Language and culture

It was interesting, talking to an Indian man last night and having the only common language between us be Japanese. I’m not used to that–I’ve been under the impression that a lot of Indians speak English due to the British influence in India, but I guess not. (This was the chef at Masala, the restaurant on the 5th floor of Tokushima station that serves mediocre curry and amazing naan.)

I was in Tokushima yesterday afternoon and evening, just hanging out and getting out of Ikeda for a while. I’m starting to stock up on more winter clothes (I love you, Uniqlo), though my furniture situation is still unchanged, but my supervisor’s thinking about what we can do. I also took a look at some jackets–really expensive, but I’d imagine the price would be similar at home; I’ve never bought a real, heavy winter jacket before. I just have a knee-length wool coat. I haven’t made any purchases yet, but I may have to soon.

I had another fun language encounter this evening, when I went by the 100-yen store to try to find dehumidifiers, except I couldn’t remember the Japanese word for “dehumidifier,” so I tried to explain that I wanted a plastic box that makes the air not humid…except apparently “mushiatsui” doesn’t mean humid, because the really nice and well-meaning (and cute) clerk kept asking, “Samui? Cold?” He finally pulled out a pad and a pen and I sketched it, and he figured it out, only to realize that it was sold out. Boo.

So, happy Halloween, and happy early Diwali/Deepavali/however-you-spell-it. No costume this year, and my 100-yen reindeer antlers finally broke beyond repair (it cracked my kids up today to see me walking around class with one droopy antler, though), but that’s all right–helping a bunch of kids to make masks of their own was dressing up enough for me. I have a few photos I’ll post soon, whenever I get around to downloading and editing my photos. (And Aimee–I did snap some photos of the river/fault area for you, when I was walking from the train station to my school this morning. Hopefully you’ll see something of interest there.)

Tomorrow I have a class that I’m stressing over…it’s a double-length class at the school I go to every other week (but this’ll be the first time in a month that I’ve been there–I’m going there 4 out of the 5 Tuesdays in this month, actually), which is stressful in and of itself, but it wouldn’t be bad except that the kids’ parents and apparently people from the community want to sit in and watch it! I would have easily spent at least half the class doing the Halloween party thing, but that’s obviously a no-go for tomorrow. So right now, I want to spend one half talking about Halloween and its equivalent in other cultures (Japan has one called Obon, Spain has La Dia de los Muertos, and there are plenty more), and I want to spend the other half talking about Diwali. I just don’t want it to be boring…for the Diwali half, I’m hoping to do illustrations of the Ramayana story that inspires the North Indian celebrations (the South India one is a little less auspicious–a battle between Krishna and some demon/evil force–but the Northern story just makes for better storytelling because it’s detailed and longer–time’s my big concern), and while it would be cool to attempt to do some religious art, since Hindu art is absolutely beautiful, I may have to take some liberties and chibi-fy everything so the kids will have more fun with it. (Sorry, gods.) I also want to show the kids examples of kolam and give them paper with dots on it so they can try to draw their own. I’m just trying to figure out how to make this all a little less boring, the first half in particular.

It’s funny how Japan is putting me in touch with my own roots so much. I just hope that what I found online is accurate. (Mom and Dad, I may be giving you a call tonight just to verify my facts.)

And in the spirit of Diwali, I’m finally going to use the new vacuum I bought a couple of weeks ago. I’ve never vacuumed in the 3 months I’ve lived here–I’ve dusted fairly regularly, but a tatami room throws a lot of particles into the air just by virtue of being what it is. I had a couple of books sitting on the floor for a couple of days and I had to wipe them off when I picked them up.

Okay, time to get to work…I’ve been thinking about putting together a photographic Day In The Life, and just taking photos of my daily routine and all my schools over the next couple of weeks and compiling them online somewhere. Let’s see how that goes–now that I’m back online, I’ve been trying to work on an update for my Pirates of Dark Water website, and I’m finding it surprisingly difficult to motivate myself to do any serious web work. I think the fact that I’m on a laptop (instead of having a separate keyboard and monitor) and sitting on the floor (instead of at a desk) is contributing to that. That’s also why I haven’t been updating my Flickr account too much. Well, hopefully I’ll get it all together soon, so I can keep you all updated and keep on top of my design/web coding skills.

