism, specific examples
involving Japan, and personal anecdotes--all of which make for a perfectly fine half-hour lecture. The problem was that she'd been given an hour and some change.
My favorite breakout session of the conference was headed by the Prefectural Advisors (basically the two head JETs in the prefecture), Pene and Laura. This one included both JETs and JTEs. They wanted to facilitate discussion between us and our supervisors regarding each side's expectations of the other coming into the program, how those have changed, and what suggestions we could offer for the other.
I found several things very interesting. First of all, practically every other first-year JET mentioned how overwhelmed they felt when they first arrived, and how difficult it was to find their way. (This was before the session by the UC Irvine anthro girl, so I didn't yet know about the don't-talk-to-me-like-I'm-an-idiot resistance in Japan.) In response, the JTEs politely pointed out that we went through an orientation in our home country, three days of orientation in Tokyo when we arrived, and two more days of orientation in Nagasaki after that. In their minds, we had been given plenty of time to have our duties explained to us.
I found this fascinating. When it came time for us to suggest solutions to these problems, many people came up with similar ideas. The most common involved better communication. My way of phrasing it is this: let the JTEs know that we do not in fact have the slightest idea what we're doing, and have actually been cautioned by every official along the way to be prepared to learn from scratch, regardless of teaching experience. The JTEs should at the very least be proactive in communicating with us about our responsibilities. On the other hand, JETs should be prepared both to ask questions, no matter how stupid they may sound, and also accept that we know nothing about our job, and so should let our supervisors talk to us as a first-day trainee.
All in all, the official part of the conference was so-so. A lot of people were staying for the weekend in Nagasaki. I had been planning on doing so, but it didn't quite work out like that. More on that next post...
Evelyn's awesome, and booked most of our hotel rooms together. I am apparently the only one of the eight of us Tsushima JETs who had to work Wednesday, so the rest of them had spent most of the afternoon enjoying Nagasaki. There was typical craziness at a bar on the Dejima wharf, involving twenty Japanese college students who were celebrating four birthdays. Nothing too crazy, though.
The first day of the conference was kicked off with a keynote speech. The speaker was some guy who apparently heads up a camp around here for learning English. The content of his speech was probably pretty mediocre; however, having gone so long without such prolonged exposure to English, I basked in it. He talked about the history of Japan hiring foreigners to teach in the country, dating back to the Meiji Restoration, and went into a little philosophy, so the geek in me loved it.
All JETs, regardless of length of tenure, have to attend the conference and all its breakout sessions. This obviously leads to a lot of re-tread. I can understand the program's reasoning: something along the lines of rejuvenating the troops, trying to remind them of why they're here. I also can understand second- and third-years' being frustrated with being told the same thing time and again. So much of
what they tell us--even at the prefectural meetings--is woefully irrelevant to Tsushima. JET's mantra is "every situation is different," and with good reason. Gathering 166 people from different situations to try and teach them all the same discrete procedures seems kind of counterintuitive to many people, including me. However, we don't complain too loudly, for two reasons: a) the whole trip is paid for by our schools, and 2) we get to party with fellow anglophones.
With that in mind, I endured the first day's breakout sessions. I did in fact pick up a couple of useful game ideas. That I learned them from a pretty JET who loved to hear herself talk almost kept it from being worth the effort, though.
Oh, and JETs aren't the only ones who come to this conference. Also invited are our supervisors, the Japanese Teachers of English (JTEs). This becomes important later.
Anyway. The important stuff happened afterwards. There was a big party at a local bar back at the August orientation, with proceeds benefiting an English school in Laos. A sequel was planned for this conference, with a costume party tacked on. I hadn't brought my costume for two very good reasons: I didn't think anyone else would bring theirs, and I never really had a costume to begin with. Turns out, everyone else brought a costume. I wound up going as Guy in Pajamas, which worked well enough, in that I was the only guy wearing flannel pajamas and a hotel bathrobe. Other costumes in our little group included a pirate and Waldo. The girls in our group had planned costumes around some French cartoon or comic book or something. I dunno either.
The party was fun, but absolutely packed with people. Six or seven of us broke off from the main party and decided to find a quieter venue for some relaxing. After about an hour of "seriously, guys, it's just a little farther this way" from three different guides, we found the Panic Paradise. Our group had grown to about ten by then, and we were the only people in this cozy little bar. The bartender let us take over DJing, and most of the music played wound up being 80s rock. Everyone was singing along with Sweet Child O' Mine at one point. It was great.
The second day began with a third-year ALT leading a seminar on ideas for games. She'd had about six cups of coffee (by her own admission), and did not need the aid of the microphone she nevertheless kept pressed to her mouth the whole time. While Aaron and I were exchanging notes about how much we were suffering, I noticed that Evelyn didn't seem too bothered. In fact, she had a bemused little smile on her face. On closer inspection, it was revealed that she'd brought earplugs. I tried to talk her out of them, to no avail.
One of the breakout sessions that day was led by an anthropology student from UC Irvine. This marked the first time in the program that I've listened to an official who cites a background in anthro, so I was all ears. She was rather boring, but I didn't let it bother me too much (thanks especially to the frenetic lecture by coffee girl that morning). Her main point was the differences between Japanese and non-Japanese cultures. One of the highlights was the difference in attitudes regarding training and asking questions. Job training for most westerners entails a basic step-by-step outline to whatever the task is. We expect this, so we don't feel insulted by being led by the hand through something entirely new to us. According to her, in Japan, it's considered offensive to talk to someone as if they don't know what they're doing, even if they clearly don't know what they're doing. More on this later. Basic cultural relativism, specific examples
involving Japan, and personal anecdotes--all of which make for a perfectly fine half-hour lecture. The problem was that she'd been given an hour and some change.
My favorite breakout session of the conference was headed by the Prefectural Advisors (basically the two head JETs in the prefecture), Pene and Laura. This one included both JETs and JTEs. They wanted to facilitate discussion between us and our supervisors regarding each side's expectations of the other coming into the program, how those have changed, and what suggestions we could offer for the other.
I found several things very interesting. First of all, practically every other first-year JET mentioned how overwhelmed they felt when they first arrived, and how difficult it was to find their way. (This was before the session by the UC Irvine anthro girl, so I didn't yet know about the don't-talk-to-me-like-I'm-an-idiot resistance in Japan.) In response, the JTEs politely pointed out that we went through an orientation in our home country, three days of orientation in Tokyo when we arrived, and two more days of orientation in Nagasaki after that. In their minds, we had been given plenty of time to have our duties explained to us.
I found this fascinating. When it came time for us to suggest solutions to these problems, many people came up with similar ideas. The most common involved better communication. My way of phrasing it is this: let the JTEs know that we do not in fact have the slightest idea what we're doing, and have actually been cautioned by every official along the way to be prepared to learn from scratch, regardless of teaching experience. The JTEs should at the very least be proactive in communicating with us about our responsibilities. On the other hand, JETs should be prepared both to ask questions, no matter how stupid they may sound, and also accept that we know nothing about our job, and so should let our supervisors talk to us as a first-day trainee.
All in all, the official part of the conference was so-so. A lot of people were staying for the weekend in Nagasaki. I had been planning on doing so, but it didn't quite work out like that. More on that next post...
First Halloween Lessons
In the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, we moved from Florida to Missouri. My English II class that year was run by Mrs. Rowe, whose uncanny resemblance to Dana Carvey's "Church Lady" she actually endorsed with a giant poster in her classroom. The poster featured the Church Lady striking her most self-righteous pose, and was captioned "Well, Isn't That Special?"
She was the first of many teachers to try and get me to perform some wretched act called "prewriting." This requires one to actually plan out one's writing in an organized fashion, followed by composing the actual essay in a similarly regimented manner. This confused the daylights out of me at the time, and for many years afterwards. My time in high school (just like that of most of the people I know) was defined by starting on an assignment no more than one day before it was due. (Two, if it involved painting.) I most often waited until the night before, right around normal bedtime, and the anxiety of not getting it done and therefore failing would compel me to work. Fueled by the adrenaline, I'd stay up as long as it took to get the thing done, whatever it was.
I managed to use this model to perfection up through senior year: my crowning achievement was producing a twelve-page term paper on Franz Kafka the night before it was due. Before I could begin the paper that night, I had to do all the research I was supposed to have been doing over the previous six weeks. Six hours and eight cans of Mountain Dew later, I had succeeded. The paper got an A, which is especially nice considering it was for my AP Literature class.
It wasn't until my Freshman Composition class at UGA that I learned what everyone does, often sooner than I did: that you can't produce truly good papers by waiting until the night before. Having learned that much, I assumed that was all there was to be gleaned from that lesson, and I modified my strategy: I thenceforth began my writing assignments three days before they were due. Eventually, though, I discovered that prewriting is in fact a valuable tool, and not (as I smugly maintained for so long) a crutch for the inept.
I tell all of this because if the me from the day after I wrote the Kafka paper met the me from right now, he'd (I'd?) probably punch him (me?) in the face. I'm such a prewriting geek that I now begin these blogs with a rough outline of what I need to say. I'm such a nerd.
Anyway. Halloween was fun this year, all things considered. Though it was pretty slapdash at the beginning, my Halloween lesson for my high schoolers was, by the ninth or tenth time teaching it, decently cohesive. I began by showing the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas ("Halloween Town") in Japanese, courtesy of YouTube. Then I asked each class what they knew about Halloween. This produced a list of vocabulary ranging from three to twelve words long. The worst class only got "Halloween," "candy," and "trick or treat;" the best went as far as "grim reaper" and "Cerberus." (Seriously--a 15-year-old Japanese boy tossed "Cerberus" in with Halloween. He pronounced it with a hard C, which is faithful to the Greek pronunciation, but I learned it incorrectly, with a soft C, so I thought he was saying "Care Bears" at first.)
I initially had pretty high hopes for what would come next, including teaching the kids about the Celtic holiday Samhain, the evolution of the word "Halloween" from "All Hallows Evening," the story of Jack o'Lantern, and the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. You can probably imagine the looks of shock and fear on my fellow teachers' faces as I pitched this lesson plan to them. Suffice it to say, the end result was toned down quite a bit. I had to settle for a three-sentence breakdown of Samhain: "2,000 years ago, people lived in Ireland. These people believed that once a year, on October 31st, dead people could come back to life. People were scared of them, so some wore costumes to try and scare the dead away." That's the best compromise I could strike between all the trawling I did on the Internet and what the students would actually understand. Even this much had to be given slowly.
Several of my teachers, trying to be helpful, likened the Samhain festival to the Japanese Buddhist festival O-bon. While both are festivals involving the return of the dead to the earth, all the research I've done has shown that while the Gaels feared the return of the deceased on Samhain, O-bon is a much more welcoming celebration of one's ancestors. I think one of us misrepresented our holidays, and I'm pretty sure it was me. Oh, well. The history isn't so much crucial to the understanding of Halloween as it is simply interesting.
Next, I talked about pumpkin carving. Telling the story of Jack o'Lantern would likely lose all its effect in translation for the students, so I settled for pointing out the distinction between a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern. I showed lots of pictures I found of different jack-o-lanterns, and explained how to carve a pumpkin, complete with drawings on the board and sound effects for popping open and gutting a pumpkin. The kids absolutely loved all of this. With my second, smaller high school, I brought a green Japanese pumpkin I had carved, and showed it to the students after explaining carving. At this school, I have a class of seven third-year commercial-track students that I've talked about before. The teacher and I decided to have the students carve some pumpkins. I went to the grocery store, bought four more green pumpkins, and carved out three of them for the class to use. The fourth I purposefully left unhollowed so the kids could hear the juicy ripping sound it makes when you tear off the top. I tried to get them to stick their hands in and scoop out the guts, but had to settle for them using a spoon. I had to dart out early, so I only snapped one picture.
The most important thing I learned from this little unit has nothing to do with the holiday itself. This was the first time I've known exactly what I wanted to teach the kids, and felt no pressure or stress about whether or not the students would understand. Of course, the deck was stacked in my favor: the students already know little snippets about Halloween, I showed lots of pictures, we played games, and I gave them candy. Even so, it felt amazing to be able to relish the sheer joy of teaching something. I take it as a preview of how everyday teaching could one day be for me, once I get past all the crazy lesson planning.
Pictures!
She was the first of many teachers to try and get me to perform some wretched act called "prewriting." This requires one to actually plan out one's writing in an organized fashion, followed by composing the actual essay in a similarly regimented manner. This confused the daylights out of me at the time, and for many years afterwards. My time in high school (just like that of most of the people I know) was defined by starting on an assignment no more than one day before it was due. (Two, if it involved painting.) I most often waited until the night before, right around normal bedtime, and the anxiety of not getting it done and therefore failing would compel me to work. Fueled by the adrenaline, I'd stay up as long as it took to get the thing done, whatever it was.
I managed to use this model to perfection up through senior year: my crowning achievement was producing a twelve-page term paper on Franz Kafka the night before it was due. Before I could begin the paper that night, I had to do all the research I was supposed to have been doing over the previous six weeks. Six hours and eight cans of Mountain Dew later, I had succeeded. The paper got an A, which is especially nice considering it was for my AP Literature class.
It wasn't until my Freshman Composition class at UGA that I learned what everyone does, often sooner than I did: that you can't produce truly good papers by waiting until the night before. Having learned that much, I assumed that was all there was to be gleaned from that lesson, and I modified my strategy: I thenceforth began my writing assignments three days before they were due. Eventually, though, I discovered that prewriting is in fact a valuable tool, and not (as I smugly maintained for so long) a crutch for the inept.
I tell all of this because if the me from the day after I wrote the Kafka paper met the me from right now, he'd (I'd?) probably punch him (me?) in the face. I'm such a prewriting geek that I now begin these blogs with a rough outline of what I need to say. I'm such a nerd.
Anyway. Halloween was fun this year, all things considered. Though it was pretty slapdash at the beginning, my Halloween lesson for my high schoolers was, by the ninth or tenth time teaching it, decently cohesive. I began by showing the opening song from The Nightmare Before Christmas ("Halloween Town") in Japanese, courtesy of YouTube. Then I asked each class what they knew about Halloween. This produced a list of vocabulary ranging from three to twelve words long. The worst class only got "Halloween," "candy," and "trick or treat;" the best went as far as "grim reaper" and "Cerberus." (Seriously--a 15-year-old Japanese boy tossed "Cerberus" in with Halloween. He pronounced it with a hard C, which is faithful to the Greek pronunciation, but I learned it incorrectly, with a soft C, so I thought he was saying "Care Bears" at first.)
