Both Ways

It's Friday the 13th, and we return to cookie baking. I told myself, we're gonna do this again, and we're gonna do it right this time.

Planning well in advance, I got my wonderful parental units to supply me with a shit-tonne of the instant pudding necessary to make the cookies. The also brought along some chocolate chips to make my ordering load lighter.

I can't believe we're making them today. Not because it's Friday the 13th, but because this week has been so incredibly intense and it's only been like four days long.

I want to do a 'real' post about this.. complete with pictures and all that, but for now I'll just fill in the outline.

Last weekend was a sort of mess. Friday, I didn't go to work, but instead to Kobe where I was made an official Goodwill Envoy of Hyogo Prefecture. This just means that wherever I go I should spread the good word. This is easy; I'm liable to pimp out anything I think is truly any good (someone once told me I would be a good saleswoman when I vehemently extolled the virtues of some thing or other.. but the truth is I can only sell something I really know and love).

So that just meant no school that day. Saturday was supposed to be a school day, sort of.. we were to go to work and then after an hour of hanging out at school, go and watch kids compete all over town in various taikai things against the other schools (then get Monday off as a trade in day). But Saturday got rained out so hard they called in an O-ame (too much damn rain) warning, which cancels school in the city. (This happens way more than o-yuki, or too much snow warnings, actually... seriously, imagine a place where rain cancels school more often than snow does!)

So Saturday got pushed to Sunday, and we still had Monday off... I had a visitor in town to hang out and see the taikai, and we thought go to the beach Sunday, but no cigar.

Long story short, it was planned to be a sort of schedually challenged weekend and became EVEN MORE SO because of the rain.

This thrust me into Tuesday's 'last lessons day' at Small Elementary with little mental preparation (since I had Monday off and work on Sunday? I don't know). And then suddenly everything was happening at once. Tuesday was an exhausting run of six class periods conducted for all grade levels, including kindergarten, made heavy with the knowledge that it was the last one for each and all of them. By the end of the day I was a ragged mess. Wednesday was first-year classes back at the middle school (Mario Kart game ftw), and Thursday was the actual last day at the bigger elementary school, which left me less wrecked by still glad I wore waterproof mascara.

I felt better at the bigger school because they made a bigger deal of things.. I felt okay about crying because I could tell they wanted me to cry. They were doing things with the express purpose of making me cry. Then the entire school "hana-michi" style harassed me all the way to the front door. It was exhilarating, and exhausting. More about all that later when I get the photos ready.

In an oddly fitting gesture from the universe, the little girl who walked into the office on perhaps my first day (she was a second grader then) was in the office again during the end of my last day. She was the first student I have memory of speaking directly to; as a second grader she came up to me and told me that I was cute (which was a shocking thing to hear from an adorable second grade girl willing to walk right up to you), and gave a sort of botched self-intro in English. She's one of the special needs kids and is absolutely precious still. She's a fifth grader now and she thanked me for the time I've spent there before I slipped out to put all the presents I'd gotten near my desk at the middle school.

And since I realized (that afternoon) that I was going to be making cookies the very next day, I decided to just get all that stuff when I had my car, which I would on Friday, because I would need to transport said shit tonne of pudding mix (not heavy) and 5.5 kg of chocolate chips (kinda heavy) along with a few other odds, ends, and things.

So yeah. It's been a short week (too short... I almost wish I'd had Monday) and now I'm facing this weekend when I will rent that giant effing van I once drove, roadtrip to Shikoku with some of Shiso-plus-Alessandro, and go rafting and canyoning again. 

All that because it's a three-day weekend, which leads into another too-short (blasphemy, I know) week, which is the last week of this semester, the last week of my job in any actuality. Ending ceremony is the 20th, the day after our Salamander farewell dinner which is the same day as the BOE last 'greeting' for which I'll get out of school early (I am never sure these days whether skipping school time is a good thing anymore)... 

There is no time to think, little to plan, and I feel like I should have seen this coming, but I didn't realize it would come on so fast! I know there will be another quieter period once the school year ends (after my 'word' at the closing ceremony, etc.) for me to pack and clean and sort, but the way all this descended in a rush makes me feel like I should be packed and ready to go, like, tomorrow. Which just adds to the sense that there was probably a time to think and feel and plan, and that time has come and gone while I was marveling at June and how for the first time it wasn't a shit show. Whatever was missing from June has about hit the fan and here we are up on the final countdown.

So some moments I'm really happy, and some moments I'm hearing a song I just discovered on a CD I unearthed in the packing process and it's making me cry. And some moments I'm feeling relieved that I don't have to plan for/worry about/English educate this or that group anymore -- that their enthusiasm for or knowledge of English is no longer my responsibility. Other moments a particular face will come to mind.. a kid or a teacher, and I'll have to forget for the moment how much it sucks to leave a place.. how much I always did hate graduations.

One of the third graders summed it up pretty well at my send-off ceremony. "She's crying! Look! Now she's smiling. [confusion]" There's that saying, don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened. But I was always one to have it both ways.

false start

Today is one of the spring days of changes, in which the school assumes, or very nearly, the shape it will be in for the next twelve months or so. In some ways, I've been looking forward to this time because I felt I couldn't start preparing to leave until things were as they would be when I do that.

I can't tell my successor about where and who until the where and who have been set in place, as it were. Now we know.

My desk has been moved to one corner of the room, which I rather like. I don't like having my back to the rest of the room, and now I have a great (some might say commanding) view of the staff room. I can see everything, and to face the front, I need only look up. It's pretty sweet.

Today, MP-sensei is officially leaving, so my successor will never really know her; Twitchy and Mikan are staying, which is a good thing and a bad thing all at once (better the devil you know?). There is a new JTE coming in, whom I have not yet met but who Mikan-sensei said is his teacher. I picture her as an older woman, then, strict but well qualified as any seasoned veteran would be. Also I'm a little intrigued to see what kind of English teacher produced the Mikan-sensei, from a scholastic point of view.

I'm totally jumping the gun by writing this post right now because we're only halfway through the day, but I've kind of been dying to start the "for my successor" tab on this blog. One of the purposes of keeping it has been to pass on some knowledge and helpful info; I'm quite aware that after these three years, the blog (like my apartment) has become too full of stuff for any stranger to usefully sort without an abundance of spare time.

