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.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
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?
Monday, September 3, 2007
Ever tried bathing with bottled water?
I officially taught my first classes today. I'm gonna tell everyone all about it, but first, a little refresher on the way the students are divided.
Japanese high schools have what would in America be 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. Grade level numbering in Japan isn't cumulative--you go from 6th grade in elementary school to 1st grade in junior high school. Ditto for "8th" grade (3rd year junior high)--you become a 1st year high schooler after you leave junior high. Each grade is divided into sections, based on academic level. (I'm not sure how they determine academic level, or whether/how often they do the determining. I've heard something about testing that places the students in these sections, but I wonder whether the kids are ever retested? I worry that, if they're never retested, a brilliant first-year who stresses out and flunks his placement test winds up stuck in the worst class, never given a chance to escape.)
Anyway, the number of sections created depends, of course, on the number of students. My main high school has between six and seven sections; ten years ago, they apparently had eight. So each student belongs to a year (1-3) as well as a section (1-6 or 7).
The first-year students at my main school are further divided into A and B groups. Each student takes two types of English class: oral communication (that's me!) and grammar. The way it works out, group A of one section is taking grammar while group B is taking oral communication. The next day they're scheduled to take English class, they switch--B takes grammar while A takes OC.
So! Having explained all that, I can use abbreviations for each class without worrying about confusing you folks.
My first class was 1-4B. (That's first year, fourth section, group B, yes?) Oral communications is "team taught"--I'm the main teacher, but the JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) is in the room to help translate and clarify the sticky parts. We have our own room that's nice and secluded--the teachers told me it's off on its own because the OC classes can be "a little loud." The room has about ten tables that can each seat 4-5 students, and there's a chalkboard at the front.
I set up my laptop at the front of the class, and loaded up a PowerPoint presentation I made. The presentation was just a bunch of pictures of and about me and things I like--where I was born, where I went to school, where I worked, my hobbies, my family, etc. The 1-4B class has about 20 students in it, and I had them all come sit up at the front so they could all see. I told them about myself, in not-too-painfully-slow English, and paused to let the JTE clarify as needed. After I finished, I passed out a worksheet I had made, with multiple-choice questions about me ("Where am I from?" "What is my favorite baseball team?" etc.) I gave them about five minutes to work on it alone, and then checked the answers aloud with the entire class. After that, I had the class rephrase each question in order to ask me out loud--"Where are you from?" "What is your favorite baseball team?" etc. That part went over remarkably well. That more or less filled up the class period.
I gave the same lesson to the 1-2Bs that followed. I had the same JTE for both classes, and according to him, I did well. I spoke too quickly for the first group, but I apparently handled the second group much better. I made sure to ask as many different students as possible a question, and they all knew the right answer. What surprised me most of all was their pronunciation. I expected words like "Bulldogs" and "Georgia" to give them trouble, but they handled them okay. The hardest part for them was the "th" in Athens.
From what I've heard, students remain in the same room for most of their classes, while the teachers move from room to room giving their lessons. My team-teaching classes have their own separate room, so the students leave when class ends. As they leave, they put the chairs back up on the table. They do this without instruction, hesitation, or complaint--it's automatic. I compare this to my memory of high school, where desks in a classroom were left strewn whichever way the students left them on their way out.
Oh, and my high school doesn't have a lunchroom. Or a janitor staff. The kids bring their lunch, and everybody--faculty and students--spends at least ten minutes a day cleaning the school. At the same time every day, everybody cleans: some grab a broom and sweep the floors, some sweep the sidewalks outside, some clean windows, and some cut grass with foot-long gardening trowels. Everyone does this. Every now and then, we have a big cleaning day, and cleaning will last for about half an hour to an hour. It breaks the monotony, it's a social equalizer, it gives the chance for fresh air and being outdoors, and it saves money. Why on earth don't schools everywhere do this?
What else, what else... That's all that's new about Tsushima High School. I'm teaching two days a week at another high school, in Toyotama, which is about an hour by bus from here. My first two days teaching there are tomorrow and Wednesday. I'm also going to be teaching sporadically at a local elementary school. It won't be extra work; rather, I'll go there on normal workdays when I wouldn't be teaching classes at my main high school. I'm in pretty high demand, apparently.
Friday night, the eight other English teachers from my main high school took me out for a welcome party. We ate at an Italian/seafood restaurant, and then five of us broke off and did karaoke for an hour or so. It was a lot of fun, and not nearly as crazy as I had feared. They've told us horror stories ever since Tokyo orientation about wild nights of drunken debauchery that Japanese welcome parties are known for; I for one was relieved that Tsushima seems to be more mellow than the main islands. Then again, that was just the English department--there's a schoolwide party this Saturday night.