I initially had pretty high hopes for what would come next, including teaching the kids about the Celtic holiday Samhain, the evolution of the word "Halloween" from "All Hallows Evening," the story of Jack o'Lantern, and the ins and outs of trick-or-treating. You can probably imagine the looks of shock and fear on my fellow teachers' faces as I pitched this lesson plan to them. Suffice it to say, the end result was toned down quite a bit. I had to settle for a three-sentence breakdown of Samhain: "2,000 years ago, people lived in Ireland. These people believed that once a year, on October 31st, dead people could come back to life. People were scared of them, so some wore costumes to try and scare the dead away." That's the best compromise I could strike between all the trawling I did on the Internet and what the students would actually understand. Even this much had to be given slowly.
Several of my teachers, trying to be helpful, likened the Samhain festival to the Japanese Buddhist festival O-bon. While both are festivals involving the return of the dead to the earth, all the research I've done has shown that while the Gaels feared the return of the deceased on Samhain, O-bon is a much more welcoming celebration of one's ancestors. I think one of us misrepresented our holidays, and I'm pretty sure it was me. Oh, well. The history isn't so much crucial to the understanding of Halloween as it is simply interesting.
Next, I talked about pumpkin carving. Telling the story of Jack o'Lantern would likely lose all its effect in translation for the students, so I settled for pointing out the distinction between a pumpkin and a jack-o-lantern. I showed lots of pictures I found of different jack-o-lanterns, and explained how to carve a pumpkin, complete with drawings on the board and sound effects for popping open and gutting a pumpkin. The kids absolutely loved all of this. With my second, smaller high school, I brought a green Japanese pumpkin I had carved, and showed it to the students after explaining carving. At this school, I have a class of seven third-year commercial-track students that I've talked about before. The teacher and I decided to have the students carve some pumpkins. I went to the grocery store, bought four more green pumpkins, and carved out three of them for the class to use. The fourth I purposefully left unhollowed so the kids could hear the juicy ripping sound it makes when you tear off the top. I tried to get them to stick their hands in and scoop out the guts, but had to settle for them using a spoon. I had to dart out early, so I only snapped one picture.
The most important thing I learned from this little unit has nothing to do with the holiday itself. This was the first time I've known exactly what I wanted to teach the kids, and felt no pressure or stress about whether or not the students would understand. Of course, the deck was stacked in my favor: the students already know little snippets about Halloween, I showed lots of pictures, we played games, and I gave them candy. Even so, it felt amazing to be able to relish the sheer joy of teaching something. I take it as a preview of how everyday teaching could one day be for me, once I get past all the crazy lesson planning.
Pictures!
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Happy Halloween!
Wow. It's only been two weeks since I last posted, but it feels like a lot longer. I'm actually glad that I haven't had enough spare time to add to this blog--that means I'm too busy having the time of my life to sit down and write about it. Suffice it to say, I'm loving it here. The negatives are few and temporary, mostly related to the language barrier and interacting with fellow teachers. I've been teaching Halloween lessons for the past week (complete with candy for the students), I was able to play a piano for the first time in two months this week (and man, did it feel good), the JETs on my island got together and helped put on a trick-or-treating shindig with about 200 elementary students, and I'm going to Nagasaki this week for the prefectural mid-year conference (which means about 500x the anglophones I see around here). Oh, and I found a spectacularly nostalgic youtube video of the UGA Men's Glee Club from almost 20 years ago. The only serious differences I noticed were the former conductor (Arant instead of Crowell) and the auditorium (one of the PJ auditoria instead of the School of Music). Everything else--the clothes, the hairstyles, the good-natured foolishness--has changed very little, if at all.
However, all of this pales in comparison to two glorious parts of today. First, UGA beat the ever-loving snot out of Florida, for only the third time in 18 years. What trumps everything else, though, is that today I found out that my grandmother, who has been fighting liver cancer for two years, has been declared cancer-free. I know it's kind of awkward to mention that here, but in the spirit of keeping a journal for me to read as much as for everyone else, I think it's appropriate. Today rocked so hard that I still can't believe it.
Guitar Hero 3 came out today. Yet another reason to buy a Wii. Let's see how long I can resist...
However, all of this pales in comparison to two glorious parts of today. First, UGA beat the ever-loving snot out of Florida, for only the third time in 18 years. What trumps everything else, though, is that today I found out that my grandmother, who has been fighting liver cancer for two years, has been declared cancer-free. I know it's kind of awkward to mention that here, but in the spirit of keeping a journal for me to read as much as for everyone else, I think it's appropriate. Today rocked so hard that I still can't believe it.
Guitar Hero 3 came out today. Yet another reason to buy a Wii. Let's see how long I can resist...
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Ad-veen-ture in Taiwan!
Last Wednesday, I boogeyed down the mountain right after school, did some last-minute packing, and caught the 4:45 bus to the airport. From there I caught my half-hour flight to Fukuoka, and had an adventure with a cab driver who didn't know where my hotel was. When we finally did find the hotel, I watched Japanese TV for about the second time since I've gotten here. They had a pretty nifty English education program, and one for Korean, too.
I woke up bright and early Thursday morning, ducked in for an Egg McMuffin on my way to Hakata station, and took the subway back to the airport. The lady at the check-in counter for my airline--the airline responsible for getting me both to and from Taiwan--asked me if I had my return ticket to Japan with me. I sort of balked at this, thinking that surely she/the airline isn't retarded enough not to see on their screen that I made my reservation online. When I explained this as gently as I could, she ducked away to make a phone call. It all got straightened out (apparently Taiwan requires proof of return passage for tourists), and I got to my gate with no trouble at all.
As I was walking away from the check-in counter, I noticed my boarding pass looked a little funny. Sure enough, it was decorated with Hello Kitty. This didn't surprise me as much as seeing that my airplane was similarly covered in Hello Kitty. After this, I was only mildly surprised that my in-flight meal was similarly themed, including a Hello Kitty placemat and Hello Kitty-shaped Jello mold. It was kind of weird.
As we were boarding, a flight attendant was offering Japanese and Chinese newspapers to passengers. When she saw me, she brandishes a copy of USA Today. I hadn't expected this, and spent half the flight gulping down every word of English I could find, even in the advertisements. Being deprived of mother culture can make you do weird things.
The flight was uneventful, with most of the time taken up by flight attendants giving all the announcements in four languages: Mandarin, English, Cantonese, and Japanese. I found it kind of strange that the English translation was given before the Japanese, considering we had just come from Fukuoka. We had little TV screens in each seat, and I found a Travel Channel episode about Budapest. It was in English, thank goodness, and I recognized about half of the places they went to in the city. It was awesome to hear the parts of the locals' Hungarian that weren't blotted out by the dubbed-over voices. They also had movies, including Knocked Up, Harry Potter 5, and Evan Almighty. I'd spent so much time reading the paper that I knew I wouldn't be able to get into Harry Potter, and I love Steve Carell, so I went with Evan Almighty.
I only got about half an hour into it before we arrived. Customs was fun (the stern look on the customs officer's face almost turned into tears when his stamp crumbled on my passport), and my baggage made it with no trouble. Ju's flight was arriving about an hour and a half after mine, so the plan was for us to meet at the coffee shop in the airport.
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, formerly Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, is way too small to have such a long name. I think Springfield-Branson Regional is bigger. The arrival terminal is tiny, at least. There's only one coffee shop, and I found it. As I exited customs and got to the part of the airport where people stand and hold signs for folks to find them, I noticed a huge crowd. I squirmed my way to the coffee shop, sat down with a "German meringue tart" and some water, and just watched.
The crowd was almost entirely girls, none of whom were older than me, and most of whom were about high-school age. After a few minutes I noticed lots of uniformed policemen strolling around. I also noticed signs, most of which were in Chinese, but a large portion of which were not--I recognized one in Korean, and another written in a Romanized alphabet without tone markings. I finally spotted a poster of what looked like a band, and realized that band must be flying into Taiwan right after me. Sure enough, about ten minutes later, the arrival lobby sounded like a Backstreet Boys concert. As it turned out, the band's route to their getaway limo took them right past my seat, so I got a nice little video of them, with the screaming girls trying to break through the line of policemen. I'll try to post them.
Ju arrived right on time, and we sort of walked in circles around the airport, trying to decide what to do while catching up on stuff, since the last time we saw each other was outside Baskin Robbins in Athens a year and a half ago, when she was getting ready to come to Japan for JET. We eventually found the bus station, bought two tickets to the train station in Taipei, and took off. We took a train to T'ai-nan, in the southwest of Taiwan. We had originally planned to meet another student of Dr. Benedek's, but we were never able to get in touch with him. No worries--we found a hotel with no trouble, and spent the first night watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet in English.
Cities in Taiwan are dirty. Well, to phrase it more fairly, both of the cities I visited in Taiwan were dirty. A large part of it was just big-city dirty, like you find in inner city Atlanta or Budapest. Another part, though, was something bordering on squalor. I guess Japan's a little cleaner than average, which probably made me more critical of trash and grime I found in Taiwan. At any rate, Taipei and T'ainan were both crowded, smelly metropolises.
That being said, the people were great. Ju and I talked about it, and we both find the service industry hospitality in Japan is courteous and accommodating, but in a forced, artificial way. Sure, you always get a smile and a greeting from all the workers when you enter, but you just know that there's no way everyone's that happy to be working. In contrast, the shopkeepers and restaurant workers we met in Taiwan were cordial. Not grinning ear-to-ear, not maniacally happy to see you--just mildly appreciative. We heard a lot of people yelling at each other as we walked around, but there wasn't any scuffling going on. Folks were just sort of yelling, which is something neither one of us have encountered in Japan.
Don't get me wrong--the people weren't brimming with rage everywhere or anything. In fact, almost everyone we walked by would smile warmly back at us. I would've thought I was just being weird, had Ju not echoed my sentiments--it felt so much more genuine than a smile in Japan. That's probably because it was coming from someone we knew had no qualms about yelling at someone, while it seems to take a whole lot of pushing to get a Japanese to raise their voice.
I was expecting to find a nation full of Jeans, which will make sense to those of you who know whom I'm talking about. I was delighted to find this somewhat accurate, at least based on the folks being so honest with their emotions.
Ju and I speak about three words of Mandarin in total. She had brought a phrasebook with her, but neither one of us are good with distinguishing tones, so we were more or less completely helpless when it came to understanding or making ourselves understood in Chinese. The people guarding the essentials--food, hotel, transportation--spoke English, but beyond that, we were lost. This really got to me by the second day. I realized that this was my first time being in a country where neither I nor the other people traveling with me could speak the local language effectively. I never felt threatened or in any way in danger. It was much more passive than that.
We did a lot of walking, saw some awesome parks, a sprawling produce market, a nine-story shopping mall, and several Buddhist temples in T'ainan. It was a lot of fun, but in a very limited, man-I-wish-we-could-ask-them-questions sort of way.
Taiwan uses the dollar sign for their currency, and the exchange rate is about 30 of theirs to 1 USD, so everything in Taiwan looked outlandishly expensive--our "$240" Mos Burger receipt would terrify someone who didn't know the currency.
We noticed on Wednesday that Taiwan was in fact sandwiched between two typhoons, with the southern of the two projected to hit the island that weekend. Nobody was freaking out about it, so we weren't concerned. Ju, however, realized that the typhoon would probably shut down the trains, so we would need to get back to Taipei before it hit, so that we wouldn't be more than a bus ride away from the airport. Ju's a genius--we took what turned out to be the second-to-last train for Taipei before the typhoon hit.
Super Typhoon Krosa hit Taiwan with gusts of about 150mph and sustained winds of 115mph, making it the equivalent of a baby Category 4 hurricane. It was actually making landfall as we were riding the train to Taipei, so we got to watch as the flooding started. It was kind of creepy traveling at 150mph on a track 30 feet in the air in the middle of something like that, but nobody seemed the least bit concerned, so we didn't sweat it. In my experience thus far with typhoons, they seem to be just really windy, rainy hurricanes with no lightning. They're dangerous, especially in tropical lowlands, but I haven't experienced one yet that's felt the same as I remember Erin or Opal being. Oh well.
When we got to Taipei, we hopped on the subway to Taipei Main Station. From there, we scurried around in the station's tunnels, looking for the nearest hotel on the maps. The closest one we could find was the Sheraton. We made a mad dash from the subway tunnel to the hotel, and found the lobby full of people wearing three-piece suits. Preparing for the worst, we squeaked our way across the marble floor to the check-in desk, and asked if they had a room. Miraculously, they did, but the only ones they had were on the Executive Floor, and they ran about $350 a night. Ju and I had a quick huddle, debated, decided we weren't going to be spending any money on sightseeing during a typhoon anyway, and went for it.
The room was ridiculously plush. I'll try to post the video. It was by far the nicest room and hotel Ju and I have ever stayed at. We even had to use our room key in the elevator to get to our floor. When I turned the TV on, a welcome screen popped up that began "Dear Mr. Shirley..." Five minutes after we got to the room, there was a knock at the door. A cute Taiwanese girl greeted us in fine English, gave us her card, and introduced herself as our butler. That's right--our butler. Her card even said it. Ju and I spent the rest of our time at the hotel thinking of bizarre things we could ask her to do for us.
We spent the evening trying to find some of the underground shopping malls we had heard of, only to find labyrinthine hallways full of closed shops. Defeated, we trudged back to the underground food court that was still open, and ducked into the Mos Burger. We each got a fish sandwich, and though mine was tasty, there was something icky in Ju's, so she didn't eat hers. By the time we got back to the hotel, she was still hungry, and I wasn't full, so we went to the "Pizza Pub" restaurant in the basement. We ordered a customized pizza, a couple of drinks, and told dirty jokes while the musical entertainment for the evening, a Taiwanese husband and wife, serenaded the crowd with old American and Japanese songs.
By Sunday, the nastiest part of the typhoon had blown over, so we ventured out, trying to find a more reasonably-priced hotel. We indeed found one not two blocks away that was perfectly fine and half the price. Also, it had a Dunkin Donuts next door. Take that, Sheraton.
Our to-do list for Taipei consisted of a temple, the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, a night market, and Taipei 101. Since it's billed as the tallest building in the world (it's the tallest completed building, but the Burj Dubai will be much taller), we figured it'd be worth stopping by.
The temple was fun, the memorial was closed for renovation, and it was rainy all afternoon. Despite these setbacks, we trudged on to Taipei 101. It's connected to a huge shopping mall, in which you can find a Toys R Us, a McDonald's, and a Cold Stone. The Toys R Us looked identical to the ones you find back home (maybe a bit smaller, but not much), and so did the Cold Stone. They had exactly the same menu with exactly the same flavors and ingredients as you find back home. I hadn't eaten ice cream that good since having Marble Slab with Kristi and Clay back in July.