The "for my successor" series will be a lot of retrospectives and info I think might be useful to that person, which I will not expect myself to generate all at once, but to put together over the course of the next few months as I think of things. I have a tendency to just sort of think of things at random times and need to write them down right then. Like right now, even though I hardly have the info I'm trying to convey.

But I will. Today I have my meetings with the elementary school teachers to plot the year's schedule and figure out who the elementary English contact people are this year. It also says on the front board (which I can easily see!) that our new JTE will also be part of this meeting (but not Twitchy-sensei because he's a part-timer I guess).

It's rumored that I will be spending more time at Small Elementary and less at Big Elementary because of class size changes and so on. Rumors rumors!

Here's a mostly-blank diagram of the new desk layout.

The secretary is new, but she handles a lot of the paperwork and the previous one always helped me when I broke (or discovered a problem with) the copy machines. The new lady seems very energetic anyway.

The head teacher makes the schedules and distributes them, and also keeps the schedule for the front board. Sometimes he doesn't get to "tomorrow's" til the end of the day.. I think that is unusual, but he's a really nice guy.

The VP is the person you go to for all your personal scheduling requests (that is, when you want to take time off, or when you aren't sure what is up). He handles a lot of the official business of the school, and is really nice. He occasionally sends me home a little early and is understanding about things. I've heard horror stories about VPs who are super strict with vacation hours (yeah counting hours out for you) and who are loath to let you take vacay when you want to. Our guy seems to have no issues like this whatsoever. He is easily recognizable for his full head of mostly white hair. He speaks to me in Japanese like he has no doubt about my ability to understand, but also doesn't seem surprised when I ask about something I don't understand.

The principal has his own office (the door to it is between his desk and the copy machine, though there is another door to it in the hallway) where he receives guests and I suppose chills out when he wants to be in his own space and not in the crowded staff office. He used to be a PE teacher and looks (to me) like a Japanese Michael Scott. He's very friendly and likes to party; he doesn't know you yet but he would love to get drunk with you. He's good at karaoke and often communicates with me using one or two words and a lot of facial expressions.

Mikan-sensei is now starting his fourth year at this school, and is the JTE for the second year class. He has been the one to be in charge of me here. When I arrived, they (the BOE rep people) brought him along to the bank and cell phone place to help translate for me. He has been making my weekly schedule for me since then, and also attending at least one of every two-day conference, and the entirety of the one-day conferences I have been sent to.

Either because of these conferences, or because of his own personal awesomeness level, he is the best JTE I have ever worked with. He uses activities to teach and knows his students very well; he is very strict and very kind by turns (to the students) and depending on the situation (generally he's kind in class and strict as hell in club activity time) and also on the student in question (he knows who to be disappointed in and who to speak gently to). He has always been very nice to me. Mikan-sensei is in charge of a second year homeroom class and is also the kendo club leader, which means he can become very busy. I've always tried to find the balance between staying out of his way and trying to be helpful.

His wife is also an English teacher in a school further south (not in our city limits), and I hear she is as progressive and excellent as he is (perhaps even more so), and also I believe she has lived abroad in London and also in China at some point in her life. I've only met her like three or four times, but she's awesome too.

Twitchy-sensei is about 26 years old, and is starting his second year (at this school and also of teaching, ever). He spent seven years in Vancouver, Canada (attending high school and University), and his English comprehension is therefore very high. His interest so far has been in grammar and translation, but Mikan-sensei (and now I resolve to rejoin the effort) has been on task to get him out of that habit.

I feel like I just wrote a glowing review of Mikan-sensei in which my respect and admiration are pretty clear, so I feel like an asshole if I follow that with a dour report on Twitchy-sensei. But we must be honest, too. (Heh...) Twitchy tries very hard and is very friendly, so that makes it kind of sad all around when he falls short (which last year happened a good bit). Suffice for now to say that Mikan-sensei will be in charge of both the first year and second year classes, and Twitchy will be "like a TA," according to Twitchy himself. And from today's optimistic point of view, we'll remind ourselves that Mikan has a lot more experience than Twitchy, and maybe in the fullness of time.... or something..

Aaaand .....this is about all I can provide for now.

(Also, just in case it's not obvious, these are not their real names, nor do they [or should they probably] know these nicknames at all. It's just how I like to represent them on the interwebz because of all the biased misinformation I am spouting. Oh and libel. Etc.)

Graduation as an anniversary, and cookie-baking

My last class with the 3nens was on their last actual day of class, from what I understand. This was unusual; normally our last class creeps up on us out of the calendar and I'm halfway through conducting it before we realize there won't be any more.

But this year was different. We planned ahead, and I wanted to make it special. So special, in fact, it would require the assistance of those abroad. I was callin' in the pudding cookies.

Other ALTs have done cooking classes with their students, but I never had before. Mostly I felt bad for asking to use the computer room, so the prospect of taking over and making use of not only a special room, but also a bunch of ingredients (which at first I thought, heck I'll just pay for, until I realized that chocolate chips have to be imported too, unless you want to bake with mini bags of mini chips and they just don't make cookies here like they do back home-- which is entirely the point of doing a class like this, after all), and making such a big mess and deal, well it seemed too much to ask, and to do. Plus, I'm not much of a cook. I don't know any really special recipes, right? Or super delicious representative foods?

But this year, I thought, no, let's do this. My favorite recipe is a fairly simple cookie recipe which is fairly cheap and did I mention really easy to make at home. The stuff you need is mostly already in your house. But for twelve groups of middle schoolers with a big shiny new kitchen classroom, it's a bit different. In Japan, everything comes in smaller bags and bottles, and since it was a class thing, we needed massive amounts of all the ingredients. First, we put in orders with Foreign Buyer's Club and YoYoMarket variously for all kinds of things. For the butter and eggs and sundry, we put in orders at the local grocery.

I was struck again with just how much butter and sugar goes into this recipe, but it's my favorite for a reason. The special secret ingredient (which my mom mailed me, thank goodness), makes the cookies really extra soft and forgiving. A few groups were instructed to make the regular "bag" recipe (that written on the choco chip bag) since we didn't have enough pudding mix packets for all 12 groups (that was my bad), but I think the substitutions of measurement and flour type and whatever the hell else happened in the process of procuring and measuring the ingredients in Japan vs. back home caused those poor groups to suffer very flat cookies.