Anyway! Later, guys. :o)

My eikaiwa classes have presented me with a new and unprecedented source of discomfort: now, it seems inevitable that if I ask my students what they did in the last week, they’ll tell me they went to one or more funerals of friends.

For the past several weeks, there seem to have been quite a few deaths among the friends and acquaintances of my eikaiwa students. Some of the funerals made my students miss class, and other times they would tell me about it while recapping the week’s events. The majority of my students are at least 50 years old, with quite a few in their 60s and even their 70s, so I guess they’re reaching The Age where this starts happening to people in their lives on a regular basis. The most awkward part, though, happened in my intermediate class, where several of the women are pretty much inseparable friends. One of them attended a funeral of a person she and another student were friends with–and that second student hadn’t heard this person had passed away until the first student brought it up in class. She had to dig out her handkerchief and wipe at her eyes and silently compose herself for a moment.

And I don’t really know how to handle it…of course I’m sympathetic and I offer my condolences, but when it’s a class setting (albeit a loose one, but still, I’m the teacher and they’re my students, despite being older than my parents for the most part) and not just a group of people talking casually, what do I do? How can I gracefully and tactfully move on with the class?

My classes are sort of falling into place…sort of. For now I’m sort of depending on the fact that my JTE at my junior high has her own lesson plan she incorporates me into, because it frees me up to concentrate on how to make my elementary school and eikaiwa lessons work. I’ve wanted to write more about how my classes actually go, but it’s tough to just summarize them without just parroting back the basic lesson plan, because every class is very different. Each group of students, whether 8 or 58, has its own very distinct dynamic. I have elementary classes which are really happy to see me, and others which are shy and harboring on unenthusiastic. I have classes that I can share some real rapport with, classes that I can joke around with and that already share inside jokes of a sort with me, and I have classes where I wonder why the kids won’t say anything and whether or not it’s something I’m doing to make them keep their distances.

All my classes are at different points, too…there are of course the 3 grades of junior high kids, and each grade has 2 homerooms, and though I’m only there one day a week while they learn English daily, I can already see that some classes are pushing ahead a bit while others are falling behind. And I have some super-genki (and, dare I say it, loud…I wonder how my JTE doesn’t lose her voice trying to shout over those kids) kids and others who stare blankly at me and then exchange knowingly helpless grins with their friends.

And among my elementaries, due to the differing schedules and the staggered start times while the term was lurching to a start, I have one school that’s 3 weeks ahead of some of the others. I have another school that won’t meet at all for the month of October, but I only go there every other week anyway. It takes a lot of effort and energy to keep them straight and to keep up with all of them. I have a day where I have 2 back-to-back elementary school lessons, and the first school’s a week ahead of the second, so it isn’t just as simple as repeating my lesson. I also have to tweak my lesson subtly for every class, and the students themselves will take the rules for my games (heh, “my”–more like ideas from Dave’s ESL Cafe, GenkiEnglish.com, and the Teamwork Tokushima writers of old, with some tweaking to suit my purposes) and interpret them a little differently in each class.

At the same time, when I use really vague terms like “a lot of effort” and “I plan lessons” without elaborating and giving details, I don’t know if that really helps any current or prospective JETs reading this. So for example, here are a couple of the games I’ve created/doctored:

  • Face Race: this was adapted from Dave’s ESL Cafe. I wrote eye, nose, mouth, chin, ear, and hair on separate slips of paper and put them into a little Zip-loc bag. The classes are already divided into teams, so I’d have the team members come up and janken (rock/paper/scissors–it’s huge here) to decide the order of the teams. I’d then have the teams compete against each other to draw a face on the board the most quickly. It gave the kids a chance to get really creative, and they did some really crazy and hilarious stuff.
  • Robot Game: after I ran the kids through the English words for directions (which many of my kids already knew to some degree, because my predecessor treated these English classes as real lessons and taught them a lot of stuff…but having someone ask you, “left wa nihongo de nan to iimasu ka?” is different than actually using it actively, which is my aim with all these games–to get them to use English in small and fun ways). I then had one person from each team come up, one at a time, and stand at the front of the room. Their team members would have to tell them, “go,” “stop,” “left,” “right,” “back,” and so on, and have them navigate around the room. Sometimes the teachers jumped in and made kids move back and forth and back and forth, which made all the kids start giggling. If there was a lot of time, I’d have each of the kids be the robot, and if there was still time, I’d jump in at the end and have all the students in the class take turns commanding me around the room.