Neither one of us was too keen on the hordes of people running around, so we made our way over to Taipei 101 itself. The bottom five floors or so are a shopping mall with the most expensive shops I've ever seen. What few luxury brand names I do know--Gucci, Luis Vuitton, Armani, Dior, Prada--all had at least one boutique (I don't think you're allowed to call them "shops" when the cheapest item for sale is $100), and there were plenty of brands I'd never heard of. Lee and Tommy Hilfiger also had shops, and even though I didn't go in, I could tell by looking that jeans in Taipei probably cost more than a suit back home.
Ju wanted to get something nice for her boyfriend in Japan, so we ducked into a few shops. Most of them didn't have price tags out, but a purse Ju peeked at in a fit of daydreaming was priced at $700. They had Luis Vuitton luggage, but we were both scared to look at the price. In a different shop, I couldn't resist browsing one of the t-shirt racks. A long-sleeved, 100%-cotton t-shirt cost $150. That's USD, too.
The 89th floor of Taipei 101 is an observation tower, and you can take the elevator there for about US$10. The building apparently has the fastest elevators in the world: we went from the 5th to the 89th floor in about 39 seconds, which averages out to 37mph. The remnants of the typhoon made visibility pretty poor, and the 91st-floor outdoor observatory was closed, but the view was nonetheless awesome. The building has three tuned mass dampers--a 662-ton and two smaller ones--but you can still feel it swaying in the wind. It's kind of creepy. The building is also lit up in a different color each night of the week, with Monday through Sunday running the visible-light spectrum. Our night was violet, and it looked purdy.
After buying $80 worth of Taipei 101 omiyage for my coworkers, we went to the nearby night market. We discovered cheap designer-label clothing outlets, a positively revolting smell, and stalls selling fried chicken feet, turkey heads, and items we couldn't readily identify.
This atmosphere, combined with the steady drizzle that had been keeping us moist all day, got me ready to call it quits and come home. I got the feeling Ju felt the same way. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was about 10. We talked to token anglophone at the front desk, and discovered that, to make our 8 am flight, we would need to leave the hotel no later than 5:15. Delighted, we set our alarm for 4:15 and, naturally, had trouble getting to sleep. We discovered that CNN International carries the Daily Show, which I haven't seen on a TV screen in three months, so that lightened our mood a little.
At any rate, we got up on time after what can only be described as a nap, slept in the taxi, and made it to the airport right on schedule. We checked in, went through security and customs, and plopped down at a point equidistant from our departure gates. I was too tired to remember what we talked about, but I'm pretty sure we vowed to go on our next adventure in a place where at least one of us speaks the language, and said goodbye.
Being in a country where you speak absolutely none of the language made me feel fluent in Japanese by comparison. That's sad, really, because I can barely fend for myself in daily conversation. Nonetheless, I felt remarkably at home in Fukuoka, and I managed to take an earlier flight back to Tsushima. I thought I'd be coming straight back to my apartment to unwind, but fate--and an inkstone carver--had other plans...
Hah! How's that for a teaser?
I woke up bright and early Thursday morning, ducked in for an Egg McMuffin on my way to Hakata station, and took the subway back to the airport. The lady at the check-in counter for my airline--the airline responsible for getting me both to and from Taiwan--asked me if I had my return ticket to Japan with me. I sort of balked at this, thinking that surely she/the airline isn't retarded enough not to see on their screen that I made my reservation online. When I explained this as gently as I could, she ducked away to make a phone call. It all got straightened out (apparently Taiwan requires proof of return passage for tourists), and I got to my gate with no trouble at all.
As I was walking away from the check-in counter, I noticed my boarding pass looked a little funny. Sure enough, it was decorated with Hello Kitty. This didn't surprise me as much as seeing that my airplane was similarly covered in Hello Kitty. After this, I was only mildly surprised that my in-flight meal was similarly themed, including a Hello Kitty placemat and Hello Kitty-shaped Jello mold. It was kind of weird.
As we were boarding, a flight attendant was offering Japanese and Chinese newspapers to passengers. When she saw me, she brandishes a copy of USA Today. I hadn't expected this, and spent half the flight gulping down every word of English I could find, even in the advertisements. Being deprived of mother culture can make you do weird things.
The flight was uneventful, with most of the time taken up by flight attendants giving all the announcements in four languages: Mandarin, English, Cantonese, and Japanese. I found it kind of strange that the English translation was given before the Japanese, considering we had just come from Fukuoka. We had little TV screens in each seat, and I found a Travel Channel episode about Budapest. It was in English, thank goodness, and I recognized about half of the places they went to in the city. It was awesome to hear the parts of the locals' Hungarian that weren't blotted out by the dubbed-over voices. They also had movies, including Knocked Up, Harry Potter 5, and Evan Almighty. I'd spent so much time reading the paper that I knew I wouldn't be able to get into Harry Potter, and I love Steve Carell, so I went with Evan Almighty.
I only got about half an hour into it before we arrived. Customs was fun (the stern look on the customs officer's face almost turned into tears when his stamp crumbled on my passport), and my baggage made it with no trouble. Ju's flight was arriving about an hour and a half after mine, so the plan was for us to meet at the coffee shop in the airport.
Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, formerly Chiang Kai-shek International Airport, is way too small to have such a long name. I think Springfield-Branson Regional is bigger. The arrival terminal is tiny, at least. There's only one coffee shop, and I found it. As I exited customs and got to the part of the airport where people stand and hold signs for folks to find them, I noticed a huge crowd. I squirmed my way to the coffee shop, sat down with a "German meringue tart" and some water, and just watched.
The crowd was almost entirely girls, none of whom were older than me, and most of whom were about high-school age. After a few minutes I noticed lots of uniformed policemen strolling around. I also noticed signs, most of which were in Chinese, but a large portion of which were not--I recognized one in Korean, and another written in a Romanized alphabet without tone markings. I finally spotted a poster of what looked like a band, and realized that band must be flying into Taiwan right after me. Sure enough, about ten minutes later, the arrival lobby sounded like a Backstreet Boys concert. As it turned out, the band's route to their getaway limo took them right past my seat, so I got a nice little video of them, with the screaming girls trying to break through the line of policemen. I'll try to post them.
Ju arrived right on time, and we sort of walked in circles around the airport, trying to decide what to do while catching up on stuff, since the last time we saw each other was outside Baskin Robbins in Athens a year and a half ago, when she was getting ready to come to Japan for JET. We eventually found the bus station, bought two tickets to the train station in Taipei, and took off. We took a train to T'ai-nan, in the southwest of Taiwan. We had originally planned to meet another student of Dr. Benedek's, but we were never able to get in touch with him. No worries--we found a hotel with no trouble, and spent the first night watching Discovery Channel and Animal Planet in English.
Cities in Taiwan are dirty. Well, to phrase it more fairly, both of the cities I visited in Taiwan were dirty. A large part of it was just big-city dirty, like you find in inner city Atlanta or Budapest. Another part, though, was something bordering on squalor. I guess Japan's a little cleaner than average, which probably made me more critical of trash and grime I found in Taiwan. At any rate, Taipei and T'ainan were both crowded, smelly metropolises.
That being said, the people were great. Ju and I talked about it, and we both find the service industry hospitality in Japan is courteous and accommodating, but in a forced, artificial way. Sure, you always get a smile and a greeting from all the workers when you enter, but you just know that there's no way everyone's that happy to be working. In contrast, the shopkeepers and restaurant workers we met in Taiwan were cordial. Not grinning ear-to-ear, not maniacally happy to see you--just mildly appreciative. We heard a lot of people yelling at each other as we walked around, but there wasn't any scuffling going on. Folks were just sort of yelling, which is something neither one of us have encountered in Japan.
Don't get me wrong--the people weren't brimming with rage everywhere or anything. In fact, almost everyone we walked by would smile warmly back at us. I would've thought I was just being weird, had Ju not echoed my sentiments--it felt so much more genuine than a smile in Japan. That's probably because it was coming from someone we knew had no qualms about yelling at someone, while it seems to take a whole lot of pushing to get a Japanese to raise their voice.
I was expecting to find a nation full of Jeans, which will make sense to those of you who know whom I'm talking about. I was delighted to find this somewhat accurate, at least based on the folks being so honest with their emotions.
Ju and I speak about three words of Mandarin in total. She had brought a phrasebook with her, but neither one of us are good with distinguishing tones, so we were more or less completely helpless when it came to understanding or making ourselves understood in Chinese. The people guarding the essentials--food, hotel, transportation--spoke English, but beyond that, we were lost. This really got to me by the second day. I realized that this was my first time being in a country where neither I nor the other people traveling with me could speak the local language effectively. I never felt threatened or in any way in danger. It was much more passive than that.
We did a lot of walking, saw some awesome parks, a sprawling produce market, a nine-story shopping mall, and several Buddhist temples in T'ainan. It was a lot of fun, but in a very limited, man-I-wish-we-could-ask-them-questions sort of way.
Taiwan uses the dollar sign for their currency, and the exchange rate is about 30 of theirs to 1 USD, so everything in Taiwan looked outlandishly expensive--our "$240" Mos Burger receipt would terrify someone who didn't know the currency.
We noticed on Wednesday that Taiwan was in fact sandwiched between two typhoons, with the southern of the two projected to hit the island that weekend. Nobody was freaking out about it, so we weren't concerned. Ju, however, realized that the typhoon would probably shut down the trains, so we would need to get back to Taipei before it hit, so that we wouldn't be more than a bus ride away from the airport. Ju's a genius--we took what turned out to be the second-to-last train for Taipei before the typhoon hit.
Super Typhoon Krosa hit Taiwan with gusts of about 150mph and sustained winds of 115mph, making it the equivalent of a baby Category 4 hurricane. It was actually making landfall as we were riding the train to Taipei, so we got to watch as the flooding started. It was kind of creepy traveling at 150mph on a track 30 feet in the air in the middle of something like that, but nobody seemed the least bit concerned, so we didn't sweat it. In my experience thus far with typhoons, they seem to be just really windy, rainy hurricanes with no lightning. They're dangerous, especially in tropical lowlands, but I haven't experienced one yet that's felt the same as I remember Erin or Opal being. Oh well.
When we got to Taipei, we hopped on the subway to Taipei Main Station. From there, we scurried around in the station's tunnels, looking for the nearest hotel on the maps. The closest one we could find was the Sheraton. We made a mad dash from the subway tunnel to the hotel, and found the lobby full of people wearing three-piece suits. Preparing for the worst, we squeaked our way across the marble floor to the check-in desk, and asked if they had a room. Miraculously, they did, but the only ones they had were on the Executive Floor, and they ran about $350 a night. Ju and I had a quick huddle, debated, decided we weren't going to be spending any money on sightseeing during a typhoon anyway, and went for it.
The room was ridiculously plush. I'll try to post the video. It was by far the nicest room and hotel Ju and I have ever stayed at. We even had to use our room key in the elevator to get to our floor. When I turned the TV on, a welcome screen popped up that began "Dear Mr. Shirley..." Five minutes after we got to the room, there was a knock at the door. A cute Taiwanese girl greeted us in fine English, gave us her card, and introduced herself as our butler. That's right--our butler. Her card even said it. Ju and I spent the rest of our time at the hotel thinking of bizarre things we could ask her to do for us.
We spent the evening trying to find some of the underground shopping malls we had heard of, only to find labyrinthine hallways full of closed shops. Defeated, we trudged back to the underground food court that was still open, and ducked into the Mos Burger. We each got a fish sandwich, and though mine was tasty, there was something icky in Ju's, so she didn't eat hers. By the time we got back to the hotel, she was still hungry, and I wasn't full, so we went to the "Pizza Pub" restaurant in the basement. We ordered a customized pizza, a couple of drinks, and told dirty jokes while the musical entertainment for the evening, a Taiwanese husband and wife, serenaded the crowd with old American and Japanese songs.
By Sunday, the nastiest part of the typhoon had blown over, so we ventured out, trying to find a more reasonably-priced hotel. We indeed found one not two blocks away that was perfectly fine and half the price. Also, it had a Dunkin Donuts next door. Take that, Sheraton.
Our to-do list for Taipei consisted of a temple, the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, a night market, and Taipei 101. Since it's billed as the tallest building in the world (it's the tallest completed building, but the Burj Dubai will be much taller), we figured it'd be worth stopping by.
The temple was fun, the memorial was closed for renovation, and it was rainy all afternoon. Despite these setbacks, we trudged on to Taipei 101. It's connected to a huge shopping mall, in which you can find a Toys R Us, a McDonald's, and a Cold Stone. The Toys R Us looked identical to the ones you find back home (maybe a bit smaller, but not much), and so did the Cold Stone. They had exactly the same menu with exactly the same flavors and ingredients as you find back home. I hadn't eaten ice cream that good since having Marble Slab with Kristi and Clay back in July.
Neither one of us was too keen on the hordes of people running around, so we made our way over to Taipei 101 itself. The bottom five floors or so are a shopping mall with the most expensive shops I've ever seen. What few luxury brand names I do know--Gucci, Luis Vuitton, Armani, Dior, Prada--all had at least one boutique (I don't think you're allowed to call them "shops" when the cheapest item for sale is $100), and there were plenty of brands I'd never heard of. Lee and Tommy Hilfiger also had shops, and even though I didn't go in, I could tell by looking that jeans in Taipei probably cost more than a suit back home.
Ju wanted to get something nice for her boyfriend in Japan, so we ducked into a few shops. Most of them didn't have price tags out, but a purse Ju peeked at in a fit of daydreaming was priced at $700. They had Luis Vuitton luggage, but we were both scared to look at the price. In a different shop, I couldn't resist browsing one of the t-shirt racks. A long-sleeved, 100%-cotton t-shirt cost $150. That's USD, too.
The 89th floor of Taipei 101 is an observation tower, and you can take the elevator there for about US$10. The building apparently has the fastest elevators in the world: we went from the 5th to the 89th floor in about 39 seconds, which averages out to 37mph. The remnants of the typhoon made visibility pretty poor, and the 91st-floor outdoor observatory was closed, but the view was nonetheless awesome. The building has three tuned mass dampers--a 662-ton and two smaller ones--but you can still feel it swaying in the wind. It's kind of creepy. The building is also lit up in a different color each night of the week, with Monday through Sunday running the visible-light spectrum. Our night was violet, and it looked purdy.
After buying $80 worth of Taipei 101 omiyage for my coworkers, we went to the nearby night market. We discovered cheap designer-label clothing outlets, a positively revolting smell, and stalls selling fried chicken feet, turkey heads, and items we couldn't readily identify.
