Last Week of School Before Winter Break

After Tokyo I have just been busy finishing up the last week of school. Since its Christmas season right now, I’ve been doing some Christmas activities with my students. My current weekly schedule has 3 days at Junior High school and 2 days at elementary school. I’ve mostly been doing Christmas words searches and teaching them vocab, like what a mistletoe is. With my junior high classes I got some help from one of the teachers and printed off about 7 large Christmas trees. Then during class I had the students trace there hands on construction paper, cut it out and then decorate the hands. On one side they wrote a Christmas wish or hope and on the other side they wrote their name. When they were all finished decorating their hands, we pinned them up on the Christmas tree printout. The assignment went pretty well, the girls as usual, put way more effort into it than the boys. Some of the hands were decorated beautifully and …some of the boys hands were pretty darn plain. But in the end I think the kids had fun and it was a fun wrap up for the semester.

I’ll say the first semester in school went pretty well. I’m getting more and more comfortable by the day with teaching. The occasional miscommunication problems with a few classes occur here and there, but overall I do find teaching quite rewarding. Since I have so many schools, I have some pretty colorful vice-principals. Some speak to me in just Japanese and think I understand everything, while this other vice-principal refuses to use Japanese and will only speak to me in broken English. I have one VP that picks me up in a car that I swear is going to explode if it goes another 10 kilometers as it shakes violently every time I enter. In the end though they are all really nice and I don’t have any real problems with them.

I also had my year-end party or “bounenkai” with my teachers this week. These parties exist for every organization and school in Japan and just consists of a big dinner to "forget" the year that is about to finish. I was looking forward to seeing some more of my teachers outside of school where I would be able to chat with them a bit more. That night I made my way into Kure with Ms. Murayama, my English teacher. Out of all the English teachers I teach with, she is my favorite, and she speaks almost perfect English. Unfortunately, she’ll be leaving in April, as she’s due to give birth this year. I’m happy for her, but pretty sad that I’ll be losing her as a teacher. Hopefully, I won’t get some English Nazi coming into Yasuura. I’m actually quite scared that I’ll get a bad teacher so I’ll be praying to the gods that a nice teacher comes. Well as for the dinner, we had to draw seats for seat placement. By chance I sat beside the principal and sat across from the vice-principal, which actually turned out great, as my vice-principal is a pretty funny guy- even though he has the worst smokers cough ever. I was also able to get to know my principal a lot more, as he has always been really quiet. He was actually an English teacher 20 years ago and actually taught Ms. Murayama when she was in high school. Well after a few drinks all the teachers became quite boisterous and it was nice seeing some of the teachers relax. The food was great and I even had “Fugu”, the poison blowfish (remember Homer from the Simpsons?). Overall the dinner was fun as it was in a private room and had these funny 60 year old oba-chan’s (old grannies) in Kimonos pouring us beer. Well next week I head into Shimane with Asuka to visit her relatives. I get about 2 weeks off for winter vacation and Shimane will be my only trip out of town. It should be interesting meeting some of her relatives.

Japanese factoid # 13: So Japanese electronic stores are a lot of fun to visit. Deo-Deo is the Future-shop equivalent in Hiroshima and it always has the latest gadgets. They have cameras with like 8.5 mega pixels now and some pretty neat phones and computers. I always go to the massage chair section and get a super massage with one of the machines and since it's Japan, no one ever kicks you out too. As for the weight loss/diet section, its pretty big and you get some of the funniest contraptions sometimes. I’ve been eyeing this one for awhile. Its basically a horse saddle that apparently helps you lose weight because you have to use your abs and back muscles while you ride it like a horse. When I first saw it I cracked up pretty hard. Especially with the instructional video showing 80 year old Japanese men and woman straddling a horse saddle and riding it with a grin. So therefore, there is a picture of me riding it with a grin.