A while ago I taught a lesson to my junior high second-graders on the U.S. presidential election. It was one of their last lessons with me before the school year ended, and the teacher asked me to do something culture-y. Last year I did “what does an American look like?”. This year we did the basics of elections and the main candidates (down to three at that point). They first had to take a quiz on presidential elections, things like what animals represented the main parties, and what are the requirements to run for president (no, you don’t have to be married or have memorized the national anthem 
). Then they each got half of the answers to profiles of Clinton, McCain, and Obama and had to ask each other (in English, of course!) about the missing data. And now they know the candidates’ hobbies and ages and pre-Senate jobs. Not crucial information for making the best choice, but it was doable English for them. Finally, they had to vote for one of the three remaining candidates, nevermind about there still being two Democrats. Final results–Obama easily wins in all four classes and in the final count: Clinton 22, McCain 25, and Obama 75. Not even close. Though I’m pretty sure he won largely on name recognition alone.
May 31st, 2008
For the umpteenth time, I gave thanks today that I am lucky enough to live in such a beautiful part of the world. Yes, I can grip about how it’s a hassle to get to any other part of the country from here, and sometimes I do wish I could see the neon cities more often, but give me rural Japan over the more populated areas as a place to live any day. I will miss the mountains when I leave this summer. I’ll miss watching their contrast with a bright blue May weekend sky as I eat lunch under trees and talk with friends. I’ll miss seeing the orange and pink sunset sky between their peaks on the long drive home from aikido practice in the evening. I’ll miss the mist that half obscures them in the mornings and after it rains. I’ll miss seeing the different shades of green as the trees change again from bare brown to leafy green in the spring.
Everything has exploded into green in recent days. The official rainy season (and hot weather) is just around the corner, but we’ve gotten enough early rain so far that everything’s already green. Dark green on the pine trees on the mountain, neon green in the rice paddies, strong greens on the weeds and flowers and trees everywhere else. It’s terrific.
I’m genki. I’m here, I’m healthy. I’m leaving Japan in less than three months. I’m both a bit homesick for the U.S. and not looking forward to having to leave everything here. I’m excited to be returning to school as a student and reluctant to hand my classes and kids over to anyone else. I’m happy to be able to see friends and family more often, and sad to leave friendships in their early stages here.
I will continue writing here before I return, both about things to come and things that have happened in the past few months. A few posts to look for (and to give me some accountability to actually write them): feet-eating fish in Singapore, our fabulous GENKI musical tour, a mock U.S. presidential election, what the future holds for me.
May 25th, 2008
Some days my job means go fish, duck duck goose, and the hokey-pokey. Other days it means five hours of sitting in the cold hallway doing one-on-one language skills tests. Today was one of the latter days. After one hour of second-year conversation tests, four hours of third-year reading tests, and practicing for interview tests for a national standardized test with half a dozen kids after school, I think I did some where in the ballpark of 120, 130 individual tests today. And the testing season is only halfway finished! Today finished off the second-years for this term, but conversation tests with the first and third-years are coming up in the next week and a half.
Still, despite my cold toes and the tedium of answering “How are you?” a hundred times in one day, these little one-on-one tests are amazingly effective. I’ve said for a long while now that my second-year students, whose teacher has been having me do conversation tests with them for a year and a half now one or twice a term every term since they started learning English, are as a whole much better at speaking and much more willing to speak with me than the third-years who have only started doing tests like this this year. I know the second-years the best of all the students, and they are by far my favorites in the school.
Today’s reading tests with the third-years was from the textbook; I flipped a coin and they had to read one of two pages while I graded them on pronunciation, intonation, voice volume, and general attitude. Conversation tests with the second-years were more interesting. They usually have to incorporate whatever the latest grammar pattern was into some of their questions for me, or, like this recent test, they have to talk about a specific topic. This time they had to talk about their families and ask me about mine. I grade them on pronunciation, volume, grammar, and attitude.