This atmosphere, combined with the steady drizzle that had been keeping us moist all day, got me ready to call it quits and come home. I got the feeling Ju felt the same way. By the time we got back to the hotel, it was about 10. We talked to token anglophone at the front desk, and discovered that, to make our 8 am flight, we would need to leave the hotel no later than 5:15. Delighted, we set our alarm for 4:15 and, naturally, had trouble getting to sleep. We discovered that CNN International carries the Daily Show, which I haven't seen on a TV screen in three months, so that lightened our mood a little.
At any rate, we got up on time after what can only be described as a nap, slept in the taxi, and made it to the airport right on schedule. We checked in, went through security and customs, and plopped down at a point equidistant from our departure gates. I was too tired to remember what we talked about, but I'm pretty sure we vowed to go on our next adventure in a place where at least one of us speaks the language, and said goodbye.
Being in a country where you speak absolutely none of the language made me feel fluent in Japanese by comparison. That's sad, really, because I can barely fend for myself in daily conversation. Nonetheless, I felt remarkably at home in Fukuoka, and I managed to take an earlier flight back to Tsushima. I thought I'd be coming straight back to my apartment to unwind, but fate--and an inkstone carver--had other plans...
Hah! How's that for a teaser?
Pre-Taiwan Adventures
The week leading up to my trip to Taiwan, I got to teach at a local elementary school for the first time. I mentioned the school before, though it was toward the end of a mighty long post. Both of my high schools had their midterm exams scheduled for that week, so I would've just been spinning in my chair at school if I hadn't gone to visit the kiddies.
I was there for two days, and taught three of the grade levels each day. I was stoked to find out I wasn't expected to do any lesson planning, that the teachers would basically fill me in five minutes prior to the lesson, and that I really wouldn't have to do any intense explaining. I helped the first group (the sixth-years) with "which do you like: __ or __?" "I like __," the fourth-years were learning animals, and so were the second-years. The second day I watched the fifth-years give small-group presentations involving a microwave, a raw egg, and sweeping the floor. (I was just as confused as you are.
When I teach at the elementary school, I'll be eating lunch with a different class each day. It's really cute--I go wait at my desk in the faculty room while the kids are up in the classroom preparing their lunches, and the teacher sends two of them down to get me and escort me up to the room.
After lunch, the kids get an hour of recess. A freaking hour. I don't know how much time we got for recess when I was in elementary school (I don't think 5-year-olds have more than a loose concept of time), but I don't think it was that long. All the kids do whatever they want--some stay in the classroom to color or do homework, but if it's pretty outside, most of them go out to the playground. Both days I was there, the weather was gorgeous, so all 135 of them stampeded the field. From what I could tell, kids from different grade levels were mixed together everywhere. Some of the boys went into the equipment shed for soccer balls, baseballs, and gloves, while some others started up a baseball game with a plastic bat and rubber ball.
Through all of this, there was only one teacher on the field. He wasn't even supervising--he was playing with some of the kids. At first I was worried, but by the end of the first day, not a single kid got in a fight, skinned a knee, threw up, or even cried. The teachers don't even come corral the kids when recess is over--a bell chimes, and everyone just moseys back in. It was awesome!
Oh, and I still haven't gotten a kancho.
I was there for two days, and taught three of the grade levels each day. I was stoked to find out I wasn't expected to do any lesson planning, that the teachers would basically fill me in five minutes prior to the lesson, and that I really wouldn't have to do any intense explaining. I helped the first group (the sixth-years) with "which do you like: __ or __?" "I like __," the fourth-years were learning animals, and so were the second-years. The second day I watched the fifth-years give small-group presentations involving a microwave, a raw egg, and sweeping the floor. (I was just as confused as you are.
When I teach at the elementary school, I'll be eating lunch with a different class each day. It's really cute--I go wait at my desk in the faculty room while the kids are up in the classroom preparing their lunches, and the teacher sends two of them down to get me and escort me up to the room.
After lunch, the kids get an hour of recess. A freaking hour. I don't know how much time we got for recess when I was in elementary school (I don't think 5-year-olds have more than a loose concept of time), but I don't think it was that long. All the kids do whatever they want--some stay in the classroom to color or do homework, but if it's pretty outside, most of them go out to the playground. Both days I was there, the weather was gorgeous, so all 135 of them stampeded the field. From what I could tell, kids from different grade levels were mixed together everywhere. Some of the boys went into the equipment shed for soccer balls, baseballs, and gloves, while some others started up a baseball game with a plastic bat and rubber ball.
Through all of this, there was only one teacher on the field. He wasn't even supervising--he was playing with some of the kids. At first I was worried, but by the end of the first day, not a single kid got in a fight, skinned a knee, threw up, or even cried. The teachers don't even come corral the kids when recess is over--a bell chimes, and everyone just moseys back in. It was awesome!
Oh, and I still haven't gotten a kancho.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
I'm going to Taiwan!
Hiyo! The past ten days have been crazy busy. Classes finally kicked in all the way, and I've been struggling mightily to keep up. I felt off-balance last week, due mostly to my computer dying. Like I said, it could've been much worse, and I didn't lose anything vitally important, but most of the lesson plans I'd drawn up were lost, so I spent the week playing catch-up.
As the title indicates, I'm going to Taiwan! Wednesday after work I'm flying to Fukuoka, where I'll spend the night, and Thursday morning I'll fly from there to Taipei. The flight's about three hours, and I'm meeting Julie (a JET from Hyogo-ken, where Kobe is). Monday's a holiday, so by taking Thursday and Friday off, I'm turning two days off into a six-day trip. Woohoo!
An awesome friend of mine bought me a world atlas back in July, and I'm such a geek that lately I've been spending half an hour at a time just studying maps from around the world.
I still love teaching. That being said, I despise sitting at my desk coming up with lesson plans, and running them by each class's teacher. Nobody's trying to mess with my plans or anything--if anything, they're enormously helpful, letting me know which parts of my plan are good, which ones will make the students cry, etc. It's just that writing stuff on a chalkboard and teaching stuff and drawing gasps whenever I speak the least bit of Japanese are so much more satisfying than being stuck to my desk.
I've been meeting with a second-year (11th-grade) student at my main high school to help her prepare for a regional speech competition next Saturday. I worked with her one-on-one for two afternoons last week. Her knowledge of English is impressive, and she speaks much better than most of the students I've met. She still struggles with her /l/ and /r/, though. One of the phrases in her speech is "the portrait right gives the right," and she nails all three r sounds in "portrait right." However, she goes right on and reads the rest of it "gives the light." The first time she did it, I assumed she slipped up, and asked her to re-read it. After repeating it several times, she consistently read it "portrait right gives the light." Try as I might, we couldn't correct her pronunciation. I had to settle for her recognizing that the two words are identical, and that she's pronouncing them differently. She also struggled with "bullying," although her pronunciation of word-initial /l/ is perfect.
Based on her speech patterns, and what I've noticed in othet students, I think one of the main causes of trouble in English speaking is consonant clusters. Japanese doesn't have many consonant clusters (ts is all I can think of, with ch and sh being digraphs), so groups of two or more consonants are difficult to pronounce. A couple of the other ALTs on the island were telling me that they haven't heard a single Japanese on the island pronounce "twelve" correctly, and this would be why. While helping the girl practice her speech, I attacked "bullying" by breaking it up into "bull," "lee," and "ing," each of which she pronounced perfectly. When trying to read it as a full word without interruption, it came out as something close to "buri-ing." So we spent about five minutes repeating each of the three syllables in succession, with gradually shorter pauses between each one. Bless her heart, she didn't give up, and by the end she could pull it off, but you could tell it took a lot of concentration.
I find stuff like this fascinating, as you can probably tell. I had taken for granted that if you can pronounce /s/, /t/, /a/, and /p/ correctly, you should have no trouble pronouncing "stop." After I thought about it for a while, though, I remembered when I was in first or second grade, and spending at least a couple of weeks talking about what they called blends--ch, sh, fl, fr, str, thr, etc. I wonder if there's an interesting (or even fun) way to teach blends to high schoolers...
I pass by a preschool on my walk to work each morning, and on my way back one day last week, I heard music coming from their gym. As I got closer, I thought I recognized the song, but it wasn't until I got right to the front of the building that I realized they were playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I think the students were just playing drums in time, while a teacher provided the keyboard. The song was slow, but with a slightly different rhythm, it easily could've been Glory, Glory, which, for those of you who don't know, is the UGA fight song. Suffice it to say, this made my day, if not my week.
As the title indicates, I'm going to Taiwan! Wednesday after work I'm flying to Fukuoka, where I'll spend the night, and Thursday morning I'll fly from there to Taipei. The flight's about three hours, and I'm meeting Julie (a JET from Hyogo-ken, where Kobe is). Monday's a holiday, so by taking Thursday and Friday off, I'm turning two days off into a six-day trip. Woohoo!
An awesome friend of mine bought me a world atlas back in July, and I'm such a geek that lately I've been spending half an hour at a time just studying maps from around the world.
I still love teaching. That being said, I despise sitting at my desk coming up with lesson plans, and running them by each class's teacher. Nobody's trying to mess with my plans or anything--if anything, they're enormously helpful, letting me know which parts of my plan are good, which ones will make the students cry, etc. It's just that writing stuff on a chalkboard and teaching stuff and drawing gasps whenever I speak the least bit of Japanese are so much more satisfying than being stuck to my desk.
I've been meeting with a second-year (11th-grade) student at my main high school to help her prepare for a regional speech competition next Saturday. I worked with her one-on-one for two afternoons last week. Her knowledge of English is impressive, and she speaks much better than most of the students I've met. She still struggles with her /l/ and /r/, though. One of the phrases in her speech is "the portrait right gives the right," and she nails all three r sounds in "portrait right." However, she goes right on and reads the rest of it "gives the light." The first time she did it, I assumed she slipped up, and asked her to re-read it. After repeating it several times, she consistently read it "portrait right gives the light." Try as I might, we couldn't correct her pronunciation. I had to settle for her recognizing that the two words are identical, and that she's pronouncing them differently. She also struggled with "bullying," although her pronunciation of word-initial /l/ is perfect.
Based on her speech patterns, and what I've noticed in othet students, I think one of the main causes of trouble in English speaking is consonant clusters. Japanese doesn't have many consonant clusters (ts is all I can think of, with ch and sh being digraphs), so groups of two or more consonants are difficult to pronounce. A couple of the other ALTs on the island were telling me that they haven't heard a single Japanese on the island pronounce "twelve" correctly, and this would be why. While helping the girl practice her speech, I attacked "bullying" by breaking it up into "bull," "lee," and "ing," each of which she pronounced perfectly. When trying to read it as a full word without interruption, it came out as something close to "buri-ing." So we spent about five minutes repeating each of the three syllables in succession, with gradually shorter pauses between each one. Bless her heart, she didn't give up, and by the end she could pull it off, but you could tell it took a lot of concentration.
I find stuff like this fascinating, as you can probably tell. I had taken for granted that if you can pronounce /s/, /t/, /a/, and /p/ correctly, you should have no trouble pronouncing "stop." After I thought about it for a while, though, I remembered when I was in first or second grade, and spending at least a couple of weeks talking about what they called blends--ch, sh, fl, fr, str, thr, etc. I wonder if there's an interesting (or even fun) way to teach blends to high schoolers...
I pass by a preschool on my walk to work each morning, and on my way back one day last week, I heard music coming from their gym. As I got closer, I thought I recognized the song, but it wasn't until I got right to the front of the building that I realized they were playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I think the students were just playing drums in time, while a teacher provided the keyboard. The song was slow, but with a slightly different rhythm, it easily could've been Glory, Glory, which, for those of you who don't know, is the UGA fight song. Suffice it to say, this made my day, if not my week.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
They still say "Let's go cleaning!"
Sorry for the lull in posting--I typed up the previous one last Friday night, but it was so depressing that I held off on posting it until I had prepared a more positive follow-up. I'm not trying to conceal the truth or anything--I had a less-than-stellar night, which I believe is adequately conveyed in that post, but on the whole I'm still doing fine. The rest of the weekend was fairly awesome: the typhoon was little more than a thunderstorm, and my water never shut off. (Nowadays, each time I turn on a faucet, I find myself anxiously listening for the sound of water pressure.)
Sunday, Mike and Mitch (the two ALTs who teach in the middle of the island) came and hung out with me in Izuhara. We grabbed lunch together, talked a lot, and drove to Kechi, the next town over.
Kechi's about ten minutes by car, which puts it just out of reasonable walking distance, so I had never been to the stores there. Sprawling between the two Pachinko parlors are three or four full-sized stores. Two of them are grocery stores. One of these sells Mountain Dew. I'd heard this a few weeks ago, but I refused to get my hopes up. Sure enough, there were four bottles sitting proudly on a shelf. Mike grabbed one; I took two. It was later pointed out that we should have bought the fourth, to entice them to order more--now, they'll wait until it gets sold before reordering, and probably the only two people on the island who drink Mountain Dew are Mike and me.
Anyway. One of the stores is a new/used videogame shop, as well as a movie rental store. There were the typical PS2/3 and Wii fare, with even a few Xbox games strewn about. The shock to me, however, was the used-but-looked-new N64 console bundle for $30, the Super Famicom (SNES) console bundle for $40, and even the original Famicom (NES) console for $20. Rifling through the shelves of games, I found original copies of N64, SNES, and NES games. Games like Final Fantasy VI, Tecmo Super Bowl, Mario RPG, and Mother (the prequel to EarthBound). I spent twenty minutes gawking at all of them. I came *this* close to buying an N64--had there been a copy of Smash available, I would've been sold.
As it turned out, however, I bought nothing. What talked me out of it was picturing all my free time disappearing, like it did between ages 5 and 22. For the first time in my life, I'm right where I want to be, and so I have no reason to while away the hours like I did in middle school, high school, college, and while I was at Inoko. I still play games, sure, but I'm at least more resistant to blowing an entire afternoon playing Starcraft.
Next, we drove back to Toyotama, which is where Mike lives, and where my second high school is. Mitch ran back to his place to grab something, and Mike and I tossed around the baseball and the frisbee for a while. That marked my first time doing either of those since I got to Japan, and it felt awesome. By the time Mitch got back, it was getting dark, so we hung out in Mike's apartment. He fired up his Wii, and I realized I'd never played one before. He let me make my little Mii dude, and after five minutes I realized that buying a Wii would consume my every non-working waking hour. That was before I heard it's backwards-compatible with Gamecube games, and that you can download NES, SNES, and N64 games. I thumbed through the catalog one of them had, and found that Smash 64 hasn't yet been ported, probably to keep people starved for the Wii Smash coming out soon. We played some Smash Melee instead, and though it's fun, it's nothing compared to the original. It made me miss the original enough to kill my buzz about the Wii itself.