All in all, the entire thing was a great experience, and a clusterfuck, and it gave me a cold. 

The clusterfuck aspect is pretty obvious: the recipe which is easy at home is not easy with a bunch of kids who have never made cookies before. I tried to tell them when a pile of the gooey dough was too big or too close to the others, but having never made cookies (having NEVER made cookies, at home), they couldn't really envision it. Also kids will be kids. I too remember looking at the pan and thinking, this extra dough could be one. GIANT. cookie. Oh awesome. Or, I wonder if we could make a pancake that was ACTUALLY the size of the PAN. So they had to try it, and it was pretty awful.

Also, there is the fact that this was all supposed to take place within one 50-minute class period, which I figured we could totally do. We could not.

Given one whole class period to clean up, we did restore the kitchen to order and were able to move the cookies during 4th hour.

Thirteen batches total. This is more cookieage than I ever made on my own.

The greatness of the experience was in their joy at being able to try it, and also at my own realization that they had just been given a little piece of something American iconic: cookies and milk. They didn't even know the two went together, and were horrified to see my dunk my cookie in the milk box. I was horrified that they had never heard of doing that.

That it gave me a cold is only in the way I stressed out about the whole thing in a manner that increased exponentially each day approaching the baking project. For me, colds aren't simply germs getting in and making a mess. Well it is that. But it's something else, because in my situation, that is, my age and general physical health and occupation, I am around germs all the time. Not like really bad ones, but I do work in an elementary school half the week. Shit goes around. Little kids TOUCH EVERYTHING. Germs are always there; I don't stay healthy by avoiding them, goodness knows. 

No. Getting sick is actually the rearrangement of stress and negative energy into bad physical reactions. It is conducted through the emotional wearing out of a person which leaves the mind and heart weakened against the ever-present opportunistic germs. It wasn't just the cookies thing that wore me out, of course: there are a great many things, mostly small, but too many of them nonetheless.

One is, of course, graduation. Graduations were not ever my forte, and this year there are the added bonuses of 1: these are my three-year students, meaning that when I arrived they were first-years, and now they are graduating, and 2: this is March, in Japan. 

March in Japan USED to mean spring (finally), graduation, and at the very end, hanami. But, and a lot of people don't think about this because it is so different from the western schedule, for a lot of us in schools, March 11th was, before it was the biggest goddamn earthquake of recorded history and tsunami of nearly unwatchable devastation, March 11th was graduation day. So we all sat in chilly gymnasia and cried a little while our teenage students fixed their wet eyes on the future and took flight from us. We all shook hands and took photos and sang songs and then, while we were puttering around the office, the chairs all stacked up, people already out of those black suits (always black suits for these occasions), while we were attending to paperwork or just now turning our attention to the next two weeks of school with the other students (graduates leave early or something), somewhere after the graduation while we were biding time before the evening teacher party, then that terrible disaster happened. 

I have heard other stories, from people in other places. One girl said they were already having the post-graduation party when they saw the shaking roll toward them across the horizon. Their boss said, "save the beer!" so they all grabbed one of the hefty bottles and held it up so the shaking table wouldn't spill it. 

So kind of.. in the way that you remember where you were when such and such a thing took place, and for those of us who lived in Japan, knew someone who lived in Japan, any of those related things, maybe this is one of those things. Everyone in Japan will remember where they were when they heard about the quake (or, if closer than we were, felt it). And for myself and many, many of my cohort, it was graduation day. I was exchanging e-mails, making plans with Sagramore in Tokyo, who noted in an e-mail at 3:05pm that there had been a "big ass earthquake just now, btw," and then failed to respond to my subsequent emails. I'm not into worrying, but I wondered just how big he meant, until others started getting phone calls and we turned on the TV.

So although it's not quite the year-anniversary of that event, it is, because it's graduation again, another Friday afternoon just like that one was.

Today, I'm in that in-between time again, just waiting til I can go home and hopefully take a nap. This graduation has been extra tiring because, as I mentioned, bonus number 1, they are my three-year kids, and also my last graduation, and I can't look at the departing students without seeing my own future, I can't hear their speeches without writing my own. I can't think about "Ichinan Family" without starting to cry. Splice that with the cold I got from cookie-baking and guess how many packs of tissues I've used up today. 

Tonight is the teacher party and once again, my head's not really in the game.

Some second years, being goofballs.

the results

Just to update from speech contest:
I managed to deliver my model speech without much terror. To my disappointment, there was no translation provided to the student body, so I was mostly just up there speaking heartfelt foreign words to them. It sort of reminded me of my own graduation at which I realized, after the fact, that no one of my intended audience had even heard me. I directed my words for a very particular audience and that is not who got it. Zan-nen.

But as I mentioned before, I couldn't care once it was finished, because then it was finished!

The actual speech contest was its usual grind, a bit better in overall quality of speeches and speechmakers this year, but I think that last year's clear winner was a ringer, an anomaly, who would have beaten the whole bunch again. The places were harder to negotiate this year. Who was really the best?

Like I also may have mentioned, I once more went in thinking my kids had a fighting chance. I'm better at knowing what kind of thing goes into speech contest now, and I knew my kids better too. When we chose them, I remember how I was sitting, staring down at a desk, when our female-speech-student to be began her mini speech in class. Her pronunciation had something the others didn't have. She wasn't a ringer, but she wasn't bad. Even before coaching she had a certain vocal quality that allowed her to somehow not sound quite so Japanese, or something. The boy I had picked out at last year's graduation ceremony, but he was also duly chosen by process of elimination. His pronunciation wasn't great, but he was eager, and so highly trainable; his energy was really good, too, strong. Moreover, having seen him cry, I trusted him.

By the time the contest approached, I knew the speeches were solid, content-wise, because we went through a serious speechwriting period sometime near the end of summer. I mean, we weren't messing around. None of this "I Love my Club Activity" teamwork BS, none of this "I want to be a golfer when I grow up." EVERYONE does that stuff every year. We ended up with variations on "I am proud to be part of this class/student council" and "my dream is to be a doctor," but they were solid variations, with proper lead-ins and shit.