Since it’s October and Halloween’s in a few weeks (and they do know Halloween–Universal Studios Japan had a huge fright-themed parade with lots of folks in costume parading around, and a lot of Halloween-themed decor as well), I want to start doing more season-themed activities for the next few weeks, and then having a fun Halloween Day either on the day of or the week before. I found a sheet of 16 Frankenstein-like figures in one of my Teamwork Tokushima packets (they’re seasonal publications put together by former JETs that are full of games for elementary, middle, high school, and special needs students, as well as English club and eikaiwa situations), with subtle differences between each face, and someone had come up with a game asking how many had hair, how many had big noses, and so on. So I did that yesterday, and then asked the kids to color the faces in and went around asking them to describe one of the faces, including what color the face was. For next week I want to come up with something else that progresses English while using a Halloween theme. I think about 3 or 4 of my schools are within a week of each other; the stragglers should still get at least 1 lesson before Halloween Day, where I want to have them make masks and jack-o-lanterns (on construction paper) and give them candy while talking to them about Halloween out west. I doubt they’d be at all interested that it used to be an old festival to ward off the spirits of the dead, so I won’t really bother with that.

I also really want to talk about more international/world-related things with my eikaiwa, since they’re very interested in me as an English-speaking person as well as a multicultural person. One of the students in my intermediate class is currently in Australia, so it would be cool to do a unit in there using some more advanced conversations, like a travel agent scenario. I’d also like to have them come back to me (beginner and intermediate) with several minutes of content prepared on different Japanese customs, and maybe we can have a food day, where I dig up a bunch of easy-to-make foreign snack foods and have everyone prepare something different.

I do have a lot of planning to do this week, to get that started…I’m out of town from Saturday through Tuesday. I’m very eager for this week to be done with so I can travel again, but to finish the week off I still have a lot to do.

Posted this yesterday, but it didn’t go through

I’m thinking that instead of just writing about what I’ve done every single day (which is what my Word-file journal has consisted of lately), I’m just going to directly start posting in here about my actual experiences and thoughts about the country and culture, because that’s what I really want to come away with and hang onto for years to come. And I think that was one of the original aims of this journal that I’ve since overlooked.

In the last month or so, I’ve experienced:

