Rabbits, Frogs, and Horses, and there's something in my eye

RABBITSU feeding time at elementary.

As you teach multiple levels of joined schools for long enough, two excellent perks arise naturally. One is finding siblings scattered amongst the year levels. It's always fun to find older and younger brothers or sisters of that student you love (or love to hate), and watch the ways they are different, and alike (some kids share facial features but not personality traits. Others show persistent strains of behavior...).The other excellent perk is class personality.

I know that in this blog I have on occasion bombastically decried one class group or another as 'awful' or perhaps worse. And maybe it's just the end-of-term blue tint that's coming over the whole thing, but I'd like to set the record straight: none of the classes are awful. Some of them are extra good. Some of them work really hard and listen to you, and you actually do teach them things. Other groups are too energetic to have time for learning, and so just spend their classtime not-learning and having a good time of that (and they'll take you along into that if you let them). So in my head I've started to categorize them loosely into "studious" classes, and "fun" classes. I love them for different reasons, in different ways, and sometimes on different days.

But anyway, it's the "frogs" and the "horses" killing me lately. The frogs (zodiac animal being oxen, same as me) were in 6th grade when I arrived. I've talked about them a lot because I've loved them for a long time now. They are the 3nens now, the eldest class in the middle school, goofier and sharper than ever before. Having seen them be leaders in their elementary schools (kinda) as 6th graders, and now seeing them grow into leaders in their JHS, I am more familiar with them than almost any class. They're maybe more on the 'fun' side of the spectrum when it comes to class behavior, but their spirit makes me happy to the point that I don't care. They also tend to channel that energy into not being afraid to talk to me. It's just cause I been around so long, I know, but it's nice.

The horses are now in the 4th grade, but they were 1st graders when I arrived. Those tiny cute minipeople have turned into kids with actual personalities and a great presence I think is uncommon for kids their age. The funny thing is, this is so at both separate elementary schools. At the bigger elementary, the 4th grade horses are sandwiched between the sheep below them (who I casually tend to think of as joyfully 'having rabies,' because they are perhaps the most 'fun' class I have) and the 5th grade snakes above them, some of whom border on being belligerent. But this sandwich effect always made for a sigh of relief when I saw their grade on my schedule amidst what promised to be a chaotic storm of the other grades. Every class is kind of hit or miss, but with the horses everything is a big hit.

Watching these 'horses' at recess reminds me of how long I really have been here. Kids grow, things change, and there was a time to come here, and there is a time to leave. That time is approaching.

Remember this kid? See here.

Now she gives piggy-back rides to the smaller ones.

I keep thinking about my farewell speech and putting off the writing of it. It's just going to turn into a love letter to the whole school, and I know it, and it embarrasses me a little bit, to think of having someone check it over for me and stuff, make sure the grammar is right before I stand and attempt to deliver. I guess it shouldn't, I guess really it's okay that at the end of these three years, even though I want to want to leave them with some bit of wisdom about cultural identity and international exchange, all I'm going to be able to get up there and say is I love you. Cause that's just kind of how I roll; sentimental n' shit. ^_^

"Yaritai!" said the short ones

I just got done with the small elementary class of 1^st  ("sheep") and 2^nd (horses) graders (epithets based solely on their Chinese zodiac animals). They are consistently one of my best groups, and I am not even sure why. They’re like, thirsty for knowledge.. when they connect the dots to make a picture in the numbers game, they want to know the English name of the animal they’ve outlined so they can write it on the paper at the top (I just realized that this is a big deal when I saw that the 3^rd grade has only just begun to learn romaji, writing with roman letters). They want to study.. they play the study games hard, and really do remember a lot.

I mean, maybe it’s that I tried to teach the older kids more stuff, and thus they learned each thing less well, but the youngest group here has numbers nailed to the wall more than anyone. They could count to a hundred before the 4^th grade… well, the 4^th grade is up around like 50 as of today. They see the fly swatters sticking out of my bag and insist that they wanna do that!

The fly swatters are for board karuta. Basically, first the kids have to get the ABCs on the board in order (at which this group is A-number-one champ, of course). This is generally done with a lot of shouting, because everyone will be holding one or two letters. So the kids will get ready, and I say “go!” and start the timer (usually I only time older kids.. but once again…).. they all scream “A!” like their lives hang in the balance, then start yelling the name of whatever kid is holding A, in case he/she doesn’t know already. This progresses through the alphabet in one minute and 44 seconds. (Today I had them match the lowercase letters too. This took 1 minute and 42 seconds.)

Once the letters are on the board, we can play with the fly swatters. Initially, I had taught them a bunch of words, one for each letter. Like APPLE and BAG and CAT, etc. Today we had gone over animals, weird ones too, so I kicked it off with “starfish!” The hope was that eventually they would associate the sound with the letter, rather than just that one word.. so I used the associated words for board karuta for a while, then occasionally would throw in other words that started with those letters. 

They cleared the whole board today; I was calling words I don’t think even their teachers have ever heard. I couldn’t think of anything for A but “anteater” at the time. V was “vixen.” But I think they’ve learned the sound idea. Hell yes, first and second graders.

The thing that impresses me most, and also probably works so well, is the way they fling themselves so wholeheartedly at everything I present. I don’t even really have to try that hard to entertain them. Anything will be fun. And anything will be absorbed, too. They’re like a little army of 14 sponges.

I mean, I’m fully aware that they’re not all the same. The “YARITAI!” engine is driven by a few key second graders, and there are some who are still blanking totally on English Ball (we throw a ball around and they say one English word before passing it to someone else), and I do hear a few mooouuu wakaran!s from time to time. But the energy and sheer knowledge of the class is staggering, especially for a group I hardly thought too much of while trying to plan.

What I mean by that is, I designed 5^th and 6^th grade lessons to be efficient and as effective as possible. To learn what I wanted them to learn, or what the curriculum had in store. But I planned downward, and by the time I got to the youngest of them, I was like “well I’m already bringing numbers cards, maybe we can play some kind of number game…” and sometimes I went so far in numb-minded I’ve-been-planning-under-duress to simply write “Number game, 15 minutes” and leave the details for future EmLem to handle.

Lucky for me, everything with this class is a pretty big hit. Though, they’re the only ones who’ve run me to the end of a plan (repeatedly) and had me blinking at the clock on which was left 15 more minutes of classtime. I’ve wised up a bit.. I now just keep a bagful of tricks, and if all else fails, there’s always ABC board.