My JTEs pushed this initiative, and MP-sensei kept coming back to it again and again. Memorize this because it is what you wrote and want to say. I coached them on sentence pattern and word intonation, but when they asked about gestures, we said, use your judgement, you know what the words mean, use the gestures you feel comfy using to emphasize what points you need to emphasize.

I really liked that in all steps, she made them do the work. When we were finalizing writing, she asked them both "What is your main point?" so we could make sure the speech was grounded in it and returned to it by the end. She asked them near the end of rehearsing, "What sentence or two is most important? And how will you make sure you show that?" So they each had a sentence near the end (their main point sentence, as it were) that they punctuated with louder voices, and fist pumps, etc.

They were good. I had no idea, though, what kind of potential ringers were lurking in the other schools, so I was cautiously optimistic. I cheerfully told the kids that I expected a one-two finish, with speech boy first and speech girl second. But, of course, I would be just as happy with her first and him second, I added.

I kind of did that to make sure she never felt like I was selling her short. To be totally honest, I did favor him, but didn't want to make that obvious. He had a better stage presence, and I knew the one thing that might destroy her chance of placing was her nerves. He seemed to have nerves of steel, and even though her pronunciation was better, I figured his energy and volume, along with the way I knew he wouldn't freeze onstage, would lead him to at least place. I hoped they both would.

Our positions in competition were 5th and 15th, so we sent steel-nerves boy to 15th to sweat it out and let her take 5th to get it over with sooner. When she went up to speak I was excited to hear how it would go. She got on that mic and was, for one thing, louder and more energetic sounding than I thought any of the first 4 had been. She absolutely fuckin' killed it. My jaw dropped as she plowed right through her speech with no memorable mistakes of any kind. She did better in the real thing than she had done in the most recent practices I'd seen.

I was thrilled. I looked over the previous speeches to see if I could remember any that had done better. Lots of kids had done rather well, and part of my joy was in seeing her do so well and overcome the things I thought might hold her back. I could not objectively rate her against the other students, so I just allowed myself to think she had kicked everyone's ass. Once the first half ended, I told her as much, and then grinned at our speech boy and told him he better watch out or she would beat him.

When he did his speech, I was beaming throughout. He brought it, and the other ALTs were admitting as much after the contest ended. I expected him to be that good, though, so I was just plain pleased that it had gone so well. I was proud of them both and figured they both deserved to place, at least, even if they didn't both end up getting it. After that, we did our role-reversal skit, in which a few students were the Japanese teachers, and we ALTs the students (terrible students, generally speaking, just for fun). The kids enjoyed that, as did the teachers.. got more comments on that than on my model speech (tear).

So then the judges came back, and in Japanese they announced third place(s) and then second, then first. They said it all so quickly after deliberating for so long that I wasn't sure I'd heard them properly.

This is what happened.

That's my speech boy with the second place plaque, and my speech girl, with the cup. Not only did we place, we got our one-two finish, and even with the mini-reversal I'd refused not to mention as possible. I'm very proud of them and all their hard work, and I'm very pleased that in this, my third and final year, we took home BOTH the plaque AND the cup.

From 2011_10_18

Fuck yes, I say.

"The Difference"

Well today is speech contest day. I've been really, really busy. You might be thinking to yourself, she can't be that busy, or she wouldn't have crafted such lovely photo-complimented blog posts and put them up within the last two weeks. Well, thank you for your kind words, but no seriously, I only wrote those because I was on shinkansen for hours and hours, and those kings of transport have electric outlets where you can plug in your devices.

Because my computer has begun informing me that my battery is "reaching the end of its usable life." Whatever that means is something I intend to deal with later. I have intended to deal with a lot of things later. A few of them got done on the train (I wrote those two entries and more, but the last is unfinished) or the bus or what have you.

Today is speech contest, the big event, what we've been preparing for these last few weeks, and I don't mean just my speech contestants (although I do, bless their hearts), but also the skit kids, and me, and the ALTs, oh and model speech (which I will type out for you, from memory, after this brief intro writing of mine). I'm actually kind of pleased with how the model speech turned out, although I despaired after my initial excitement, that I had too many things I wanted to say, that none of them were appropriate or comprehensible. What eventually came out of it was something that is about 40% crap and 60% awesome, so I'll settle for those stats. I have no idea how good the translation into Japanese is. I have my doubts, from looking over the page, but I'm hopeful, and also after this point, I can hardly care. Up or down, win or lose, it will be, oh thank God, over.

All that prep, all those evenings of staying late.. the pansies I bought that are still in little plastic containers because I was quite literally never home when it was light outside enough to do anything with them.

I like that image, of a battery that is used and recharged, used and recharged, but eventually it needs to just be replaced. Because it may seem small, the idea of an hour here, an hour there, staying late, missing one little thing, running to catch your transportation. But all those things add up. I think of being a JET sort of like having that battery. It gets drained all to hell sometimes, like this month, and then gets recharged, yeah, and it'll do, but it works less and less well, until such time as you need a major shift or change in your life. Some people upgrade regularly, but others can become stuck in a life pattern that never changes, and that's more my type. I won't get a new smart awesomephone until my old one actually ceases to function..!

Lately, I've had very little patience for anyone, including myself, and have been overly emotional when listening to Disney songs. I think about things while driving (since I can't bus and read) and have strange dreams at night. I can't wait to return to "normal" because I like the person I become better when I can be nicer to others (because I'm not so preoccupied trying to be nice to myself-- I do have to work at this, and when it becomes a priority, it's a lot harder to take care of anyone else, because shit, son, I'm a handful!)

ANYWAY! Today is the first day in a very long time I've not had a full schedule of classes (or been away on business) at work. I have no classes. And while I know it is frustrating and annoying to go to work each day and not have anything to do, I personally like these days now and then, to just sort of catch up, so I'm not clinging to the last edge of my sanity while crafting the crappiest of lesson plans at 6pm when I'm still at work on a Tuesday night.

I joked that it meant I could use the morning class periods to FREAK OUT ABOUT--haha, I mean "get ready for" speech contest, but honestly I won't get nervous until it's upon us, so all morning I'll just... do what I gratefully do with any given morning. Write, think, pace, try to get on top of the stuff I've let go in a big way, try to stay on top of the stuff I couldn't afford to let go.

