I'm going to Taiwan!

Hiyo! The past ten days have been crazy busy. Classes finally kicked in all the way, and I've been struggling mightily to keep up. I felt off-balance last week, due mostly to my computer dying. Like I said, it could've been much worse, and I didn't lose anything vitally important, but most of the lesson plans I'd drawn up were lost, so I spent the week playing catch-up.

As the title indicates, I'm going to Taiwan! Wednesday after work I'm flying to Fukuoka, where I'll spend the night, and Thursday morning I'll fly from there to Taipei. The flight's about three hours, and I'm meeting Julie (a JET from Hyogo-ken, where Kobe is). Monday's a holiday, so by taking Thursday and Friday off, I'm turning two days off into a six-day trip. Woohoo!

An awesome friend of mine bought me a world atlas back in July, and I'm such a geek that lately I've been spending half an hour at a time just studying maps from around the world.

I still love teaching. That being said, I despise sitting at my desk coming up with lesson plans, and running them by each class's teacher. Nobody's trying to mess with my plans or anything--if anything, they're enormously helpful, letting me know which parts of my plan are good, which ones will make the students cry, etc. It's just that writing stuff on a chalkboard and teaching stuff and drawing gasps whenever I speak the least bit of Japanese are so much more satisfying than being stuck to my desk.

I've been meeting with a second-year (11th-grade) student at my main high school to help her prepare for a regional speech competition next Saturday. I worked with her one-on-one for two afternoons last week. Her knowledge of English is impressive, and she speaks much better than most of the students I've met. She still struggles with her /l/ and /r/, though. One of the phrases in her speech is "the portrait right gives the right," and she nails all three r sounds in "portrait right." However, she goes right on and reads the rest of it "gives the light." The first time she did it, I assumed she slipped up, and asked her to re-read it. After repeating it several times, she consistently read it "portrait right gives the light." Try as I might, we couldn't correct her pronunciation. I had to settle for her recognizing that the two words are identical, and that she's pronouncing them differently. She also struggled with "bullying," although her pronunciation of word-initial /l/ is perfect.

Based on her speech patterns, and what I've noticed in othet students, I think one of the main causes of trouble in English speaking is consonant clusters. Japanese doesn't have many consonant clusters (ts is all I can think of, with ch and sh being digraphs), so groups of two or more consonants are difficult to pronounce. A couple of the other ALTs on the island were telling me that they haven't heard a single Japanese on the island pronounce "twelve" correctly, and this would be why. While helping the girl practice her speech, I attacked "bullying" by breaking it up into "bull," "lee," and "ing," each of which she pronounced perfectly. When trying to read it as a full word without interruption, it came out as something close to "buri-ing." So we spent about five minutes repeating each of the three syllables in succession, with gradually shorter pauses between each one. Bless her heart, she didn't give up, and by the end she could pull it off, but you could tell it took a lot of concentration.

I find stuff like this fascinating, as you can probably tell. I had taken for granted that if you can pronounce /s/, /t/, /a/, and /p/ correctly, you should have no trouble pronouncing "stop." After I thought about it for a while, though, I remembered when I was in first or second grade, and spending at least a couple of weeks talking about what they called blends--ch, sh, fl, fr, str, thr, etc. I wonder if there's an interesting (or even fun) way to teach blends to high schoolers...

I pass by a preschool on my walk to work each morning, and on my way back one day last week, I heard music coming from their gym. As I got closer, I thought I recognized the song, but it wasn't until I got right to the front of the building that I realized they were playing The Battle Hymn of the Republic. I think the students were just playing drums in time, while a teacher provided the keyboard. The song was slow, but with a slightly different rhythm, it easily could've been Glory, Glory, which, for those of you who don't know, is the UGA fight song. Suffice it to say, this made my day, if not my week.