Saturday night, 7/8 of the JETs on the island got together for a welcome party of our own. (The last one couldn't make it, on account of a school function early the next morning.) We started at what is apparently the Grand Hotel Tsushima, eating what was apparently the Genghis Khan dinner. The eight of us (seven JETs plus another American who was a JET back in 1990 and has been here ever since) sat down to a table with two grills and two trays of veggies and meat. We grilled the food ourselves, and it was yummy, but each portion came out to the size of somewhere between a large appetizer and a small entree. We were still hungry after all the food was gone, yet what we'd had cost us $16 apiece. We were more amused than mad, and we decided to fill up the rest of the way on fast food, and made a beeline for the Mos Burger. Sated, we headed to the island's bowling alley. It's an American-style bowling alley--once you put on the shoes, everything else is identical to the American bowling experience. The shoes are a different kind of silly-looking, and paying for the lane and games is a bit... frustrating. (They don't accept cash; you can only pay via tickets you get from a machine by putting in the equivalent amount in cash.) The bar had Samuel Adams, New Castle, Corona, Heineken, a Czech beer whose recipe Budweiser apparently stole, and a slew of other imports that most of us hadn't seen in Japan, let alone Tsushima. (Shoot, Inoko doesn't even have New Castle...) I bowled an 87 or so in the first game, and a 122 in the second game.
They had a snackbar and an arcade. The arcade had various mainstays--pachinko, whackamole, stuffed animal claw thing--but one game sucked me in. Taiko is a type of Japanese drum that probably everybody's seen before. (If you haven't, then just follow the link.) The Japanese, being smarter than roughly 100.0% of the rest of the world, have found a way to make banging a single drum an entertaining videogame. That's right. You hit... a drum. You pick up the two drumsticks, you pick a song, a la DDR, Guitar Hero, and the like, and you hit the drum in time with the little colored circles that indicate the rhythm. You pay money to do this. There are different ways to hit the drum--there's the normal hit on the drumhead, the tap on the rim, the two-stick hit on the head, two sticks on the rim, and then the sustain, where you beat on the drumhead as hard as you can for the duration of the sustain on the screen. It sounds exhausting (and it is), but it's so... much... fun! The J-pop songs are fine, and the "Namco originals" are passable, but there's a "videogame" section. Most of the songs in this section I can't recognize. One of them is from Mappy, a game that presumably only one American (me) played. Another is the theme from Zelda. (You see what this is building up to, I'm sure...) The last one is the original Mario Bros. music. The three minutes I spent hammering a drum in time with that song are among the most entertaining of my life. Though that says more about me than it does about the game, it's still freaking awesome.
I got back from Nagasaki last Tuesday. It was cloudy when I got back, it started raining that night, and I didn't see the sun until Sunday afternoon. It poured for five and a half days straight. I had to do a lot of laundry when I got back from Nagasaki, but I don't have a dryer, so I have to get by with line-drying. 120 hours of rain with accompanying overcast skies does not a reliable dryer make. Saturday night my apartment's water pump went out, which meant I didn't have running water starting that night. Conveniently, city services are all closed on Sunday, so I had to wait until Monday morning to take a shower. I also haven't gotten to the "plumbing and hydrology" section in my Japanese phrasebook yet, so I wouldn't have been able to articulate the problem had I gotten a professional on the phone.
I bought a cell phone on Friday. My plan is ¥3600 (~$30) a month, and that gives me 25 minutes of talking. You read that right. Sure, I got the cheapest plan--I don't intend to use it very much--but even the most expensive one only included about 250 minutes. They allow so few minutes that they don't even charge per minute--they give rates in 30-second increments. There is a two-part silver lining, though: in Japan, if I call you, it uses my minutes, not yours; and the phones here are comparatively inexpensive. I got a nifty little red-and-black one (anybody got a spare UGA sticker?) with a 2-megapixel camera and internet capability for about $30. I signed a one-year contract, but that didn't affect the price of the phone at all. You can also change your service plan anytime for a paltry $5 or so. Guys, seriously: they do so many things so much better here.
That's plenty for now, I think. A sports wrapup: the Japanese are, as a nation, stoked about Kinoshita Noriaki becoming the first Japanese to play in an NFL game, which means the Falcons are getting a lot of attention here, and they aren't even mentioning Vick. The Braves are done, screw the Yankees, and Go Dawgs!