My model speech is long, as has been noted by lots of people, but I have memorized it all, and fairly well. I paced around outside until that happened. How well I'll be able to keep it when standing on the stage remains to be seen, but I am sure that with my page in front of me to glance at surreptitiously, I will be able to give the appearance of knowing it excellently. And now, because I know you're dying of curiousity to know what today's model speech will say.

It's called "The Difference"

It seems like people are always asking me, do you have suchandsuch in your country? No matter what they are asking about, my answer is almost always the same. Yes, but it's different there.

Everyone wants to know what is different about a foreign place. My family back in America is amazed by some of the stories that I tell about how life is different in Japan. They want to know about Japanese toilets and Japanese festivals and Japanese hierarchy systems and Japanese food. Things that are different catch our attention, because they are more exciting and interesting.

People in Japan also want to know what is different about life in the US. Sometimes they are amazed by what I say. My school did not have uniforms, we didn't clean the classrooms ourselves, and we could eat snacks in class sometimes, if the teacher didn't mind. We never practiced for sports day, and we got to choose our lunches. Students moved from classroom to classroom, instead of teachers. Even though I didn't live in the city, there were 750 students at my JHS, and we rode the big yellow bus to school. But these are all examples of things American students do. This does not say who they are.

It is important to understand what is is different, but it is also important to keep in mind what is not. Because teenagers, whether they live in Japan or America, still want to be cool, and are afraid of being rejected. And people, no matter where they live, still want to matter and to do something meaningful with their lives. Families still love their children, and children still need their families. This is true not only in Japan, and in America, but everywhere in the world.

When people in Japan look at me, they can see right away that I am different. It takes a lot more effort to find out how like them I may be. If they only look at the surface, they will only see the difference. But if they open their minds and hearts, they can see what kind of person I may be, whether I am funny or serious, laid-back, or strict. Not everyone is what they seem to be at first-- for example, even though no one in Japan or America will ever think that I am Japanese, I'll tell you a secret. Inside my heart, because I lived in Shiso, I will always be a little bit Japanese.

What is most important to people is the same for everyone. We share in common our hopes and our fears, our happiness and worries, even if our actions and ways of dealing with them are not alike. That is why communication between cultures is possible, and that is also why it is important. The reason we need to discover what is different between cultures is so that we can discern what we have in common as people, therefore, what is most human.

Students in the US and students at Ichinan may be different, but we are all part of the human family. I encourage you to open your mind to people who seem at first to be very different from you. Although we are all unique, we are also all connected. When you understand this, you can truly appreciate the difference for what it is, and what it is not.
Thank you.

The Ponderous Return of The Uj (as in "usual")

Well, I must apologize for leaving you so long with that bad taste in your mouth of me being a little bit of an asshole. The truth is, I only felt bad about it for a short while, because things just got too busy to carry on with all that!

That weekend that was supposed to be International Picnic but was typhoon instead (9/3-4) preceded our seven days of working-not-working, or Sports Day Week.

Since I had been complaining about needing a vacation, I tried to look at the daylong stand-around-outside fest as a forced vacation. It worked for a while anyway. The first few days after the typhoon was finished were almost cool, and they were clear and pleasantly bright. I stood under the blue sky, looked up through the cherry trees, and wandered amongst the students, all gathered for practice. Really, it was blissful.

And although I don't necessarily like to spend all day at my desk, I don't necessarily like to spend no time here either. I have a lot of stuff I do (I might have menioned before), things that require a bit of attention, if not daily, then at least every few days to keep them moving smoothly through the internet and my brain. Hyogo Times and JETinfogather are two big ones, but my kanji review list begins to get out of hand after too long, and there's always that TEFL course I just signed up for...

And it slowly becomes maddening to spend so much time each day doing actually nothing when you know there's stuff to be done. But by the time you get home, you're pretty worn out from all that standing around in the sun, so all you really want is a shower and a nap and maybe some dinner.

So it's the best of weeks, and it's the worst of weeks, and it's also longer than most weeks, since you spend Monday to Saturay in practice and prep, and then the Sports Festival itself is Sunday.

All of our favorite events were back, the dancing, the family races, the relays, the mukade (centipede) race (I don't know whose idea this race was, but it's hilariously full of wipeouts)... the log-pull, the hat chicken fights without a pool (also called kibasen, or "mock cavalry battle")

Sports Day itself was pretty hot, with a little douse of rain in the morning to wet down the field and make the relay race a bit tougher. I got my new camera replaced for free (the rice-bin one never did recover, but the store exchanged them for me, no questions asked.. must have been under some kind of warranty since I did only buy the thing a few weeks before it got typhoon'd) so I was holding down the shutter to take a lot of rapid action shots.

Got to see a few of the graduated students, including a couple favorites..

The PTA enkai that followed was not far from the school. At first I sighed and thought, oh, I guess I have to go, but then I remembered that I love meeting kids' parents and seeing where they came from in that respect, so I was even happier that I had the good fortune of being seated next to, across from, and diagonal to parents of a couple of my favorite students. It only makes sense, of course, that the PTA parents have the mroe involved, harder-trying kids. Best of all was that the guy to my right was my speech boy's dad.

A teacher at Higashi asked me who our speech kids were, and when I said this kid, he was like "Aw crap."

All in all, it was perhaps the most successful sports day yet. I cannot find the memory card with the photos from that day, so I'll put them up eventually.

 Following our Monday-Tuesday fake weekend (blissful, that), we had a three-day work week, which for me was chock full of the usual. Classes, commitments, planning. It went off without any more hitches than usual, anyway. Since my 17th - 19th hopes for pilgriming had been rained out, we had to devise a new plan...

That entry coming soon.

Secret Perks of Speech Contest

So English Speech Contest is coming, and I know it's far too early to be thinking about it (it's October 17th or something), but I have basically already chosen my champion(s), and basically had chosen one of them as early as graduation.

I don't really care about winning, although a win would be nice. I always just want my kids to make a good showing of it, to do well and make me, their parents, and themselves proud. The kids I want to chose are two that are good, they're smart, but more importantly, they work hard, and I feel like I can trust them.

Our school will be hosting the contest this year. What this means for me is, I don't have to be a speech judge (woo!) and I do have to give the model speech.

The model speech!

What happens during the contest is, the kids speak English (or something like that) to the audience, and a Japanese translation of what they are saying is projected onto the wall or a screen off to one side, so their largely Japanese student audience can have some clue as to what the hell is being said.