  • my first classes (2 eikaiwas, which are adult conversation classes and fairly casual, and 1 elementary school lesson, which I can reuse for the other 5 schools…no junior high classes till next week)
  • language barrier issues (minoring in Japanese does nothing for you unless you get out there and actively use the language…I wish I’d realized this while I was still in school, but at least I still know enough that I’ve been able to get by just fine)
  • 2 enkais (employee parties, one for my Board of Education staff that welcomed me and said goodbye to my predecessor and that I didn’t have to pay for, and a start-of-term one for the teachers at my junior high school that was a lot more expensive than I realized)
  • half a typhoon (it veered north and we only got a really windy rainstorm last night)
  • some homesickness, and feeling pretty isolated and a bit depressed and out of sorts (weird, because I do have 2 other ALTs in my building, but they have people here they’re already close to and I miss having really close friends near by)
  • Japanese roads (no driving yet, but plenty of riding, which is more than enough to keep me from learning how to drive…though my job’s requiring me to learn now)
  • food difficulties (I’ve eaten egg in some form or another on an almost daily basis…I’m really worried about where my cholesterol’s going to be once my time in Japan is finished)
  • massive use of public transportation (pretty much unheard of in Atlanta, which is a very car-heavy city, but here I take buses and trains everywhere, and I love it!)
  • humidity, humidity, humidity (…enough said)
  • fame and fortune (er, sort of…I’ve been in the town newsletter, and when the Tokushima JETs had orientation several weeks ago, we attended a ningyo/puppetry demonstration and were allowed to play with the puppets afterwards, and someone was there videotaping us–it turns out he’s with the Tokushima news, and they got a close-up of me from below, so I evidently looked extremely tall…I heard about this from my eikaiwa students, fellow teachers and BOE/community center employees, and even my landlord, though I didn’t witness it myself. So fame, but not much fortune, unless you count my getting paychecks)
  • making international reservations (I’m going to India in December! The ticket vouchers and visa paperwork are in the mail)
  • the requisite stomach problems (it figures that Pepto-Bismol was the one thing we didn’t pack–but we found the Japanese alternative)
  • intensely beautiful natural surroundings (mountains all around, and when doing a homestay in Kamiyama we hiked up to a waterfall, and the weather’s either been hot, cloudy, or rainy, but nothing worse, and it was all beautiful)
  • compliments on my chopstick usage
  • a culinary faux pas…you apparently do eat the pits of the tiny bean-like plums that come with your food, and you do not take the pits out of your mouth and put them back on the plate; this one actually elicited a gasp from our host. Nice.
  • impromptu and planned speeches (the planned one was to the 130-odd students and dozen or so faculty at my junior high school; the impromptu ones were at enkais and teacher meetings)
  • repeated issuing of my jikoshoukai (self-introduction)
  • inquiring about vegetarian food, to the point that I have my spiel completely down pat because I do it once every several days
  • that I’m already getting tired of what little Japanese food I actually can eat, and I miss really robust and flavorful foods
  • some of the best Italian food I’ve ever had, courtesy of a restaurant in town with a cook that actually was trained in Italy (of all the places to find an authentic bistro, it’s in our town!)
  • amazing, amazing authentic Sri Lankan food on my birthday
  • a huge outpouring of warmth and support from the other ALTs in my prefecture, specifically on the north side–despite all of us being strangers, 11 of us got together on a Monday night (last Monday, in fact) to celebrate my birthday
  • many, many stares (the vast majority of which dissolve into warm smiles and bows once I greet them, bow, and smile, but they almost always expect me to do it first), and cars slowing down so the drivers can take a look at me
  • the huge impact baseball has had over here (they air every single game involving a west coast team, I swear, but they’re all American League, so I can’t watch the Braves in action)
  • a strong feeling of patriotism for Atlanta, and a strong(er) wave of disdain and disgust for the Bush administration, now that I can view them from non-US-media-influenced eyes
  • an acute helplessness at not being able to help others in my country out during a time of need (I’m of course talking about Hurricane Katrina), and outrage at how poorly the situation was handled and the depths that the people themselves sank to, in and outside the affected areas
  • guilt and helplessness over trying to not seem like I’m slacking off at my job (I have nothing to do…my eikaiwas right now involve minimal planning since I’m trying to get the hang of them, and I only really have to plan one elementary school lesson and then tweak it for all the different schools I go to, and I’m an assistant teacher at my junior high and the teacher doesn’t plan the lessons till the night before)
  • realization that Georgia is indeed a lazy and lax part of the country (Lindsay and Hannah, the other ALTs in my building, are from the Pacific Northwest, and they have very conservation-oriented mentalities, much more so than anybody from home does)
  • realization that not all parts of the US shut down on Sundays the way Georgia does
  • realization that the world really isn’t such a foreign place, and while basic customs might be different, the same warmth and generosity is prevalent everywhere, though especially in smaller and more personal/personalized towns, as compared to big mega-cities like Tokyo or Osaka
  • realizing how much I love and miss my friends and family
  • realizing that whenever I do return to Atlanta, many of those friends won’t be there anymore, and I’ll have to essentially start over, the way I started over when I came here
  • realizing that I’m probably not going to get around to taking my GREs in time to get started on applying for masters programs in the fall of 2006, and staying for an extra year in Japan doesn’t seem like a bad prospect at all right now

…and if I think of anything else, I’ll jot it down and add it here later.