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!