The same goes for the model speech, if I'm not mistaken.

What this means is, I get three minutes to say something to my school, to all the kids at my school. Not just the ones who can understand English. I don't have to dumb it down in order to say it in my limited Japanese, or in order for them to understand it with their limited English. I don't have to tear my hair out in agony over being scared shitless at attempting to do a whole speech in Japanese in front of a gym full of native speakers. I can march out my secret (terrified, also) little orator and really say something. I can have the freedom of using whatever word is right for the speech, not just whatever word I think they'll know. And it'll all be up there for them to read along as I enthusiastically deliver my message. I can really say what I want to say.

Now I just have to figure out what I want to say.

Friday the 13th

(and the following Saturday) : banishing the rain.

So I'll skip right over the middle of last week because all I would have written then anyway was "omg itsstillrainin" (oh wait, I did). Friday the 13th came like a breath of not-so-humid air. Hazy in the morning, the air felt bright despite the “sand from China” hanging about the valley. I looked at the board at work to see that no one had any classes at all, everyone was on various field trips (the 3^rd year Mice in Okinawa, the 1^st year Fish somewhere else closer, and the 2^nd years were around, just about to go on their one-day adventure). I suddenly did not want anything to do with the busy work I’d made for myself, thinking I would have a normal staff room atmosphere. It was not to be a normal staff room atmosphere. I would be the only person there, aside from the one they leave to answer the phones, and it was the first sunny day after three straight solid heavy rain days.

Who, tell me, wants to sit at their computer on that day? Sure, I had plenty to do, but I no longer relished the empty day in which to do it.

To my joy, the band teacher asked, “Emily, what are you doing today?” I gave her an innocent and hapless look and shrugged. Nothing. I’m doing nothing. “Wanna go with the 2^nd years?” Um, YES. I love the second years (the Frogs). They are still my new favorite class. We stood under starling nests and gave instructinons, aAnd with that, we set off at a walk up the hill toward Sponic Park where the kids were to draw landscape sketches for the first part of the morning.

kids at work

From 2011_05_13

I wandered around a little, got bit by a leech for the first time in my life (those things are gross; but seriously, leeches, get some anesthetic to go with your anticoagulants, or you'll never be as successful with me as your brethren the gdmf mosquito) becuse they were living in the damn grass (what with all the rain). Some students were kicking them off their shoes as well, jumping on them to make them "kanpeki shinda" (I swear I heard that.. the first word is "perfect" and the second "dead"). Also saw a mukade (the poisonous Japanese manypede), all of these sightings/attacks were in the same area, too. The students jumped on the mukade, but it was not made perfectly dead before it was flung away off the hillside. We also saw a deer just chilling rather close to where we were drawing.

This is where the leeches live.

From 2011_05_13

Oh, mukade, you tiny dragons of the forest.

From 2011_05_13

After our juice break, we set off for part two, which was a walking "quiz rally" around the area. Kids were in their groups, all had maps of the checkpoints, and at each checkpoint there was a question. Lots of Japanese riddles, some kinda random questions (What number is equal to the ages of all these listed teachers combined?), for which kids would get points based on how close they got to the real thing. I carried my little parasol and wandered around with them, which of course led me to discover (as I had hoped it would) some new interesting points in the area.

Then we all ate lunch outside. After lunch, they went in to color the sketches, and I got done just a little of the work I had planned to spend all day on.

That afternoon I went back to the fuji, but it was pretty much destroyed by the rain. I stopped at Osaki-san's, and she gave me manju and cocoa, then I went to Miriam's, and she gave me some kind of apricot tart cake, then I went home, and really intended to eat a real dinner, but never did.

Saturday was really nice too, we're talking perfect weather. I spent a little time on the garden, then we had a little group picnic down by the river on the road to Himeji. Went home just in time to wash up and go to Young English Enkai, which went better than I expected it to go! The food was great, and everyone was very game. I thought only about half the group (err.. mostly the ALT half) would end up at karaoke, but actually everyone came but one! 

Strawberries!

From 2011_05_14

From 2011_05_14

From 2011_05_14

Travel OK

Copying this straight from the US Embassy email I just got:
U.S. citizens should defer non-essential travel to the following regions:  Tokyo (Tokyo Capital Region), Yokohama (Kanagawa Prefecture), and the prefectures of Akita, Aomori, Chiba, Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Iwate, Miyagi, Nagano, Niigata, Saitama, Shizuoka, Tochigi, Yamagata, and Yamanashi.

Areas of Japan outside these above regions of concern include:  the islands of Hokkaido, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Okinawa, and the prefectures Aichi, Fukui, Gifu, Hiroshima, Hyogo, Ishikawa, Kyoto, Mie, Nara, Okayama, Osaka, Shiga, Shimane, Tottori, Toyama, Wakayama, and Yamaguchi on the island of Honshu.  Travelers to these prefectures should bear in mind that transit through Narita (Chiba) and Haneda (Tokyo) airports may be required.

This means many systems are go.

In the meantime, it's the last day of the official school year. The office smells strongly of bubblegum.. I think it must be cleaning products. I spend the morning booking Okinawa (dragging those participating Shiso-ites kicking and screaming into the world of planned Golden Week travel) while the tickets are still within our price range, because we've thrown around hypotheticals for at least a month, ohh, Korea? hmm.. Okinawa? The Philippines? Hmm.. But so-and-so has already been there. And someone doesn't have enough money and someone doesn't have enough vacation days, but it's important to me for us to make this trip together because it's the end of the JET year nearly, by then, but it's impossible for anyone to commit to or settle on anything. Fuck that! We're nearly out of time.
I try to look at websites about Kagoshima and fail. I will need to look at a guidebook instead. I consider ordering one on Amazon and decide to just borrow someone else's for this weekend.

I spend the morning in renraku form, playing little miss travel agent for myself and others, e-mailing and messaging in different people's various (idiotic.. no it's not her fault she can't access e-mail at work and uses facebook instead) messages. Lunch I sit and watch the sun on the river. It really is starting to feel like spring. After lunch I get back and have had enough of people who just don't listen.. and I don't mean 'people who just don't agree,' I mean who don't listen to things like facts. I tell them the time, the price. Then they ask again in another e-mail fifteen minutes later. Who can be bothered to scroll up, anyway? I have my fill of it and flee the bubblegum scented stuffy office for the flowerbeds because

I walk up that driveway every day and back down again in the afternoon to catch the bus, and there is one pansy bed among the many that is choked with weeds. The big powerful weeds wrap their coils (and roots, too) around the pitiful flowers, choking the life from them slowly...

