(no subject)
Ok, so it’s been almost two weeks now, and I’ve started school and everything. Last week I was just coming to the school every morning to get situated. I met the other teachers and went through my desk. There is a ton of crap in my desk and cabinet. Prizes, old worksheets, flash cards. TONS OF CRAP. I swear, there were at least 20 sets of alphabet flash cards on card stock. I have three two-inch-thick binders on top of my desk with some of the old activity ideas in them (one for each grade), plus the tower on my desk with yet more worksheets and other assorted papers in them. I spent about 15 hours going through all of the crap in my space, and I still only have a basic idea of what’s actually there.
There are also about 10 decks of Winnie-the-Pooh playing cards. I must admit I’m fairly pleased about that. ^_^
Ok, so life at Ita-chu (ITAkura CHUugakkou, Itakura Junior High). Well, I guess I should start with the teachers. They all seem pretty nice so far, although most of them don’t really have much to do with me. I think it’s more to do with the language barrier than anything, because they’ve always responded with enthusiasm when I say something in Japanese, even if I know it’s horribly mangled. They LOVED my business cards when I handed them out on the first day.
Business cards are a different cultural phenomenon here than in America.
Oh! I hadn’t realized it was that time already. See, it’s 11:30 am, which means that it’s getting close to lunch time! I normally wouldn’t think about 11:30 being important enough to interrupt myself, but I just HAVE to mention this. At 11:30 every weekday, Itakura has an alarm that goes off. The first time I heard it, we had had two earthquakes the night before, so I thought it was a warning of some sort. I waited where I was for about five minutes (the weather was nice, so I assumed it was just about an earthquake) before I knocked on Mark’s door to ask him if I should be worried.
No worries, though. It was the lunch alarm. Why does the city need a lunch alarm, you might ask? Well, apparently it’s a bit of a tradition dating back to the days before things like watches and phones and whatnot. Because Itakura is a rural city, and more importantly has a lot of farmers, the alarm is to remind them to come home out of the large rice fields and eat lunch. It’s pretty cute now that I know what it is. ^_^ Too bad I still have another hour before lunch.
Anyway, where was I? Business cards. At home, business cards are mostly for the purpose of continuing unfinished business. You hand someone a business card at the end of a meeting if you know you’ll need to be in contact again, or situations similar to that. In Japan, it’s more of an introduction thing. Business cards are useful to teach people your name and to clarify relationships (and hierarchy) so that people know how to treat/address each other. At least in my case at school, I mostly gave them business cards to teach them my name and to learn theirs. It was a convenient way to break the ice without having to worry about not understanding their small talk ;)
Anyway, they were all impressed that I even had a business card with Japanese on it, but everyone was entertained by my gunma-chan.
Have I talked about g-chan yet? I think so, because typing g-chan seems familiar, but I don’t actually have internet access at the moment so I can’t be sure. I’ll assume that I have and check my old posts before I post this later. Anyway, I have a gunma-chan on my business card, and they all thought it was adorable.
Oh, they all also asked how old I was, and every time I told them they practically giggled while exclaiming “wakaidesune!” As if I didn’t know that I was younger than everyone else there. I think the next youngest teacher is Mr. Wada (the second-grade English teacher) and he’s still two years older than me.
So I looked through the textbooks at one point last week, too, and there are a few things I want to note. There’s a small section about Harry Potter at the beginning of Chapter 4 in the grade 1 book, and there’s a story about a lion in that book that’s so Japanese in philosophy that I had to share.
The Hungry Lion:
One day a hungry lion slowly came out of the forest. He wanted some food.
He sat on the grass and looked around. He waited for a long time.
The lion saw a rabbit under a tree. He ran after the rabbit.
Just then, a deer ran in front of the lion. The lion wanted a big dinner, so he ran after the deer.
The deer ran away very quickly. The rabbit ran away too. So the hungry lion got nothing.
Sometimes we are like this lion.
