Category: Teaching

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I just had a really, really great workout, which consisted of walking around Ikeda for 2-3 hours. Specifically, I walked west on the 192, across the Yoshinogawa (River–redundancy #1; kawa/gawa = “river”) via the Ikeda Ohashi (Bridge–redundancy #2; hashi/bashi = “bridge”), past my junior high school, back across the Yoshinogawa via the Miyoshi Bashi (Bridge–redundancy #3), and back. I’ve been sitting so often lately (sitting at my desk at the community center, or at my desk at the junior high, or at a random desk in the teachers’ room or principal’s office of any of my elementary schools, or on the bus or train, or on cushions on my floor) that I just had to get out and walk around, and the weather’s still unseasonably warm, which lent itself really well to my spending time outside. The leaves are finally beginning to change colors, so I snapped quite a few photos of the surrounding mountains. I wanted to take photos of the town, but that can happen another day.

Right as I started my trip, I happened to pass in front of a kimono store owned by 2 of my eikaiwa students–the husband is in my beginners class and the wife is in my intermediate class. They invited me inside to look around, and the wife brought me upstairs to show me their kimono show/storeroom, which was quite stunning. (Mom and Dad–she asked me to bring you by the store when you come, so she can show you different garments as well.) It turns out this store is over 80 years old, and was started by the husband’s grandfather. When I came downstairs, they presented me with a gift: a drawstring purse made out of indigo-dyed cloth (denim?), with a butterfly on the front. It’s really beautiful, and it was completely unexpected and very generous of them to do so.

So now I’m back, and just resting for a bit before I figure out what to do for dinner, and whether or not I have to hike down to the video store to return stuff today, or whether they’re due tomorrow.

Lindsay did all my dishes last night, apparently in return for my helping her move a trundle bed up and down 3 flights of stairs (her mom was here and needed to use it), and apparently because she just likes doing other people’s dishes on occasion.

This weekend I’m here alone. There’s a camping trip in Iya, which I was going to go on, but I backed out a few days ago because of my head cold. Lindsay’s there, though, and Hannah’s in Osaka, so it’s just a quiet evening on my own. I’m watching Contact (hahaha, “Viva Las Vega”…and why does Michael Kitz keep staring unblinkingly at Ellie?…and Hadden went to Georgia Tech! “Once upon a time, I was a hell of an engineer”–so great), which is one of my favorite movies of all time–I rented it last weekend and have to return it today, but hadn’t watched it before now. (I also rented Return of the Jedi this week–the 1995 pre-Special Edition version, of course, because I don’t consider anything after that to be canon :P–and watched it a couple of times, on my own and with Lindsay. This was my first post-ROTS viewing, and now that the story has been completed, this film is a lot more powerful and there are so many subtle elements that have a completely new meaning or dimension to them. And the ending…just…wow. I do have to admit, though, I almost was craving an older version of Hayden Christensen instead of Sebastian Shaw, to give it more closure–an older version, not the smirking version on the DVD. But anyway. I could write a long essay on ROTJ alone, or an even longer one on characterizations throughout the 6-film saga (haha, masters thesis topic! I wish…), but neither of those would fit the scope of this journal, so I’ll hold off.

All right, that’s all for now…I’m most likely taking the GRE in Osaka next weekend (whew–3 hours on a bus to take a 4-hour test, only to take another 3-hour bus back). I also have a lot of lesson planning to do–West Mountain Shougakkou would like me to do double-length lessons for all the classes I teach there in November, except that I’m doing four classes at West Mountain in November (as opposed to every other week, to make up for having no classes there in October or December), meaning I’m going to have to plan ahead by at least 4 lessons. I also definitely need to catch up on uploading all my photos, because I have a lot to edit and put up, as well as creating sets of the images that are already there.

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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)

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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.