So I grab my gloves (which VP gave to me some random day when he asked me to join him in his random job-doing around school) and go down to weeds who do not argue, and do not ask questions, and I rip them out and beat the roots against the rocks to loosen the dirt therein tangled. And the weeds resist, and the flowers do not thank me, still there's satisfaction in the sunshine of it, the dirt, and the warming wind. I think I found my new favorite spring-break-at-work sunny day pastime.

But of course, at some point I really will have to look into what I'm going to hope to do in Kagoshima this weekend. And I really shouldn't slack off on my Japanese studyin'. Maybe I'll do it on the train.

Though our dramas shrink to nothing when placed on the world stage.

It's been a whirlwind.

Yesterday was weird.

First, we had closing ceremony. There was an earthquake in the middle of it, nothing big, just little rumblings in the mountains. After ceremony, there were club activities.

Then, at noon, we had a meeting. For some reason, the meeting memos were not on my desk. I don’t know why I get all these other memos, but not the ones for this meeting, or like.. where the 3^rd years all ended up going to high school. I get a lot of stuff I hardly bother to glance over, but stuff I want to see I end up leaning over to look at other people’s desks.

So I was leaning over pre-meeting to see the floor plan of the new school. Big Brother had told me that when they built the new Ichi-Kita, he and the tea lady were like separated from the rest of the staff room by some kind of partition and that for morning meetings and such, he had to crane around it to see anything. I kind of expected something like that on our new floor plan too (building to open summer 2011?).

But no, they went Kita one better. There is a plan of the staff room, with all the important desks at the front (principal, vp, head teacher, and secretary), then the desk clusters which are much smaller.. our current plan has three desk clusters of six desks each. The tea lady, nurse, ALT, etc are just kind of glommed on to different clusters. I sit with the 1^st year teachers, the 2^nd year has the tea lady and nurse, and the head teacher is with the 3^rd year teachers. I always get put with the first year cluster (last year I was by the tea lady), so I figured that next year I might get moved over to what is currently the 3^rd year, as we turn over.

But in the new school, as I mentioned, 4 smaller clusters, 4 desks each. One cluster is tea lady plus one teacher from each year, and then each cluster is a year group.

And my desk? Oh well. There’s the staff room, then there’s this hallway, then there’s a sort of meeting room with a big table, and one desk cluster. Two empty desks, the school counselor, and me.

Sabishii, naaa!

When I saw this I didn’t initially realize that I was in another room across the hall. I was looking at it as one big room where I was far away. Even then, the school counselor is rarely at our school. I don’t know her at all. Even though I am gone twice a week to elementary, this is still my base school and I’m still here 3 days a week. Most of the time, I’d be alone in that extra room.

Which isn’t the end of the world, I mean, think of all the space! I could (shouldn’t, but would) slowly spread out and use both extra desks as well as my own. I would claim as much storage space as I liked. I could work furiously on HT, blogging, and studying Japanese, et al to my lonely heart’s content. I would probably sit and work at the big table. And I would never be part of the team again.

When they got to the floor plan in the meeting, though, Mikan-sensei stood up for me. I don’t know if anyone expected me to say anything, but a few people looked at me when we turned to the plan, with expressions reading “that’s kinda effed up, isn’t it?” I understand a lot more than I can say, though, so I was so grateful it brought tears to my eyes when Mikan-sensei said “You know, it’s really lame to put her over there all by herself, when she came all the way here to be a teacher for us and she’s trying to get better at Japanese,” in polite eloquence. Have I mentioned that I <3 Mikan-sensei?

I had written a post yesterday, just giving an overview of last weekend. Not too long after writing it, and working madly on HyogoTimes (April now live) all afternoon, and formulating a real schedule for studying Japanese, I packed up my crap and headed out. But the bus roared by when I was still halfway up the path to the road. I sighed, watched the elementary kids play soccer with graduated 3^rd-years (one of whom had the audacity to ask if I remembered his name—goodness, how could I have forgotten?) for a minute, then trudged back up to school to await the next bus, or someone heading home after clubs finished at like 4:30. I wanted to get back in good time so I could turn around in my car and come back up to Ichi for adult conversation class. Into the staff room again. But everyone was still there.

There was ANOTHER meeting, at 5:15. And this one was a bigger deal.

I didn’t know what was going on until it was. It was the official presentation of who is leaving, where they are going, and who is coming, and from where. I obsessed about this a lot last year, and all the ALTs were abuzz, wondering about the ways we would all swap English teachers, or not, who got to keep whom, and who was good, and who we were losing.

This year, I knew Newbie-sensei was going, she already got her info about elementary in Asago like two weeks ago. I knew that Mikan-sensei was staying. And I knew that Miss-Piggy-sensei was probably going; as a part-timer, she cleaned out her desk yesterday while I e-mailed and edited and waited for photos. I knew that Westerly-sensei was probably leaving (he’s the guy that’s a year younger than me, who arrived and occupied “that extra desk” around summertime; I like him, and we hang out sometimes). I was prepared for those things, although hearing them announced wasn’t my favorite afternoon plan. But there were some other surprises.

The VP, whom I just love, who is lenient with nenkyuu rules, who is good with the special needs kids and takes me along to English class with them, who always talks to me in English, and asks questions about stuff he hears in “video movies,” and who told me, on a New-Year’s card that I’m the “most excellent ALT [he’s] ever met” is getting promoted. He’ll be a principal at some other school. While I was still absorbing this surprise, they went on to announce that the math teacher (also a painter, and at whose home I recently sat for a portrait) was being moved to another school. Which was upsetting because I feel like we just became good. A few other teachers that I don’t ever work with but whom I like from afar, because they are solid and all the kids fear/love/respect them, are going too. I hardly heard the names of who is replacing all these people; I listened to make sure that one English teacher everyone is scared to have to work with was not among them, then I checked out into my own little emo haze about how life’s not fair.

Yep. My life is hard. Safe and sound in Shiso when one could have been anywhere, one could have been in Ishinomaki. One could have been anywhere in Tohoku, really, and have no more routine to be annoyed to disrupt..