Evelyn and Aaron drove up from Izuhara, and the five of us went out to dinner and hung out drinking for a couple of hours. All in all, it was a great night.
Monday morning I woke up, brushed my teeth, and turned on my computer. It started up normally, but after a few seconds flashed a message. I can't remember exactly what it said (still being crusty-eyed and mumbly), but it involved an inability to read some file pertaining to windows.exe. I blinked, a lot, and tried restarting the computer. When this didn't work, I asked it nicely, and let it restart while I went to open my second bottle of Mountain Dew. (I had saved the second, saying it was for 'a bad day,' and figured this sort of qualified.) Half an hour of restarts later, it still wasn't able to get anywhere. Not owning anything resembling a Windows repair/restore CD, I weighed my options, took a long draw of Mountain Dew, and concluded there was nothing to do but wipe the thing. I was still half-asleep, so I thankfully wasn't able to stop and think about just how much stuff I was losing.
Basically, any pictures that aren't on my Picasa web gallery or on my Facebook are gone. Of course, that means none of you know how many pictures that is. Even I'm not sure how many, but judging by the agonizing bits of recollection I've had over the past few days, it couldn't have been any fewer than a few hundred. Pictures from all my trips this summer, from saying goodbye to my family in Alabama, my parents at the airport, and the many more pictures from my first few weeks here than those few I posted--all gone. The 20 or so rolls of film from the 2005 Maymester are gone, but the image CDs and the negatives are still back home. Trouble is, they're no good to me in a box under my bed across the ocean.
There's a lesson here, somewhere. I'm sure of it. Something about putting all my eggs in one basket, or relying too heavily on a machine, or trying to download too many Divx movies, or playing too many videogames. Maybe it's just that I should have posted all my pictures to Facebook and Picasa, instead of just thirty or so. No matter what it is, I immediately recognized that it could have been far worse--my computer could have been irreparably damaged. The thought of that scared the bejeezus out of me--while I'm sure there's a way to call my parents from a landline, I haven't learned how, and I much prefer using Skype for free.
At any rate, I'm trying not to cry too much, even though every few hours I suddenly remember something that's happened in the past two years, think to myself "Hey, I took a picture of that," and ten seconds later realize that it ain't there no more. There's probably an even bigger lesson lurking around there, something about living in the moment instead of being preoccupied with photographing it.
Despite the Friday and Monday being awful, like I said, the weekend on the whole was a lot of fun. I had a blast with everyone on Saturday and Sunday.
Tuesday and Wednesday I taught at my second high school, and that's where I have a group of seven third-year commercial-track students. That class is quickly becoming my favorite, as well as the most advanced. Of course, I have first-year students whose English ability and potential is much greater, but this small group of third-years has absolutely no school-related stress. They aren't going to college, so they aren't cramming for exams. That means they don't have any of the shyness or anxiety that so many other students do. This makes the classroom completely relaxed. They don't mind making mistakes, and, which is more, they enjoy correcting their pronunciation.
I've made it a habit to begin all my classes at this high school with a pronunciation exercise. I've started with the /f/ and /v/ sounds, with generally encouraging results, and I moved on to the /l/ sound with the third-years last week. It didn't go so well, due largely to my inability to describe in Japanese what your tongue does behind the roof of your mouth when you make the sound. I found an awesome phonetics website that has Flash animation of all English sounds (as well as Spanish and German ones), and I took screenshots of the important parts. Using that, and fully anticipating abject failure, I tried explaining /l/ and /r/ to them.
They got it.
I don't mean they nodded their heads, smiled, and we moved on. I wrote words on the board, had them repeat after me, and worked with each one of them, fine-tuning their pronunciation until it was correct. They didn't get mad, flustered, or upset--I smiled the whole time, we all laughed about how silly we sounded going "urrrr" and "ullll," and I encouraged and congratulated them when they got it. There wasn't any stress or anxiety in the room at all. By the end, we were working with minimal pairs like law/raw, and they were correctly pronouncing ball, roll, and hall.
Those of you who have ever spoken to a native speaker of Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, Korean, Chinese, and other languages that don't distinguish /l/ and /r/) can appreciate just how significant this is. I don't mean I've stumbled on some miraculous technique--the teaching ability of the instructor in this case was meaningless. All it took for this group of students was a native speaker of English spending ten minutes doing little more than going back-and-forth repeating words. These third-years, like I said, have no interest in going to university, and therefore have no academic need for English knowledge. If they can correct their pronunciation in such a short span of time, surely it can be done with the majority of other students. I'm now bound and determined to work up to /r/ and /l/ pronunciation in all of my classes.
And that was all just in the introduction to that class. We went on to discuss talking on the phone (stopping along the way to pronounce words like "call" and "here"), and played a game at the end. No tears, no anger, no giving up on the lesson--everyone stuck wth it, and laughed along the way.
I'd say that's positive enough to make up for the post under this one. It's 4:06, baby--I'm going home for the day. Woohoo!
Sunday, Mike and Mitch (the two ALTs who teach in the middle of the island) came and hung out with me in Izuhara. We grabbed lunch together, talked a lot, and drove to Kechi, the next town over.
Kechi's about ten minutes by car, which puts it just out of reasonable walking distance, so I had never been to the stores there. Sprawling between the two Pachinko parlors are three or four full-sized stores. Two of them are grocery stores. One of these sells Mountain Dew. I'd heard this a few weeks ago, but I refused to get my hopes up. Sure enough, there were four bottles sitting proudly on a shelf. Mike grabbed one; I took two. It was later pointed out that we should have bought the fourth, to entice them to order more--now, they'll wait until it gets sold before reordering, and probably the only two people on the island who drink Mountain Dew are Mike and me.
Anyway. One of the stores is a new/used videogame shop, as well as a movie rental store. There were the typical PS2/3 and Wii fare, with even a few Xbox games strewn about. The shock to me, however, was the used-but-looked-new N64 console bundle for $30, the Super Famicom (SNES) console bundle for $40, and even the original Famicom (NES) console for $20. Rifling through the shelves of games, I found original copies of N64, SNES, and NES games. Games like Final Fantasy VI, Tecmo Super Bowl, Mario RPG, and Mother (the prequel to EarthBound). I spent twenty minutes gawking at all of them. I came *this* close to buying an N64--had there been a copy of Smash available, I would've been sold.
As it turned out, however, I bought nothing. What talked me out of it was picturing all my free time disappearing, like it did between ages 5 and 22. For the first time in my life, I'm right where I want to be, and so I have no reason to while away the hours like I did in middle school, high school, college, and while I was at Inoko. I still play games, sure, but I'm at least more resistant to blowing an entire afternoon playing Starcraft.
Next, we drove back to Toyotama, which is where Mike lives, and where my second high school is. Mitch ran back to his place to grab something, and Mike and I tossed around the baseball and the frisbee for a while. That marked my first time doing either of those since I got to Japan, and it felt awesome. By the time Mitch got back, it was getting dark, so we hung out in Mike's apartment. He fired up his Wii, and I realized I'd never played one before. He let me make my little Mii dude, and after five minutes I realized that buying a Wii would consume my every non-working waking hour. That was before I heard it's backwards-compatible with Gamecube games, and that you can download NES, SNES, and N64 games. I thumbed through the catalog one of them had, and found that Smash 64 hasn't yet been ported, probably to keep people starved for the Wii Smash coming out soon. We played some Smash Melee instead, and though it's fun, it's nothing compared to the original. It made me miss the original enough to kill my buzz about the Wii itself.
Evelyn and Aaron drove up from Izuhara, and the five of us went out to dinner and hung out drinking for a couple of hours. All in all, it was a great night.
Monday morning I woke up, brushed my teeth, and turned on my computer. It started up normally, but after a few seconds flashed a message. I can't remember exactly what it said (still being crusty-eyed and mumbly), but it involved an inability to read some file pertaining to windows.exe. I blinked, a lot, and tried restarting the computer. When this didn't work, I asked it nicely, and let it restart while I went to open my second bottle of Mountain Dew. (I had saved the second, saying it was for 'a bad day,' and figured this sort of qualified.) Half an hour of restarts later, it still wasn't able to get anywhere. Not owning anything resembling a Windows repair/restore CD, I weighed my options, took a long draw of Mountain Dew, and concluded there was nothing to do but wipe the thing. I was still half-asleep, so I thankfully wasn't able to stop and think about just how much stuff I was losing.
Basically, any pictures that aren't on my Picasa web gallery or on my Facebook are gone. Of course, that means none of you know how many pictures that is. Even I'm not sure how many, but judging by the agonizing bits of recollection I've had over the past few days, it couldn't have been any fewer than a few hundred. Pictures from all my trips this summer, from saying goodbye to my family in Alabama, my parents at the airport, and the many more pictures from my first few weeks here than those few I posted--all gone. The 20 or so rolls of film from the 2005 Maymester are gone, but the image CDs and the negatives are still back home. Trouble is, they're no good to me in a box under my bed across the ocean.
There's a lesson here, somewhere. I'm sure of it. Something about putting all my eggs in one basket, or relying too heavily on a machine, or trying to download too many Divx movies, or playing too many videogames. Maybe it's just that I should have posted all my pictures to Facebook and Picasa, instead of just thirty or so. No matter what it is, I immediately recognized that it could have been far worse--my computer could have been irreparably damaged. The thought of that scared the bejeezus out of me--while I'm sure there's a way to call my parents from a landline, I haven't learned how, and I much prefer using Skype for free.
At any rate, I'm trying not to cry too much, even though every few hours I suddenly remember something that's happened in the past two years, think to myself "Hey, I took a picture of that," and ten seconds later realize that it ain't there no more. There's probably an even bigger lesson lurking around there, something about living in the moment instead of being preoccupied with photographing it.
Despite the Friday and Monday being awful, like I said, the weekend on the whole was a lot of fun. I had a blast with everyone on Saturday and Sunday.
Tuesday and Wednesday I taught at my second high school, and that's where I have a group of seven third-year commercial-track students. That class is quickly becoming my favorite, as well as the most advanced. Of course, I have first-year students whose English ability and potential is much greater, but this small group of third-years has absolutely no school-related stress. They aren't going to college, so they aren't cramming for exams. That means they don't have any of the shyness or anxiety that so many other students do. This makes the classroom completely relaxed. They don't mind making mistakes, and, which is more, they enjoy correcting their pronunciation.
I've made it a habit to begin all my classes at this high school with a pronunciation exercise. I've started with the /f/ and /v/ sounds, with generally encouraging results, and I moved on to the /l/ sound with the third-years last week. It didn't go so well, due largely to my inability to describe in Japanese what your tongue does behind the roof of your mouth when you make the sound. I found an awesome phonetics website that has Flash animation of all English sounds (as well as Spanish and German ones), and I took screenshots of the important parts. Using that, and fully anticipating abject failure, I tried explaining /l/ and /r/ to them.
They got it.
I don't mean they nodded their heads, smiled, and we moved on. I wrote words on the board, had them repeat after me, and worked with each one of them, fine-tuning their pronunciation until it was correct. They didn't get mad, flustered, or upset--I smiled the whole time, we all laughed about how silly we sounded going "urrrr" and "ullll," and I encouraged and congratulated them when they got it. There wasn't any stress or anxiety in the room at all. By the end, we were working with minimal pairs like law/raw, and they were correctly pronouncing ball, roll, and hall.
Those of you who have ever spoken to a native speaker of Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, Korean, Chinese, and other languages that don't distinguish /l/ and /r/) can appreciate just how significant this is. I don't mean I've stumbled on some miraculous technique--the teaching ability of the instructor in this case was meaningless. All it took for this group of students was a native speaker of English spending ten minutes doing little more than going back-and-forth repeating words. These third-years, like I said, have no interest in going to university, and therefore have no academic need for English knowledge. If they can correct their pronunciation in such a short span of time, surely it can be done with the majority of other students. I'm now bound and determined to work up to /r/ and /l/ pronunciation in all of my classes.
And that was all just in the introduction to that class. We went on to discuss talking on the phone (stopping along the way to pronounce words like "call" and "here"), and played a game at the end. No tears, no anger, no giving up on the lesson--everyone stuck wth it, and laughed along the way.
I'd say that's positive enough to make up for the post under this one. It's 4:06, baby--I'm going home for the day. Woohoo!
Saturday, September 15, 2007
The honeymoon's officially over.
Last Friday I was talking with my supervisor about random things, and somewhere in the conversation she mentions a typhoon. When I asked her what typhoon she was talking about, she replied, "Oh, the one coming this weekend." I'm almost positive nobody has been talking about the typhoon--my Japanese may still be at a pre-K level, but the word for typhoon is "taifun," and sounds identical, so I would have picked up on it. So I looked it up on the radar and, sure enough, Typhoon Nari is a-heading this way. There was a typhoon gunning for us when I first arrived on the island, and my entire family found out about it before I got to talk to them. I'm pretty sure the same thing will happen with this one.
So today I relaxed, read the last section of Ishmael again, practiced a little Japanese, and just chilled out at the local mall. I had a late lunch, did some grocery shopping, and walked back home. As I was preparing to enjoy an evening reading Wikipedia and thinking about stuff--both of which I do not as a way to pass the time but are things I actually look forward to doing--I got a call from Kurokawa, one of the teachers, asking me if I wanted to go out with him and Murahashi, another teacher. I reluctantly agreed.
It's not that I didn't want to hang out with them--they're probably my favorite teachers here, and their English is very good--it's just that, as we were on the phone, in about five seconds, I saw exactly how the night was going to go. I was all for having dinner and a couple of drinks, telling some jokes, talking about Tsushima, and then calling it a night after a couple of hours. However, I've been here just long enough to understand that you don't just go out for an hour or two with work buddies. It's an all-night commitment. That's the part I wasn't looking forward to.
So we go to a local restaurant, sit at the bar, and a full meal gets brought to us without our having to order at all. (The owner of the restaurant knows all the teachers.) I was still stuffed from my late lunch, so I didn't want to eat anything. Not wanting to offend, I nibbled at each dish. They had saba sashimi, though, which perked me up. My last feeble hopes of having a quick dinner were dashed as the beer we had with dinner was followed by opening a bottle of whiskey for Kurokawa and Murahashi.
