how old are you?

I heard that one a lot today at school, seeing as it's my birthday.
Happy Birthday to me!

Plans for the evening? Watching "The Wizard of Oz". Sleep. I used up all my exciting plans on the weekend. I had a party. Which was awesome by the way. If you weren't there, you're lame. Especially if you actually live in Hokkaido. You know who you are.

Delicious food was eaten, excessive alcohol was drunk, and costumes were worn. I sang isth my band, and everybody had cake. And then the next day I made delicious breakfast instead of going to the elementary school sports day.

And now I'm sleepy.

unscheduled fun

It's days like this that make me remember what I like about this job...

I only had one class scheduled for today seeing as there is only one grade in school today, so I was (not) looking forward to a slow day spent sitting at my desk. Class itself was fun -- this year's first grade class is a lot better now that they've had the shit scared out of them by the scary* Junior High teachers. They haven't once had a classroom brawl since they've been in Junior High.

The rest of the morning, the students had calligraphy class. I had my stuff (brushes, ink, etc.) with me so I sat in and learned me some calligraphy. It still cracks me up to hear people say that I'm just as good at writing as a Japanese person. One of the kids said he couldn't tell it wasn't done be a nihonjin. I decided to take it as a compliment, but it's kind of insulting. And I hear it more than I like to think about. A little sad... believe it or not, non-Japanese people can do Japanese things too!

Anyways. Class was fun, and way better than desk jockeying.

After lunch, I tagged along to go pick up one of the second grade students who was doing a job shadow with a group of young women from China who are here to learn agricultural techniques. I guess so he too can someday be a foreign agricultural student**.

What a genki group of girls! It was raining so they were stuck inside. When we got there, they were all playing cards. Then the teacher*** suggested I teach them some English. It was amazing. In a split-second, they had all run back to their rooms to get pens, pencils and notebooks so they could learn some English. If only all of my students were so keen to learn!

We practiced some easy stuff, which was kind of difficult. I didn't realize how much I rely on understanding Japanese to teach English here until I met these girls who only understood Chinese. We had a lot of fun (or at least I did) and I hope I can meet up with them again. They even taught me a little Chinese, which I am hopeless at. Wo jiao Maryna.

So yeah. Today, fun.

Tomorrow is my birthday party, which should also be fun. Sunday is the Elementary School Sports day, which will probably be fun too, if I'm not too tired and/or futsukayoi. Which I'm pretty sure I will be.








*They aren't really that scary. Except for their homeroom teacher. I'd hate to be yelled at by him... he's the baseball coach too. Even scarier.

** Which is only slightly less funny than my ALT friend who every year has a student who shadows him. The requirements of being a JET Programme ALT being that you are foreign and fluent in English, preferably as your first language. So basically, it would be impossible for any Japanese person to hold my friend's job. Seeing as they're Japanese.

*** This guy is awesome. He and his wife are my neighbors and they both rock. They travel, like new things and are just fun overall. This is the same teacher who invited me to eat lunch with his students who are going to Canada so they can practice their English. You'd think the English teacher would be doing things like that... and you'd be wrong.

pork sweat

The rest of the school spent the afternoon picking weeds from the garden at a local old folks' home. I spent it here in the office writing a welcome letter to my successor. And I only had to ineptly answer the phone once, to tell the caller that I couldn't understand what he was saying. To be fair, the receptionist later said that nobody can understand what that guy says.

Anyways, everyone else in the staff room was rewarded for their hard work in the hot sun with a tasty cold beverage. I was rewarded for my unwavering determination to sit at my desk with the same tasty cold beverage -- a Pocari Sweat.

Now, I've always thought that this was a pretty ridiclous name for a beverage - tasty, cold or otherwise. Keep in mind that this is an English name for a Japanese beverage. Which is supposed to make it sound cool and appealing. You would have thought that they'd look up the word sweat before naming a drink after it.

So one of the teachers is passing my desk, and noticing the drink next to my computer, blurts out "pork sweat". I'm glad I'm not the only one around here who thinks that naming your soft drink "sweat" is a poor choice. I'm extra glad that he pointed out that it could also be sweat of the porcine variety.

Happy weekend.

reduce, reuse, recycle

Since it's my first weekend home in a long, long, long time I really have to do some spring cleaning. That, and it's recycling weekend. This will mark the very first time I have recycled anything in my town. When recycling day is only once a month on a Sunday morning, it doesn't make the priority list very often when I'm either out of town or just not functional enough to get it together to go to the recycling depot before 10am.

Two years of recycling isn't nearly as much as you think it would be. One of the super cool guys in my office drove over with his wife and baby daughter to take away all of my crap. There was too much for me to walk over, so he offered to drive it to the recycling station for me. So he showed up in his minicar, and we filled it with a two year accumulation of garbage. Plastic bottles, cans, magazines, cardboard... everything but glass bottles. Which inexplicably don't go to the recycling station, but into the empty bottle post. While I may have gotten rid of many bags of other recycling, I will still have to do something with three large garbage bags of glass bottles. Two years of wine consumption is a lot of wine bottles.

Today's other housekeeping goals include cleaning out my office room (formerly known as recycling and HAJET Publications purgatory) and the bathroom so I can reward myself at the end of the day with a nice hot bath, a glass of wine and only four more rooms to deal with tomorrow.

demonstration lesson

Instead of the standard boring textbook lesson we usually have, today we had a demonstration standard boring textbook lesson. It was a big change. If by big change you mean that other teachers were also watching.

This morning we had a little meeting about our planned lesson, which involved my team teaching partner explaining to me very slowly and carefully today's reading -- a beautiful monologue by Akiko Ono (better known as Aki), the hero of One World about the plight of Japanese cranes.

"These are Japanese cranes. Ainu people call them the gods of the wetlands.

Cranes used to live in many parts of Japan. However, people hunted them and little by little destroyed the wetlands. Because of that, the cranes almost disappeared.

Then in 1924, some Japanese cranes were found in the Kushiro wetlands. The discovery made people happy."

Her speech made me happy. As did my team teacher very slowly explaining to me what the reading was about, as though I were one of the students and not a native English speaker. With lots of pictures. I was asked to explain "almost" and "discovery".

Completely shockingly, the lesson was less than enthusiastically recieved. The students didn't care about Aki's moving speech, and weren't moved to start speaking English after reading her words in their textbooks. They refused to answer basic questions about the content and read in monotone voices when asked to recite Aki's powerful words for themselves. I think it was their form of protesting the destruction of the wetlands.

We racked our brains trying to understand why listening to Aki talks about cranes and wetlands for 25 minutes failed to spark enthusiasm in the students. Why they were not touched by such poetry. Why it seems that reciting textbooks for two years has not made them able to speak English. Whether we should focus more on pronounciation or intonation or stress. What techniques we can use to make recitation better for the students. It was a rousing discussion in Japanese, and so of course I was able to follow and contribute fully. All in all, I felt that our discussion will change the way we teach, and give the students more tools with which to speak, read, write and listen to English with confidence and skill.








Okay, so I had a crappy day at school, and needed a whinge. It seems to be happening more and more frequently, probably due to a combination of feeling underutilized at work, having a lot of time sitting around with nothing to do, and knowing that the next two months are something I just have to finish before I can go home.