Japanese high schools have what would in America be 10th, 11th, and 12th graders. Grade level numbering in Japan isn't cumulative--you go from 6th grade in elementary school to 1st grade in junior high school. Ditto for "8th" grade (3rd year junior high)--you become a 1st year high schooler after you leave junior high. Each grade is divided into sections, based on academic level. (I'm not sure how they determine academic level, or whether/how often they do the determining. I've heard something about testing that places the students in these sections, but I wonder whether the kids are ever retested? I worry that, if they're never retested, a brilliant first-year who stresses out and flunks his placement test winds up stuck in the worst class, never given a chance to escape.)
Anyway, the number of sections created depends, of course, on the number of students. My main high school has between six and seven sections; ten years ago, they apparently had eight. So each student belongs to a year (1-3) as well as a section (1-6 or 7).
The first-year students at my main school are further divided into A and B groups. Each student takes two types of English class: oral communication (that's me!) and grammar. The way it works out, group A of one section is taking grammar while group B is taking oral communication. The next day they're scheduled to take English class, they switch--B takes grammar while A takes OC.
So! Having explained all that, I can use abbreviations for each class without worrying about confusing you folks.
My first class was 1-4B. (That's first year, fourth section, group B, yes?) Oral communications is "team taught"--I'm the main teacher, but the JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) is in the room to help translate and clarify the sticky parts. We have our own room that's nice and secluded--the teachers told me it's off on its own because the OC classes can be "a little loud." The room has about ten tables that can each seat 4-5 students, and there's a chalkboard at the front.
I set up my laptop at the front of the class, and loaded up a PowerPoint presentation I made. The presentation was just a bunch of pictures of and about me and things I like--where I was born, where I went to school, where I worked, my hobbies, my family, etc. The 1-4B class has about 20 students in it, and I had them all come sit up at the front so they could all see. I told them about myself, in not-too-painfully-slow English, and paused to let the JTE clarify as needed. After I finished, I passed out a worksheet I had made, with multiple-choice questions about me ("Where am I from?" "What is my favorite baseball team?" etc.) I gave them about five minutes to work on it alone, and then checked the answers aloud with the entire class. After that, I had the class rephrase each question in order to ask me out loud--"Where are you from?" "What is your favorite baseball team?" etc. That part went over remarkably well. That more or less filled up the class period.
I gave the same lesson to the 1-2Bs that followed. I had the same JTE for both classes, and according to him, I did well. I spoke too quickly for the first group, but I apparently handled the second group much better. I made sure to ask as many different students as possible a question, and they all knew the right answer. What surprised me most of all was their pronunciation. I expected words like "Bulldogs" and "Georgia" to give them trouble, but they handled them okay. The hardest part for them was the "th" in Athens.
From what I've heard, students remain in the same room for most of their classes, while the teachers move from room to room giving their lessons. My team-teaching classes have their own separate room, so the students leave when class ends. As they leave, they put the chairs back up on the table. They do this without instruction, hesitation, or complaint--it's automatic. I compare this to my memory of high school, where desks in a classroom were left strewn whichever way the students left them on their way out.
Oh, and my high school doesn't have a lunchroom. Or a janitor staff. The kids bring their lunch, and everybody--faculty and students--spends at least ten minutes a day cleaning the school. At the same time every day, everybody cleans: some grab a broom and sweep the floors, some sweep the sidewalks outside, some clean windows, and some cut grass with foot-long gardening trowels. Everyone does this. Every now and then, we have a big cleaning day, and cleaning will last for about half an hour to an hour. It breaks the monotony, it's a social equalizer, it gives the chance for fresh air and being outdoors, and it saves money. Why on earth don't schools everywhere do this?
What else, what else... That's all that's new about Tsushima High School. I'm teaching two days a week at another high school, in Toyotama, which is about an hour by bus from here. My first two days teaching there are tomorrow and Wednesday. I'm also going to be teaching sporadically at a local elementary school. It won't be extra work; rather, I'll go there on normal workdays when I wouldn't be teaching classes at my main high school. I'm in pretty high demand, apparently.
Friday night, the eight other English teachers from my main high school took me out for a welcome party. We ate at an Italian/seafood restaurant, and then five of us broke off and did karaoke for an hour or so. It was a lot of fun, and not nearly as crazy as I had feared. They've told us horror stories ever since Tokyo orientation about wild nights of drunken debauchery that Japanese welcome parties are known for; I for one was relieved that Tsushima seems to be more mellow than the main islands. Then again, that was just the English department--there's a schoolwide party this Saturday night.