A few snippets that I remember: a boy telling me how his younger brother was very cute when he was little but that he is a ‘rascal’ now; learning today that a girl’s father is an undertaker; asking a boy how many people were in his family and having him think hard for a while in order to respond “about 50″ before he realized he confused “family” with “friends”.
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It rained today for the first time in a while.
It makes me very happy not to go home from school in the darkness anymore.
I’m going to be in a musical. I’m fugu chef #3. More on that soon.
February 22nd, 2008
It’s Valentine’s Day over here (just like back home, imagine!). It’s strictly a females give to males phenomenon over here, though, and they pretty much only give chocolates or cookies. The guys reciprocate in March on White Day with with white chocolate (no, it’s not the most inappropriately named holiday ever that it seems). I got a few bags of homemade cookies from some of the female students today but in keeping with my abysmal record of gift giving I didn’t dole out anything to all the male teachers. They got KitKats last year in the office, women too, so I’m not completely without hope. There’s not too much in the way of romantic significance attached to the day; they save that for Christmas Eve.
February 14th, 2008
Super Tuesday fever is here! I’m sure I’ll know all the results and percentages by early afternoon tomorrow thanks to all my very interested informants at the office.
Japanese TV in general is pretty bizarre, but at least they have good taste in movies. Only one of my favorites, The Sting, is on tonight after One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest last night. It makes for decent company while cutting out lots of paper cards for school tomorrow. And I can learn how to talk like a Depression-era con artist in Japanese. We didn’t cover that at Calvin.
I have exactly six months left here on my contract. The time has flown and I’m sure the final months will as well.
I’m teaching four big classes of fifth and sixth graders at Kubokawa Elementary tomorrow morning so must continue with that paper cutting.
February 5th, 2008
Watching Bill Belichick lose in the final seconds and blow his perfect season is just as satisfying from the other side of the world as I imagine it was from home.
No commercials here, though.
February 4th, 2008
I don’t like walking in the cold rain. I do like listening to the rain outside while I’m tucked under my toasty kotatsu.
I don’t like word processing programs that do crazy things to your formatting and fonts between saving and reopening. I especially don’t like it when you’re working on fairly important things, like resumes and graduate school essays and you don’t have hours and hours of extra time to figure out why things keep opening up in Arial and center-justified when two minutes ago you clearly saved it in Times New Roman and very much justified to the left.
I like helpful graduate school secretaries who print off your papers for you to save you the trouble of mailing them in.
I love listening to the Ahn Trio.
I don’t like feeling a sore throat that’s going to show up tomorrow.
I like playing Go Fish for an entire class period.
I like three-day weekends.
I like having fantastic English teachers to teach with.
January 11th, 2008
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Trying to be good about my resolution to write more this year…
*Korea was fantastic. I had a really great week and I’ll definitely go back anytime I get the chance. We pretty much stayed in Seoul the whole time except for a day trip up towards the DMZ. But there was plenty to do and see in the city, especially with it being Christmastime. The crowds were crazy but fun to be a part of for a little while. And the city was beautiful; so many light displays and interesting buildings. I didn’t pick up more than a few words but am inspired to try for a lot more for the next visit. My lack of Korean meant that we got to do lots of language triangles during the week when I was with Jung-won, my friend from here, and Kyung-sok, her boyfriend. We didn’t share a common language between the three of us, so she and I would speak Japanese, he and I would speak English, and they would speak Korean. A bit time consuming but fun. I’ll try to put some pictures up soon; see a later bullet point about my busy few days ahead of me right now.