As we sat and talked with the owner and each other, the guys went through at least a pack of cigarettes each. I'm not opposed to people smoking--in fact, the faint smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of my parents, so I actually like smelling it in passing. What bothered me was that the ventilation wasn't so hot, and the guys didn't make much of an effort to keep the smoke away from me. I may like the faint smell of cigarette smoke in the air, but I abhor the stench of cigarette smoke on clothing. I sound like a weenie, I'm sure, but I have to wash those clothes once they soak up that smell, when I could have otherwise worn that outfit again without washing it. It's even more inconvenient here, where laundry is a day-long process at best (depending on the presence of sunshine), and that's if the water pump to my apartment cooperates with the washing machine in the first place. There's a typhoon coming, so I probably won't have water for the next few days. Am I blowing this out of proportion a little?
I also noticed that the owner, a cheery old lady who had sat down to talk with us since we walked in, was pouring herself a drink whenever she refilled the guys'. I thought nothing of it at first. A little later, though, while she was out of the room, Murahashi explained to me in slurred English that, in a restaurant like this one, we pay not just for the food and drink, but for the atmosphere and the hospitality.
I immediately thought of Hanamizuki, the Atlanta karaoke bar I went to last year, where you pay cocktail waitresses by the hour to host a group of your friends. During that hour, it is perfectly appropriate to ask the girls questions that, if asked outside those doors, would get you a mere slap to the face if you were lucky. You literally can say anything you want to the girls, and they are required by their job to take it in stride. While there, you also pay for alcohol, which is fine--except the girls drink from the same bottle of alcohol you've bought (in the course of refilling your glasses), and you pay for what they drink too. To put it in perspective, the group of four I was with spent three hours there, bought a bottle and a half of good-but-not-best-name whiskey, and had two of the waitresses keep us company the whole time. The total bill? $500.
Now, I'm not saying the restaurant I ate at tonight is just like the one I was at in Atlanta. I'm just saying that I felt the same sense of awkward resentment tonight that I haven't felt since I was at Hanamizuki. I don't know what I resent more--the fact that you're charged for the company of a proprietor who would have nothing else to do with her time were she not keeping you company, or the fact that people agree to patronize places like this in the first place. I'm not trying to make some ethnocentric judgement or indict Japanese culture or people over this--I'm fully aware there are comparable examples of compensated hospitality in American culture. It just doesn't make sense to me. It's therefore my problem, not theirs, and I understand this. Still doesn't make sense to me, though.
Anyway. Five hours later, we finally left the place. The guys asked me if I wanted to do a little karaoke, and I hope I wasn't too quick to decline. I had spent five hours and thirty dollars for a beer and some hors d'œuvres, my clothes reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and I felt a little sick from eating mollusk and what was translated for me as "squid womb"--I was, in a word, done. Ugh.
I tell this thoroughly negative story to talk about the work hard/play hard mentality of my coworkers. The teachers I work with, as I've been told is also the case with most teachers in Japan, work about six and a half days a week. Kurokawa, for example, worked Friday from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., and had to go back in Saturday from 7 a.m. until about 6 p.m. Many of the teachers have spouses, of whom I know several that are also teachers, and many of the couples have children.
I simply can't believe that this goes on. It's one thing to work so much when you're single and have nothing but time to spend. I was the most logical candidate of the Inoko management staff (all two-and-a-half managers) to work six days a week, because I was the youngest, and had no family to go home to. I can understand that. (Moreover, I was paid fairly for my overtime, something that does not happen to teachers here, who are salaried in the strictest sense of the term.) But if I had a wife and kids to support, I can only hope that our circumstances wouldn't be so dire that I'd have to work a job that kept me apart from them so much. I know these teachers aren't limited in options--they're all very competent, college-educated people, so finding a job wouldn't be that difficult. I also know it's not just the education field that demands so much of its workers here, so the teachers wouldn't escape by simply not being a teacher.
It's putting in so much time at work that makes them party so hard. Anyone who's worked a double- or triple-shift in a restaurant or otherwise pulled twelve or sixteen hours straight at a job can relate--everyone needs to unwind, to destress. But based on what limited experience I have with this, it seems that partying as hard as they do here ruins the next day, which is either your day off (in which case you've wasted it) or a normal work day (in which case you're useless that day at work, and your normal day-to-day stress gets combined with the extra stress from being hung over). In the latter case, you wind up needing to escape from the day that was itself ruined by your escaping the previous day, and you accomplish that escape by doing exactly what you did the night before. Instead of trying to compensate for all the extreme repression and professionalism by going hog-wild at a bar, why not cut back on the former to render the latter unnecessary?
I'm well aware that I'm about the billionth person to harp on about the oddity of Japanese work ethic. I'm also aware that I'm not sounding very culturally relativistic or properly anthropological about this. Part of this is because I'm ranting, but maybe another part is that I don't think every aspect of a culture is grey area, that some things ought not to be relative. Oh well.
There'll be a positive post to make up for this one. Promise.
So today I relaxed, read the last section of Ishmael again, practiced a little Japanese, and just chilled out at the local mall. I had a late lunch, did some grocery shopping, and walked back home. As I was preparing to enjoy an evening reading Wikipedia and thinking about stuff--both of which I do not as a way to pass the time but are things I actually look forward to doing--I got a call from Kurokawa, one of the teachers, asking me if I wanted to go out with him and Murahashi, another teacher. I reluctantly agreed.
It's not that I didn't want to hang out with them--they're probably my favorite teachers here, and their English is very good--it's just that, as we were on the phone, in about five seconds, I saw exactly how the night was going to go. I was all for having dinner and a couple of drinks, telling some jokes, talking about Tsushima, and then calling it a night after a couple of hours. However, I've been here just long enough to understand that you don't just go out for an hour or two with work buddies. It's an all-night commitment. That's the part I wasn't looking forward to.
So we go to a local restaurant, sit at the bar, and a full meal gets brought to us without our having to order at all. (The owner of the restaurant knows all the teachers.) I was still stuffed from my late lunch, so I didn't want to eat anything. Not wanting to offend, I nibbled at each dish. They had saba sashimi, though, which perked me up. My last feeble hopes of having a quick dinner were dashed as the beer we had with dinner was followed by opening a bottle of whiskey for Kurokawa and Murahashi.
As we sat and talked with the owner and each other, the guys went through at least a pack of cigarettes each. I'm not opposed to people smoking--in fact, the faint smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of my parents, so I actually like smelling it in passing. What bothered me was that the ventilation wasn't so hot, and the guys didn't make much of an effort to keep the smoke away from me. I may like the faint smell of cigarette smoke in the air, but I abhor the stench of cigarette smoke on clothing. I sound like a weenie, I'm sure, but I have to wash those clothes once they soak up that smell, when I could have otherwise worn that outfit again without washing it. It's even more inconvenient here, where laundry is a day-long process at best (depending on the presence of sunshine), and that's if the water pump to my apartment cooperates with the washing machine in the first place. There's a typhoon coming, so I probably won't have water for the next few days. Am I blowing this out of proportion a little?
I also noticed that the owner, a cheery old lady who had sat down to talk with us since we walked in, was pouring herself a drink whenever she refilled the guys'. I thought nothing of it at first. A little later, though, while she was out of the room, Murahashi explained to me in slurred English that, in a restaurant like this one, we pay not just for the food and drink, but for the atmosphere and the hospitality.
I immediately thought of Hanamizuki, the Atlanta karaoke bar I went to last year, where you pay cocktail waitresses by the hour to host a group of your friends. During that hour, it is perfectly appropriate to ask the girls questions that, if asked outside those doors, would get you a mere slap to the face if you were lucky. You literally can say anything you want to the girls, and they are required by their job to take it in stride. While there, you also pay for alcohol, which is fine--except the girls drink from the same bottle of alcohol you've bought (in the course of refilling your glasses), and you pay for what they drink too. To put it in perspective, the group of four I was with spent three hours there, bought a bottle and a half of good-but-not-best-name whiskey, and had two of the waitresses keep us company the whole time. The total bill? $500.
Now, I'm not saying the restaurant I ate at tonight is just like the one I was at in Atlanta. I'm just saying that I felt the same sense of awkward resentment tonight that I haven't felt since I was at Hanamizuki. I don't know what I resent more--the fact that you're charged for the company of a proprietor who would have nothing else to do with her time were she not keeping you company, or the fact that people agree to patronize places like this in the first place. I'm not trying to make some ethnocentric judgement or indict Japanese culture or people over this--I'm fully aware there are comparable examples of compensated hospitality in American culture. It just doesn't make sense to me. It's therefore my problem, not theirs, and I understand this. Still doesn't make sense to me, though.
Anyway. Five hours later, we finally left the place. The guys asked me if I wanted to do a little karaoke, and I hope I wasn't too quick to decline. I had spent five hours and thirty dollars for a beer and some hors d'œuvres, my clothes reeked of stale cigarette smoke, and I felt a little sick from eating mollusk and what was translated for me as "squid womb"--I was, in a word, done. Ugh.
I tell this thoroughly negative story to talk about the work hard/play hard mentality of my coworkers. The teachers I work with, as I've been told is also the case with most teachers in Japan, work about six and a half days a week. Kurokawa, for example, worked Friday from 7 a.m. until 11 p.m., and had to go back in Saturday from 7 a.m. until about 6 p.m. Many of the teachers have spouses, of whom I know several that are also teachers, and many of the couples have children.
I simply can't believe that this goes on. It's one thing to work so much when you're single and have nothing but time to spend. I was the most logical candidate of the Inoko management staff (all two-and-a-half managers) to work six days a week, because I was the youngest, and had no family to go home to. I can understand that. (Moreover, I was paid fairly for my overtime, something that does not happen to teachers here, who are salaried in the strictest sense of the term.) But if I had a wife and kids to support, I can only hope that our circumstances wouldn't be so dire that I'd have to work a job that kept me apart from them so much. I know these teachers aren't limited in options--they're all very competent, college-educated people, so finding a job wouldn't be that difficult. I also know it's not just the education field that demands so much of its workers here, so the teachers wouldn't escape by simply not being a teacher.
It's putting in so much time at work that makes them party so hard. Anyone who's worked a double- or triple-shift in a restaurant or otherwise pulled twelve or sixteen hours straight at a job can relate--everyone needs to unwind, to destress. But based on what limited experience I have with this, it seems that partying as hard as they do here ruins the next day, which is either your day off (in which case you've wasted it) or a normal work day (in which case you're useless that day at work, and your normal day-to-day stress gets combined with the extra stress from being hung over). In the latter case, you wind up needing to escape from the day that was itself ruined by your escaping the previous day, and you accomplish that escape by doing exactly what you did the night before. Instead of trying to compensate for all the extreme repression and professionalism by going hog-wild at a bar, why not cut back on the former to render the latter unnecessary?
I'm well aware that I'm about the billionth person to harp on about the oddity of Japanese work ethic. I'm also aware that I'm not sounding very culturally relativistic or properly anthropological about this. Part of this is because I'm ranting, but maybe another part is that I don't think every aspect of a culture is grey area, that some things ought not to be relative. Oh well.
There'll be a positive post to make up for this one. Promise.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Probably not even worth posting
I don't know why, but this Onion article has had me giggling for about ten minutes now. It sure made the morning announcements by the principal a lot more fun.
Royals Hire Tom Emanski to Teach Them Fundamentals of Baseball
Royals Hire Tom Emanski to Teach Them Fundamentals of Baseball
Thursday, September 6, 2007
Thus it has engendered some shares of poison.
I think the island is trying to tell me the "honeymoon period" is over. The weather, which had been idyllic (albeit a bit sticky), has become depressing. I'm almost positive this isn't merely me projecting some burgeoning homesickness onto weather patterns: I've seen sunlight for two days out of the past ten. I guess the silver lining here is that breezy and overcast makes for a much easier trek to school than still and sweltering.
Tuesday I went to my other high school, in Toyotama. Toyotama, as I've probably mentioned, is an hour away by bus. That's right, folks: I'm taking the bus to school again. I even bring a backpack, and it's the same one I've had since... hmm... probably 2000. Jansports last forever. Anyway, I dozed off on the ride Tuesday morning, and was awoken by the driver about fifteen minutes' in. We had stopped at the airport, and he was worried it was my stop and that I was gonna sleep through it. I doubt any Athens Transit drivers would do that.
Toyotama is about a quarter of the size of Tsushima high school--there are only 150 students. The 50 or so per grade are subdivided into two sections each, bringing the total number of sections in the school to a whopping 6. (Compare Tsushima's 17.) There are about twelve teachers (compared to the 40 or so at Tsushima), three of which comprise the English department (versus 7). It's teeny, in other words.
One of the English teachers had called Monday and briefed me--the students were going to gather in the gym for an introduction speech by the principal, and then I was asked to give a short speech. So I dress up, get up in front of the students, and give the same speech I gave to the Tsushima kids on Nagasaki Peace Day. The speech was in Japanese, just like my first time around, and three words into it, all the kids in the gym were gasping. It went okay, we broke camp, and the teachers went back to the faculty room.
I'll be teaching at Toyotama every Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll be team-teaching the entire first (tenth) and second (eleventh) grades--all four classes of 'em. I'm also teaching a group of third-years (seniors) who are taking oral communication as "Option B." Options A and C are for reading and writing, respectively. There are seven students in my Option B class.
My first group was the lower division of second-years. Despite being a much poorer school in a much poorer city, Toyotama's high school has a projector I can hook my laptop up to, something Tsushima doesn't even have. We used the AV room, and it took me a few minutes to get used to seeing my face taking up an entire wall. The class liked my presentation, and seemed to understand most of it. The Japanese teacher translated whatever didn't come across. While most of the class seemed to understand, the girls were the only ones who said anything. Practically all of the guys pretty much ignored the presentation. They didn't make any noise or anything; they just looked away the whole time. I'm new to this whole teaching thing, so I'm still an idealist--I'm clinging to the notion that they want to learn, but I'm just not doing a good enough job of motivating them.
At any rate, I finished the slideshow, gave the little quiz about me, and took questions from the class. Again, the girls were the only ones who participated. The first question: "Do you have a girlfriend?" The second question: "Do you have a fiancee?" I simply said no to the first one, but for the second one, I held up my left hand and wiggled my ring finger, which for some reason caused lots of giggling. Maybe it was the question, I dunno. Anyway, the third question: "Were you in a Harry Potter movie?" She actually didn't get that out in English--she started it, then switched to Japanese, but that's the translated version. I laughed, waited for the giggles to go down, and asked her which character I looked like. She said "head of Gryffindor." For just a second I was crestfallen, thinking I'd just been likened to McGonagall. The bell rang before she could clarify, but I could tell by the way she asked that she wasn't trying to insult me. I sort of forgot about the question for a while.