I thought it was a pretty amusing little story, and it was great because it was interspersed with little pictures showing the story, and the last panel and text were great. And speaking of the textbooks, during the classes I haven’t been in this week (thank goodness!) the third graders were reading a story about Hiroshima and a couple of kids who die under a tree after the bombing. :/ I’m so glad I don’t have to really talk about that with them, because it might be a little awkward.
So this week has been pretty much stop and go. We didn’t have classes on Monday because it was the first day of school. Normally, they have some sort of ceremony/assembly thing before doing homeroom. However, they’re renovating the gym or something, so we didn’t actually have an assembly. I briefly introduced myself during the announcements over the PA, but that was all I really did on Monday. Even so, everyone dressed up for the ceremony. However, I was way overdressed. I guess normally everyone would be wearing a suit, but since Japan is having power problems and they’re avoiding running the AC, right now everyone is doing “cool biz”. So I was the only person wearing a suit jacket, the was only one other person wearing a tie, and I was the only person who wasn’t wearing a shirt that was essentially white. Oops. At least I wasn’t underdressed this time.
After homeroom, they had cleaning time. The school doesn’t really have a janitor, but instead in Japan, all of the teachers and students clean up the school every day instead. Everyone has an assigned area that they’re responsible to clean during the 20-minute period at the end of the day. Well, on the first day, I didn’t really realize what was going on until it was about half-over. So I was just sitting at my desk while everyone else had been cleaning the school, and by then it was too awkward to go join someone, so I just sat there until time was over. Fortunately on Tuesday Mr. Mikura and his group came over to have me help them. Mark (the old ALT) was assigned to their group and I’m supposed to take over.
Classes started on Tuesday, and I just had a self-introduction lesson in all of my classes. I got off to a rough start because of technology problems, but it was short-lived and things picked up.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but calling the hogs is a lot more fun when you’re teaching it to Japanese junior high students than when people are trying to get you to do it at a ball game or whatever. Mostly because of the looks of incredulity and embarrassment on the kids’ faces.
I’m glad that classes have started, though, because now I get school lunch, which (while being scary at times, I’m sure), at least means I’m getting a good variety of Japanese foods without paying a ton of money and getting a hot meal without spending a ton of money. On Monday we had yakisoba, which was pretty good. We also had “fried beans” on the side. For some reason, I was kind of expecting refried beans. Instead, I got stir-fried beans. They felt and tasted approximately like peanuts. They were also served with what I had assumed were some sort of fried noodle. After a little while, I decided I didn’t really like it, especially since it was really crunch and hard to eat with chopsticks.
Then I noticed that they weren’t fried noodles at all. They were tiny fish. What I had assumed was black pepper on the beans? The eyes from the little fish had fallen off while being fried, I guess. I’m really glad I had decided I didn’t like it before then, because it really grossed me out after that, although I’m not really sure why it bothered me so much. We also got a (fairly big) roll of bread, and a bowl of rice and pint of milk are standard every day I think.
Wednesday we had some weird tofu-beef combination that I’ve had before and I can’t remember what it’s called. It came with a bowl of fruit, a goya salad (goya is a type of bitter fruit kind of similar to eggplant and cucumber, I think), milk and rice. Yesterday was pork curry (well, it was “vegetable curry” according to the menu, but it had pork in it), some tuna-salad stuff, milk, rice, and a green-apple dessert that seemed like a cross between sherbet and jello. Weird but tasty.
I’m so hungry, and Saitou-sensei is putting on his apron, so he’s about to go get the food to bring it up. Awesome. Did I mention I was hungry. It’s 12:30 now and since I have to be at school by 8, I haven’t eaten since about 7:00 this morning. I don’t know how people go this long without food. I’ve already had a snack and I’m STILL starving.
Um, there’s not really a whole lot else to say right now. I don’t have my list if there’s anything still on it, so I’ll have to cover those next time. I think for now I’m going to cut this off here before it gets too ridiculously long. Although I may change my mind after lunch if there’s nothing else for me to do and I get bored enough again. Anyway, till next time!
Midgett