Saturday night, 7/8 of the JETs on the island got together for a welcome party of our own. (The last one couldn't make it, on account of a school function early the next morning.) We started at what is apparently the Grand Hotel Tsushima, eating what was apparently the Genghis Khan dinner. The eight of us (seven JETs plus another American who was a JET back in 1990 and has been here ever since) sat down to a table with two grills and two trays of veggies and meat. We grilled the food ourselves, and it was yummy, but each portion came out to the size of somewhere between a large appetizer and a small entree. We were still hungry after all the food was gone, yet what we'd had cost us $16 apiece. We were more amused than mad, and we decided to fill up the rest of the way on fast food, and made a beeline for the Mos Burger. Sated, we headed to the island's bowling alley. It's an American-style bowling alley--once you put on the shoes, everything else is identical to the American bowling experience. The shoes are a different kind of silly-looking, and paying for the lane and games is a bit... frustrating. (They don't accept cash; you can only pay via tickets you get from a machine by putting in the equivalent amount in cash.) The bar had Samuel Adams, New Castle, Corona, Heineken, a Czech beer whose recipe Budweiser apparently stole, and a slew of other imports that most of us hadn't seen in Japan, let alone Tsushima. (Shoot, Inoko doesn't even have New Castle...) I bowled an 87 or so in the first game, and a 122 in the second game.
They had a snackbar and an arcade. The arcade had various mainstays--pachinko, whackamole, stuffed animal claw thing--but one game sucked me in. Taiko is a type of Japanese drum that probably everybody's seen before. (If you haven't, then just follow the link.) The Japanese, being smarter than roughly 100.0% of the rest of the world, have found a way to make banging a single drum an entertaining videogame. That's right. You hit... a drum. You pick up the two drumsticks, you pick a song, a la DDR, Guitar Hero, and the like, and you hit the drum in time with the little colored circles that indicate the rhythm. You pay money to do this. There are different ways to hit the drum--there's the normal hit on the drumhead, the tap on the rim, the two-stick hit on the head, two sticks on the rim, and then the sustain, where you beat on the drumhead as hard as you can for the duration of the sustain on the screen. It sounds exhausting (and it is), but it's so... much... fun! The J-pop songs are fine, and the "Namco originals" are passable, but there's a "videogame" section. Most of the songs in this section I can't recognize. One of them is from Mappy, a game that presumably only one American (me) played. Another is the theme from Zelda. (You see what this is building up to, I'm sure...) The last one is the original Mario Bros. music. The three minutes I spent hammering a drum in time with that song are among the most entertaining of my life. Though that says more about me than it does about the game, it's still freaking awesome.
I got back from Nagasaki last Tuesday. It was cloudy when I got back, it started raining that night, and I didn't see the sun until Sunday afternoon. It poured for five and a half days straight. I had to do a lot of laundry when I got back from Nagasaki, but I don't have a dryer, so I have to get by with line-drying. 120 hours of rain with accompanying overcast skies does not a reliable dryer make. Saturday night my apartment's water pump went out, which meant I didn't have running water starting that night. Conveniently, city services are all closed on Sunday, so I had to wait until Monday morning to take a shower. I also haven't gotten to the "plumbing and hydrology" section in my Japanese phrasebook yet, so I wouldn't have been able to articulate the problem had I gotten a professional on the phone.
I bought a cell phone on Friday. My plan is ¥3600 (~$30) a month, and that gives me 25 minutes of talking. You read that right. Sure, I got the cheapest plan--I don't intend to use it very much--but even the most expensive one only included about 250 minutes. They allow so few minutes that they don't even charge per minute--they give rates in 30-second increments. There is a two-part silver lining, though: in Japan, if I call you, it uses my minutes, not yours; and the phones here are comparatively inexpensive. I got a nifty little red-and-black one (anybody got a spare UGA sticker?) with a 2-megapixel camera and internet capability for about $30. I signed a one-year contract, but that didn't affect the price of the phone at all. You can also change your service plan anytime for a paltry $5 or so. Guys, seriously: they do so many things so much better here.
That's plenty for now, I think. A sports wrapup: the Japanese are, as a nation, stoked about Kinoshita Noriaki becoming the first Japanese to play in an NFL game, which means the Falcons are getting a lot of attention here, and they aren't even mentioning Vick. The Braves are done, screw the Yankees, and Go Dawgs!
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