Between that class and my next one, I had a break in the faculty room. Iwase-sensei sits next to me, and she's probably the youngest Japanese teacher I've met here. She also has the best English accent, which is probably because she lived in Ireland for five years. Anyway, she asked how the class went. I remembered her telling me she's a big Harry Potter fan, so I thought she might be able to help. She sort of cocked her head and looked at me for a second, and said the girl probably meant "captain," not "head," and that she would have been talking about the captain of the Quidditch team. I thought she meant Harry, since a) I assumed the girl would have read up until at least the sixth one, and b) I can't remember much from the fifth book or before. Iwase said that the books are difficult to read, even when translated, and so most of the fans here just watch the movies. There isn't a movie theater on the island, and the most recent movie to be on DVD is the fourth one, so as far as the kids know, Oliver Wood is the captain of Gryffindor's team. I dunno. Do I look like him to you guys?
So my second class was with the upper division first-years. It went much, much better than the first one: the class was much more engaging, and they spoke much better English.
My third and final class was the seven Option B third-years. A few teachers had gently commented that the Option B kids aren't the best of students, basically warning me not to expect too much. I don't so much care what their academic section is--I was excited just to have a class of only seven kids. We didn't need a projector with so few kids, so I had them scoot their desks up to my laptop, and I gave my introduction as more of a roundtable presentation than a lecture. The worksheet went fine, and I asked each student individually to read a question and the answer. They were a little sheepish at first, but nobody completely clammed up. After each one read, I thanked them, and then went to the board and wrote one of the words they stumbled over--"Athens," "bulldogs," "university," etc. Yes, yes, I made them learn words about UGA, but it was more to practice phonics and pronunciation--"l," "th," "r," and "s" give them fits. I sounded the word out, and had the whole class repeat after me. To my utter astonishment, they parroted it back almost perfectly--"A-sen-zu" became something much closer to "Athens," "buu-ru-do-ggu-zu" got a lot closer to two syllables," and "yu-ni-ba-shi-ti" resembled "university." It still needed some polish, but I got that much done in five minutes. I was ecstatic.
Even before I coached them, a couple of the girls had excellent pronunciation. I don't know how much material the teachers want me to cover, but I would have no problem whatsoever just using words they already know and practicing pronunciation. Not just drills, but games, speeches, songs, anything involving even simple English.
I was so happy after school, I was almost skipping to the bus stop. My first two days on the job managed to show me everything I dreamed of finding as a teacher: motivated, disciplined, interested students, and proof that I can actually help them. I know things are going to get worse--the novelty will wear off and I'll be more like a regular teacher to them, I'll get burned out on the day-to-day routine, or any number of other bummers. I recognize that, and I'm still bracing myself for it, but despite (and also because of) the inevitable bad days, I'm still savoring how I felt on the bus ride home Tuesday. I even found a girl I like. (No, she isn't a student.)
Wednesday was much the same--I was in Toyotama, and I had the third-years introduce themselves to me. I asked them their names, ages, birthdays, and favorite English or Japanese band/group/singer. From this, I learned all their names, and wound up spending about half an hour coaching them on basic pronunciation of things like "singer" (not 'shin-ga'), "birthday" (not 'baa-su-de-i'), and even simple ones like "is" (not 'i-zu'). I was afraid going into this that they'd find it extremely boring, and would promptly shut down. If anything, though, they perked up. Iwase-sensei thinks they like having a native speaker to copy. At all the orientations and Q&A sessions, they repeatedly mentioned that we might be asked to be a "human tape recorder" for our classes, and they made it sound like a prison sentence. I actually don't mind it, especially when it produces results as quickly as I've managed to. I don't know whether what they've learned will stick (I'm not assigning homework, and there likely won't be a test until the final), but by the end of class, anytime someone would make a mistake that I'd already talked about, the other students would whisper the correct version--not to make fun of the student, but rather to help them out. If I can keep things this relaxed, and keep the students helping each other out, then I might just be able to do some good with them.
Whew. Today... what is today? Oh! Thursday! Today, I was back at Tsushima high school. This weekend is the school's Sports Festival. I don't know what to compare it to--I haven't seen one yet, but just based on the description, it sounds completely foreign to me. From what I've heard, it's sort of like a field day (just with no teams, ice cream stand, or tug-of-war), in that it's out on the school's big field, the students wear different colored shirts depending on their grade, and and it's really hot outside. It's also sort of like a parade (just with no floats, crowded downtown streets, or teeny Shriner cars), in that the marching band will be there, and each student organization will march around. You can tell by my excellent descriptive ability just how hard this thing is to classify.
Anyway, the kids have been practicing for this thing for at least two weeks. When I say practice, I mean classes are cancelled and the student body spends an hour or two a day out on the field, lining up and marching. I saw some of the practices Monday, and it's sort of like boot camp graduation. The kids move in lockstep, they have three different poses when standing (facing straight ahead with feet together, facing the speaker with feet together, and facing straight ahead with feet spread and hands folded behind their back), and they even march in place and sound off. It's almost creepy, seeing 700 people wearing almost exactly the same outfit moving and speaking as one. I'd be impressed if I saw a military regiment marching, but the fact that these are a bunch of 16-year-olds adds something to it.
Someday I'm gonna stop making colossal posts. Someday. Not today, though--I haven't even gotten to the point of this one.
Monday I met with a teacher from Izuhara Kita Shogakkou ("Izuhara North Elementary," not "North Izuhara" or even "Northern Izuhara"). I'd heard whispers about being asked to teach at a local elementary school once a month, so I wasn't entirely surprised. The guy spoke next to no English, so my supervisor helped out tremendously. I'm going to go there whenever Tsushima high school has exams, which would be days they wouldn't need me anyway. That works out to one or two days a month. They said they'd talk to my main vice principal about bringing me to the elementary on Thursday to meet everyone.
Today (Thursday) was originally a half-day, but got turned into a no-class day, in order for the students to practice more for the Sports Festival. (For all the stereotypes of year-round studying and incomparable focus they have, Japanese students and teachers sure spend a lot of time either planning for or getting over holidays and festivals...) That meant I had no classes to teach, and could go to the elementary school earlier than planned. A man came to pick me up--I soon learned he was the vice principal--and on the ride to the school spoke nothing but Japanese to me. I got by okay, but I really, really need to study more.
We got to the school, and I was introduced one-on-one to each of the faculty. The school has about 130 students, and 12 teachers. I was given the tour, made some notes at my desk for a few minutes, and then was led to the gym for my welcome ceremony.
I may have used the term "ceremony" here before. I might have used it to describe the situation in which I was welcomed to my two high schools, where an army of silent students would stand straight-faced while I delivered some rusty Japanese about where I'm from and how happy I am to be here. If I did, I used that term in error. Today was a ceremony.
I entered the gym to find the students seated in loose lines on the gym floor, with "Adam" being mentioned after every third word or so in the general murmur. (I imagine someone tried adamantly to put the kids in perfectly straight lines, and also hoped for complete silence, but soon accepted that you can't keep 7-year-olds quiet or in one place for more than ten seconds unless food is involved.) Along the back wall were two posters: "Welcome to Kita Sho" and "Mr. Adam Shirley!" The vice principal guided me around to the back of the gym (all of this was done at the back of the gym, away from the stage), to the center of the two groups of students. In the middle of the two groups stood two rows of about six students each. Each pair held up a long stick with flowers on it, creating a little tunnel, with a chair in the center of the gym at the end of the tunnel. I can't describe it very well, and I wish I'd taken pictures, but hopefully you get the idea.
Stunned by the reception, I walked through the tunnel and took my seat. 130 voices belonging to 6- to 12-year-olds announced "Hi Adam!" The vice principal stood next to me and introduced me, then handed the microphone over to me. I gave the same speech, with some of the bigger terms ("anthropology," for example) omitted, and got the usual gasps from the students. I sat back down, thinking that would be pretty much it. Next, however, the first- and second-graders were called up: they all replied "hai!", stood as one, and ran to the space between their groups, in front of where I was seated. In loose unison, they said, "Hi Adam Welcome to Kita Sho Please to Meet You" (I don't punctuate because they didn't, and it was that much cuter because of it)
There was a pause, and a song came on over the speakers. To my complete astonishment, the kids began performing "5 Little Monkeys" for me. (For those of you who were deprived of a childhood and don't know the song, it goes like this: 'Five little monkeys / jumping on the bed / one fell off and bumped his head / Mama called the doctor and the doctor said / No more monkeys jumping on the bed! / Four little monkeys / jumping on the bed' etc.) They even had it choreographed, jumping up and down as well as slapping their heads when appropriate. It started out perfectly timed, but slowly the dance fell behind the song. It was awesome nonetheless.
The first- and second-years bowed and retreated to applause, and the third- and fourth-years ran up. They gave a similar introduction, and then sang a song that I couldn't recognize. Something about a pan and Mama, though it wasn't Hot Cross Buns or Shortenin' Bread. Anyway, it was well done, and they finished the same way.
The fifth- and sixth-years got up next. Even though they were nowhere near as restrained as the high-schoolers, they looked pretty shy compared to the first-graders. Their song started over the speakers, and it took me a few bars to accept that it was what I thought: Daydream Believer, by The Monkees. It was definitely Davy Jones singing, too, not just some cheap cover. As cool as it was that they were trying, I knew from the beginning that it wouldn't work so well--the kids weren't really trying to sing the lyrics, but they kept their mouths moving and pretended to be keeping up with the tune. (According to Eddie Izzard, after all, that's 90% of effective public speaking.) I was just impressed that they were trying--American elementary choruses would be hard-pressed to sing those lyrics.
After they finished, the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders ran into the middle, formed a loose arrangement, and waited for a song to kick in. Three notes into the song, I recognized it: The Chicken Dance. Sure enough, the kids started doing the chicken dance. After repeating the basic movements of the dance, the kids joined hands and ran around in a circle before doing the dance again. The song got cut off after about a minute, and everybody in the gym stood up and came to the floor--students and teachers alike. We all did the Chicken Dance, including the running around in a circle part. It was awesome.
After the introduction, I went back to the faculty room. I had heard that I'd be eating lunch at the school, and that I'd be eating with the sixth graders. The teachers' lunch trays were made up in the faculty room, and I waited until a shy kid came to the office doorway and sheepishly announced (in Japanese) that he would take me to the room. The classroom had about twelve students, and they had their desks arranged into fours, forming a makeshift table for their trays. I had been given a chair pulled up alongside the desks, and squeezed my tray in among theirs.
Lunch consisted of a bowl of corn chowder-type soup with carrots and zucchini, a roll, a hamburger patty, a small portion of noodles, edamame-flavored yogurt/pudding/dessert, and a milk. It was one of the tastiest meals I've had on the island. The kids weren't shy at all around me, but they didn't use much English--I probably hurt some feelings before I finally realized that "sensei! sensei!" was being directed at me. I was holding my chopsticks in one hand, and trying to get the wrapper off my straw with the other. The kid beside me, probably assuming I didn't know how to open the straw, deftly took it from me, deliberately opened it, and just as slowly poked it through the hole in the milk box. He wasn't showing off or anything--just being helpful. The same boy showed me where to put my tray and my garbage when I was done, too.
After lunch, the school has an hour-long recess. Today was another soggy day, so the kids had to stay inside to play. After everyone put away their trays, helped do the dishes, and took out the trash, they all pushed their desks to the back of the room, making a nice open space for playing. The teacher asked me to come visit with the fifth-years before they finished their lunch, so I talked some with them.
At first, I stood next to the kids' desks, with several students flocking to me. Two or three at a time would stroke the hair on my arms, ask me questions, and make comments about my eyes. After a minute or two, I noticed one or two kids constantly moving to stay on the outside of my periphery--I'd glance from side to side, and they'd try to move out of sight. I turned around just in time to see one of the little twits holding his hands together, fingers interlocked, with his index fingers pointing outward in a sort of handgun pose.
Those of you who know what I'm driving at have probably known since I started that paragraph; for the rest of you, this is the instrument the kids use to perform a kancho. I casually squatted down, and remained that way for the rest of the day. Everybody told us at orientation to watch out for kancho. Heck, even the other JETs on Tsushima told me. I was still shocked to see the kid getting ready for it--I guess I just assumed the joke would've lost its allure by now. I thwarted them, though. Hah!
The rest of my time at the elementary was spent playing with Jenga blocks. We tried to play the actual game of Jenga, which lasted a good thirty seconds before it devolved into building our own block towers while others tried knocking them off by pelting them with blocks. It was a lot of fun, but I don't remember being allowed to (or even wanting to) run wild like that when I hit fifth grade. Running around was still fun, but these kids were carrying on like kindergarteners.
The vice principal drove me back to Tsushima high school, where I helped one of the English teachers proofread the script for a student's speech. You can tell from the title of this post (which is a quote from the speech) that it was pretty slow-going. It was worthwhile, though, and the teacher appreciated it greatly.
Wow. That's the last three days. I'm off tomorrow and Monday, because I'm working Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow night the teachers in my apartment building are throwing a party for me, and Saturday night the entire high school is throwing one for me. Hopefully I can get away with drinking as little as I did last week.
This has easily been the best week I've had here so far. I've met the students, and I've had a lot of success with some of them, which is definitely encouraging. I've figured out where to pay my bills, which is always handy. Not bad, huh?
Tuesday I went to my other high school, in Toyotama. Toyotama, as I've probably mentioned, is an hour away by bus. That's right, folks: I'm taking the bus to school again. I even bring a backpack, and it's the same one I've had since... hmm... probably 2000. Jansports last forever. Anyway, I dozed off on the ride Tuesday morning, and was awoken by the driver about fifteen minutes' in. We had stopped at the airport, and he was worried it was my stop and that I was gonna sleep through it. I doubt any Athens Transit drivers would do that.
Toyotama is about a quarter of the size of Tsushima high school--there are only 150 students. The 50 or so per grade are subdivided into two sections each, bringing the total number of sections in the school to a whopping 6. (Compare Tsushima's 17.) There are about twelve teachers (compared to the 40 or so at Tsushima), three of which comprise the English department (versus 7). It's teeny, in other words.
One of the English teachers had called Monday and briefed me--the students were going to gather in the gym for an introduction speech by the principal, and then I was asked to give a short speech. So I dress up, get up in front of the students, and give the same speech I gave to the Tsushima kids on Nagasaki Peace Day. The speech was in Japanese, just like my first time around, and three words into it, all the kids in the gym were gasping. It went okay, we broke camp, and the teachers went back to the faculty room.
I'll be teaching at Toyotama every Tuesday and Wednesday. I'll be team-teaching the entire first (tenth) and second (eleventh) grades--all four classes of 'em. I'm also teaching a group of third-years (seniors) who are taking oral communication as "Option B." Options A and C are for reading and writing, respectively. There are seven students in my Option B class.