*I also had a really great week and a half back here in Japan with my very good friend Rachel who came over a day after I got back from Korea. We hung around Osaka for a day, came back to Kubokawa for New Years Eve and Day and Day2 (where we had crazy snow like they haven’t had for three years). We went to the temple on the 31st, went to church, went to the beach, joined a big family dinner. Then we spent a day on trains and ended up next to Mt. Fuji, which we had absolutely perfect weather for the following day. No hiking the actual mountain in winter, of course, but still had a really enjoying time doing other things in the area. It really is worthy of the hype. We finished the trip off with three days in Tokyo, hitting the various neighborhoods, gawking at the lights and way-too-expensive-for-us things, watching a bit of a kabuki play, and continuing our streak of eating really, really well. I really loved being there. Maybe it’s different coming off of a year and a half in Kochi, but while before I never really thought I’d like living in a big city, I really think I could thoroughly enjoy being in Tokyo for a while.
*I already think Japanese kids (the six and under crowd) are a pretty adorable group as a whole, but what’s even more cute is when then put on miniature firefighter uniforms and get their pictures taken by firetrucks, like Rachel and I watched them do at the Tokyo Fire Department’s New Years Ceremony/Exhibition. Seriously adorable, even to the non-kid-obsessed two of us.
*Grad school application crunch time is here. I worked really hard to get them mostly done before all the winter break travels but have a few last minute things to finish up. But there’s always Tokyo if those don’t work out…or even if they do…
*But the upside is, my apartment is going to be really well organized for the next little while from all the stress-motivated cleaning. I already put in an hour-plus tonight following a drop-off at the post office five minutes before closing time.
*The people in my office knew all about who had won or lost the New Hampshire primary and by how much by the end of the day today (i.e., a few hours after it was over). Who can tell me the name of the Japanese prime minister right now?
*I turned in my papers saying I’m not going to recontract for a third year today. Which means you all have seven more months to get in your trips to not-in-the-tourist-books Japan.
*My olive oil solidified again.
January 9th, 2008
I’m alive, though very tired and with only a few minutes to write tonight. Life lately has been very busy. Mostly good, but very busy. I had my last day of school for the term today, but the last two months were jam-packed with normal classes, baking a couple dozen apple pies for the culture festival, sending off students to speech contests, Halloween lessons, Halloween parties, Christmas lessons, Christmas parties, Harry Potter lessons, English camps, hours and hours of conversation tests, a couple kindergarten visits, and a retirement home visit as well.
On top of actual work, I’ve been working on applications for some graduate school programs for this next year and those have taken their fair share of time and energy and stress. Also, I made a trip to Kyoto to look at the pretty leaves, and I danced in the streets wearing a full-body wild boar costume. Ooh, and got my very undeserved brown belt in aikido.
But, tomorrow, I get to finally breathe, and maybe even sleep, as I’m leaving for Korea for a week, yay! I’m going with my friend Jungwon, who works in the town hall here and is from Seoul. It’ll be my first time out of Japan except for when I came back home this summer. It’s supposed to be really cold, I haven’t had any time to figure out what I want to see while I there, and I know how to say exactly three words in Korean, but I’m still really looking forward to it. And Christmas should be interesting as well.
When I get back, Rachel is coming over for a week and a half which will be fantastic. We will spend New Years in my town, and then get some traveling in as well, notably to Mt. Fuji and Tokyo, both of which I don’t really know very well and thus am excited to see.
As our plane leaves in 14 hours and that’s including 4+ hours on a train and bus to get to the airport, I’d best go finish packing and do my dishes and give my body a few hours of zzzs. Merry Christmas, and I resolve to write more in the new year!
December 21st, 2007
*Rampant wildflowers called cosmos springing up everywhere in pink and red and purple and yellow and white
*Little tepee haystacks in the rice fields
*Leaf bonfires in the fields and in little garden plots between houses
*Having to close the windows against the cold at night
*Classrooms of white-shirt-clad students turn into seas of black and navy as they don their uniform jackets
*Heading home from school in the pitch dark
*Ripe, juicy persimmons and crunchy pears
*Warm ocean, cool air, cold sand
*No sweat
*Or bugs
*Almost
October 27th, 2007
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