My first group was the lower division of second-years. Despite being a much poorer school in a much poorer city, Toyotama's high school has a projector I can hook my laptop up to, something Tsushima doesn't even have. We used the AV room, and it took me a few minutes to get used to seeing my face taking up an entire wall. The class liked my presentation, and seemed to understand most of it. The Japanese teacher translated whatever didn't come across. While most of the class seemed to understand, the girls were the only ones who said anything. Practically all of the guys pretty much ignored the presentation. They didn't make any noise or anything; they just looked away the whole time. I'm new to this whole teaching thing, so I'm still an idealist--I'm clinging to the notion that they want to learn, but I'm just not doing a good enough job of motivating them.
At any rate, I finished the slideshow, gave the little quiz about me, and took questions from the class. Again, the girls were the only ones who participated. The first question: "Do you have a girlfriend?" The second question: "Do you have a fiancee?" I simply said no to the first one, but for the second one, I held up my left hand and wiggled my ring finger, which for some reason caused lots of giggling. Maybe it was the question, I dunno. Anyway, the third question: "Were you in a Harry Potter movie?" She actually didn't get that out in English--she started it, then switched to Japanese, but that's the translated version. I laughed, waited for the giggles to go down, and asked her which character I looked like. She said "head of Gryffindor." For just a second I was crestfallen, thinking I'd just been likened to McGonagall. The bell rang before she could clarify, but I could tell by the way she asked that she wasn't trying to insult me. I sort of forgot about the question for a while.
Between that class and my next one, I had a break in the faculty room. Iwase-sensei sits next to me, and she's probably the youngest Japanese teacher I've met here. She also has the best English accent, which is probably because she lived in Ireland for five years. Anyway, she asked how the class went. I remembered her telling me she's a big Harry Potter fan, so I thought she might be able to help. She sort of cocked her head and looked at me for a second, and said the girl probably meant "captain," not "head," and that she would have been talking about the captain of the Quidditch team. I thought she meant Harry, since a) I assumed the girl would have read up until at least the sixth one, and b) I can't remember much from the fifth book or before. Iwase said that the books are difficult to read, even when translated, and so most of the fans here just watch the movies. There isn't a movie theater on the island, and the most recent movie to be on DVD is the fourth one, so as far as the kids know, Oliver Wood is the captain of Gryffindor's team. I dunno. Do I look like him to you guys?
So my second class was with the upper division first-years. It went much, much better than the first one: the class was much more engaging, and they spoke much better English.
My third and final class was the seven Option B third-years. A few teachers had gently commented that the Option B kids aren't the best of students, basically warning me not to expect too much. I don't so much care what their academic section is--I was excited just to have a class of only seven kids. We didn't need a projector with so few kids, so I had them scoot their desks up to my laptop, and I gave my introduction as more of a roundtable presentation than a lecture. The worksheet went fine, and I asked each student individually to read a question and the answer. They were a little sheepish at first, but nobody completely clammed up. After each one read, I thanked them, and then went to the board and wrote one of the words they stumbled over--"Athens," "bulldogs," "university," etc. Yes, yes, I made them learn words about UGA, but it was more to practice phonics and pronunciation--"l," "th," "r," and "s" give them fits. I sounded the word out, and had the whole class repeat after me. To my utter astonishment, they parroted it back almost perfectly--"A-sen-zu" became something much closer to "Athens," "buu-ru-do-ggu-zu" got a lot closer to two syllables," and "yu-ni-ba-shi-ti" resembled "university." It still needed some polish, but I got that much done in five minutes. I was ecstatic.
Even before I coached them, a couple of the girls had excellent pronunciation. I don't know how much material the teachers want me to cover, but I would have no problem whatsoever just using words they already know and practicing pronunciation. Not just drills, but games, speeches, songs, anything involving even simple English.
I was so happy after school, I was almost skipping to the bus stop. My first two days on the job managed to show me everything I dreamed of finding as a teacher: motivated, disciplined, interested students, and proof that I can actually help them. I know things are going to get worse--the novelty will wear off and I'll be more like a regular teacher to them, I'll get burned out on the day-to-day routine, or any number of other bummers. I recognize that, and I'm still bracing myself for it, but despite (and also because of) the inevitable bad days, I'm still savoring how I felt on the bus ride home Tuesday. I even found a girl I like. (No, she isn't a student.)
Wednesday was much the same--I was in Toyotama, and I had the third-years introduce themselves to me. I asked them their names, ages, birthdays, and favorite English or Japanese band/group/singer. From this, I learned all their names, and wound up spending about half an hour coaching them on basic pronunciation of things like "singer" (not 'shin-ga'), "birthday" (not 'baa-su-de-i'), and even simple ones like "is" (not 'i-zu'). I was afraid going into this that they'd find it extremely boring, and would promptly shut down. If anything, though, they perked up. Iwase-sensei thinks they like having a native speaker to copy. At all the orientations and Q&A sessions, they repeatedly mentioned that we might be asked to be a "human tape recorder" for our classes, and they made it sound like a prison sentence. I actually don't mind it, especially when it produces results as quickly as I've managed to. I don't know whether what they've learned will stick (I'm not assigning homework, and there likely won't be a test until the final), but by the end of class, anytime someone would make a mistake that I'd already talked about, the other students would whisper the correct version--not to make fun of the student, but rather to help them out. If I can keep things this relaxed, and keep the students helping each other out, then I might just be able to do some good with them.
Whew. Today... what is today? Oh! Thursday! Today, I was back at Tsushima high school. This weekend is the school's Sports Festival. I don't know what to compare it to--I haven't seen one yet, but just based on the description, it sounds completely foreign to me. From what I've heard, it's sort of like a field day (just with no teams, ice cream stand, or tug-of-war), in that it's out on the school's big field, the students wear different colored shirts depending on their grade, and and it's really hot outside. It's also sort of like a parade (just with no floats, crowded downtown streets, or teeny Shriner cars), in that the marching band will be there, and each student organization will march around. You can tell by my excellent descriptive ability just how hard this thing is to classify.
Anyway, the kids have been practicing for this thing for at least two weeks. When I say practice, I mean classes are cancelled and the student body spends an hour or two a day out on the field, lining up and marching. I saw some of the practices Monday, and it's sort of like boot camp graduation. The kids move in lockstep, they have three different poses when standing (facing straight ahead with feet together, facing the speaker with feet together, and facing straight ahead with feet spread and hands folded behind their back), and they even march in place and sound off. It's almost creepy, seeing 700 people wearing almost exactly the same outfit moving and speaking as one. I'd be impressed if I saw a military regiment marching, but the fact that these are a bunch of 16-year-olds adds something to it.
Someday I'm gonna stop making colossal posts. Someday. Not today, though--I haven't even gotten to the point of this one.
Monday I met with a teacher from Izuhara Kita Shogakkou ("Izuhara North Elementary," not "North Izuhara" or even "Northern Izuhara"). I'd heard whispers about being asked to teach at a local elementary school once a month, so I wasn't entirely surprised. The guy spoke next to no English, so my supervisor helped out tremendously. I'm going to go there whenever Tsushima high school has exams, which would be days they wouldn't need me anyway. That works out to one or two days a month. They said they'd talk to my main vice principal about bringing me to the elementary on Thursday to meet everyone.
Today (Thursday) was originally a half-day, but got turned into a no-class day, in order for the students to practice more for the Sports Festival. (For all the stereotypes of year-round studying and incomparable focus they have, Japanese students and teachers sure spend a lot of time either planning for or getting over holidays and festivals...) That meant I had no classes to teach, and could go to the elementary school earlier than planned. A man came to pick me up--I soon learned he was the vice principal--and on the ride to the school spoke nothing but Japanese to me. I got by okay, but I really, really need to study more.
We got to the school, and I was introduced one-on-one to each of the faculty. The school has about 130 students, and 12 teachers. I was given the tour, made some notes at my desk for a few minutes, and then was led to the gym for my welcome ceremony.
I may have used the term "ceremony" here before. I might have used it to describe the situation in which I was welcomed to my two high schools, where an army of silent students would stand straight-faced while I delivered some rusty Japanese about where I'm from and how happy I am to be here. If I did, I used that term in error. Today was a ceremony.
I entered the gym to find the students seated in loose lines on the gym floor, with "Adam" being mentioned after every third word or so in the general murmur. (I imagine someone tried adamantly to put the kids in perfectly straight lines, and also hoped for complete silence, but soon accepted that you can't keep 7-year-olds quiet or in one place for more than ten seconds unless food is involved.) Along the back wall were two posters: "Welcome to Kita Sho" and "Mr. Adam Shirley!" The vice principal guided me around to the back of the gym (all of this was done at the back of the gym, away from the stage), to the center of the two groups of students. In the middle of the two groups stood two rows of about six students each. Each pair held up a long stick with flowers on it, creating a little tunnel, with a chair in the center of the gym at the end of the tunnel. I can't describe it very well, and I wish I'd taken pictures, but hopefully you get the idea.
Stunned by the reception, I walked through the tunnel and took my seat. 130 voices belonging to 6- to 12-year-olds announced "Hi Adam!" The vice principal stood next to me and introduced me, then handed the microphone over to me. I gave the same speech, with some of the bigger terms ("anthropology," for example) omitted, and got the usual gasps from the students. I sat back down, thinking that would be pretty much it. Next, however, the first- and second-graders were called up: they all replied "hai!", stood as one, and ran to the space between their groups, in front of where I was seated. In loose unison, they said, "Hi Adam Welcome to Kita Sho Please to Meet You" (I don't punctuate because they didn't, and it was that much cuter because of it)
There was a pause, and a song came on over the speakers. To my complete astonishment, the kids began performing "5 Little Monkeys" for me. (For those of you who were deprived of a childhood and don't know the song, it goes like this: 'Five little monkeys / jumping on the bed / one fell off and bumped his head / Mama called the doctor and the doctor said / No more monkeys jumping on the bed! / Four little monkeys / jumping on the bed' etc.) They even had it choreographed, jumping up and down as well as slapping their heads when appropriate. It started out perfectly timed, but slowly the dance fell behind the song. It was awesome nonetheless.
The first- and second-years bowed and retreated to applause, and the third- and fourth-years ran up. They gave a similar introduction, and then sang a song that I couldn't recognize. Something about a pan and Mama, though it wasn't Hot Cross Buns or Shortenin' Bread. Anyway, it was well done, and they finished the same way.
The fifth- and sixth-years got up next. Even though they were nowhere near as restrained as the high-schoolers, they looked pretty shy compared to the first-graders. Their song started over the speakers, and it took me a few bars to accept that it was what I thought: Daydream Believer, by The Monkees. It was definitely Davy Jones singing, too, not just some cheap cover. As cool as it was that they were trying, I knew from the beginning that it wouldn't work so well--the kids weren't really trying to sing the lyrics, but they kept their mouths moving and pretended to be keeping up with the tune. (According to Eddie Izzard, after all, that's 90% of effective public speaking.) I was just impressed that they were trying--American elementary choruses would be hard-pressed to sing those lyrics.
After they finished, the fourth, fifth, and sixth graders ran into the middle, formed a loose arrangement, and waited for a song to kick in. Three notes into the song, I recognized it: The Chicken Dance. Sure enough, the kids started doing the chicken dance. After repeating the basic movements of the dance, the kids joined hands and ran around in a circle before doing the dance again. The song got cut off after about a minute, and everybody in the gym stood up and came to the floor--students and teachers alike. We all did the Chicken Dance, including the running around in a circle part. It was awesome.
After the introduction, I went back to the faculty room. I had heard that I'd be eating lunch at the school, and that I'd be eating with the sixth graders. The teachers' lunch trays were made up in the faculty room, and I waited until a shy kid came to the office doorway and sheepishly announced (in Japanese) that he would take me to the room. The classroom had about twelve students, and they had their desks arranged into fours, forming a makeshift table for their trays. I had been given a chair pulled up alongside the desks, and squeezed my tray in among theirs.
Lunch consisted of a bowl of corn chowder-type soup with carrots and zucchini, a roll, a hamburger patty, a small portion of noodles, edamame-flavored yogurt/pudding/dessert, and a milk. It was one of the tastiest meals I've had on the island. The kids weren't shy at all around me, but they didn't use much English--I probably hurt some feelings before I finally realized that "sensei! sensei!" was being directed at me. I was holding my chopsticks in one hand, and trying to get the wrapper off my straw with the other. The kid beside me, probably assuming I didn't know how to open the straw, deftly took it from me, deliberately opened it, and just as slowly poked it through the hole in the milk box. He wasn't showing off or anything--just being helpful. The same boy showed me where to put my tray and my garbage when I was done, too.
After lunch, the school has an hour-long recess. Today was another soggy day, so the kids had to stay inside to play. After everyone put away their trays, helped do the dishes, and took out the trash, they all pushed their desks to the back of the room, making a nice open space for playing. The teacher asked me to come visit with the fifth-years before they finished their lunch, so I talked some with them.
At first, I stood next to the kids' desks, with several students flocking to me. Two or three at a time would stroke the hair on my arms, ask me questions, and make comments about my eyes. After a minute or two, I noticed one or two kids constantly moving to stay on the outside of my periphery--I'd glance from side to side, and they'd try to move out of sight. I turned around just in time to see one of the little twits holding his hands together, fingers interlocked, with his index fingers pointing outward in a sort of handgun pose.
Those of you who know what I'm driving at have probably known since I started that paragraph; for the rest of you, this is the instrument the kids use to perform a kancho. I casually squatted down, and remained that way for the rest of the day. Everybody told us at orientation to watch out for kancho. Heck, even the other JETs on Tsushima told me. I was still shocked to see the kid getting ready for it--I guess I just assumed the joke would've lost its allure by now. I thwarted them, though. Hah!
The rest of my time at the elementary was spent playing with Jenga blocks. We tried to play the actual game of Jenga, which lasted a good thirty seconds before it devolved into building our own block towers while others tried knocking them off by pelting them with blocks. It was a lot of fun, but I don't remember being allowed to (or even wanting to) run wild like that when I hit fifth grade. Running around was still fun, but these kids were carrying on like kindergarteners.
The vice principal drove me back to Tsushima high school, where I helped one of the English teachers proofread the script for a student's speech. You can tell from the title of this post (which is a quote from the speech) that it was pretty slow-going. It was worthwhile, though, and the teacher appreciated it greatly.
Wow. That's the last three days. I'm off tomorrow and Monday, because I'm working Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow night the teachers in my apartment building are throwing a party for me, and Saturday night the entire high school is throwing one for me. Hopefully I can get away with drinking as little as I did last week.
This has easily been the best week I've had here so far. I've met the students, and I've had a lot of success with some of them, which is definitely encouraging. I've figured out where to pay my bills, which is always handy. Not bad, huh?
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