And it’s really sad and scary, but in a much more distant way, that deaths are at 9737 with an additional 16501 missing (.. don’t look at that, even if you were able to stomach my Jermaine photos last year). But it’s different when they turn up someone just like you. Yeah, there have to be lots of people just like you among the missing, but Taylor Anderson was living a life just like mine at the same time as me. Tell me she was a JET and I can immediately know (or assume with a good deal of safety) that she taught English and didn’t teach English, that elementary kids worshipped her, that she was frustrated by the system, and loved Japan. I know nothing about her but I can see her at enkais, at hanamis, and under momiji. I can imagine her Japanese friends and her spring break plans. My reckless imagination insists that without knowing her at all, I know her quite well. And maybe that’s why this one person in ten-thousand hits me, and I’m sure all JETs, harder than numbers do. It’s quite a different thing to hear this kind of news about someone you know.

So yesterday I didn’t get home until 9:40 at night, having spent the whole day up around work. I was meccha tired. The attitude maybe has been, we do what we can, and keep doing what we can, but we keep living our lives too, which means we wish we could go to hanami, and we're going to go on spring break, and the school trip will be moved to Okinawa or Hokkaido instead of Tokyo. Because out here in unaffected Japan, we have to balance between the fact that life goes on, but not everywhere. That no one is making a big enough deal of it, but that it’s overtalked. So it's strange because life around here is about the earthquake, but it's not.. we do what we always did, out here in unaffected Japan, but we also do more than that because we have to donate and worry and hope and mourn too.

Saigai

I posted my last entry to the web at about the time a massive earthquake was shaking eastern Japan. A friend of mine who lives in Tokyo and I had been exchanging messages about plans for the upcoming three day weekend (I was trying to convince him to visit beautiful nature-filled Hyogo), and he added as a little addendum to one "Big ass earthquake just now btw" at 3:05 pm (my time). I hadn't felt anything and almost didn't give it much thought.


A little while later, I messaged a few friends in Yamasaki, to ask if they'd felt anything. My fear actually jumped to my apartment, because sometimes it's snowin' in Ichi and springlike in Yama. I hadn't cut off the gas supply to the water heater or anything and I wanted to make sure stuff wasn't going down at home.

I live in West Japan. The Kansai region was largely undisturbed, from what I heard.

But nobody had felt anything. I looked it up on google news, finding one article about a megaquake shaking Tokyo. But we were too far to feel that, and about halfway between the north and south coasts. Someone said the TV was on at their school, and not too long after, commotion started in mine. We turned on the TV.


It took a moment to realize what we were seeing. It was apparently a live helicopter feed. A corner figure of Japan flashed giant red patches over sections of the map. The teacher behind me said, "What is that, a river?" Not a river, the ocean, come too far in, and far too fast.

The aerial we were seeing happened at that point to be Sendai. Relentless water pushed fire and debris and boats and houses, sweeping across rice fields. I kept thinking something would stop the motion, slow the movement of the sweep, there, a river, when the water hits the river, it'll just go downriver and be a big river. But the tsunami that pushed houses into rivers pushed them right back out of those rivers the next second. It didn't stop, and didn't seem to slow down.

Teachers started texting family and friends, calling them on cell phones and asking in low serious voices if everything was alright. I guess it was.

All of this was right about my bus time, so I haplessly shoved my stuff into my bags and headed down to the bus stop, wondering what it all meant. I texted my Tokyo friend, and resisted texting my Okinawa acquaintance as I figured she'd be swamped with "Are you OK?" messages, since Okinawa was flashing all red (along with Hokkaido, and basically the entire eastern coast, and most southern coasts other than those protected, like us, by other large islands and peninsulae).

This is for the 12th, but it's the type of map we were seeing.

Then... we carried on as usual. We'd just had graduation, and we were worn out from that, everybody cried. I wanted a nap before the dinner/drinking party and got half of one before my co-teacher came to get me and take me to enkai. I wasn't sure how to be, what attitude to assume, whether to be quiet or solemn, but things were progressing as totally normal in my little town, so we ate chicken and soybeans and I got "a little bit whiskey" trying to keep up with the art teacher in drinking (I lost). We all gave speeches about how moving graduation had been, and then the party ended and everyone went home.

Or, rather, I went to karaoke to join the others who had just finished their enkai, and I was so whiskey by then I didn't order a single drink at karaoke. I sang loudly and pretty badly, and fielded worried text messages. We stopped for snacks at Gusto on the way home. Still a bit whiskey, I got online and posted to facebook again, just to let everyone know I really was still in touch, and then I went to bed at 2. Embarrassingly, it was a really fun weekend night.

People asked me to keep them updated, but I had nothing to report. Nothing changed in my town, nothing happened here this time (we had flash floods shortly after my arrival, but that was from a typhoon).

I'd had plans to go to Nara the following day for the Omizutori festival, which you can see a bit more about here and here.

I had no real reason to cancel those plans, especially since it seemed good to go to a religious festival in the very-old capital. The festival was still on, I had bookings at a hostel, and my traveling friend was still up for it. So we went, and it took forever to get to Nara (it just always does), and we hung around and attended the last bit of the fire part of the festival (saw the last torch or two), and then meditated in the hall and hung around until 2, when the sacred water was drawn, made it back to our respective overnight places by 3 (I counted seven pairs of shoes in the genkan, making me the last to return for the night) and went to sleep.

This morning, I got up a bit after 9 and went to have breakfast. There was a free piece of toast per person, along with coffee and tea. I had the odd status of being a lone traveler at this place, and I also talked to the proprietor in Japanese. I didn't really know he knew English until I heard someone else talk to him. It's literally the smallest hostel in Nara, and we were all in the common room, me getting breakfast, the proprietor sitting at the table watching TV, one (English? Australian?) guy doing sudoku at the table, and one guy sitting with headphones and a laptop on the floor by the TV. Another guy was in and out of the sleeping room where the computer also was.

The proprietor asked me about Omizutori and I answered in English. Then I couldn't stop staring at the TV. It's all they are talking about, of course, and showing. The map of Japan was still there and flashing yellow now. It took me a while to realize it meant that those areas were still under tsunami warning, "but just a little one," the hostel guy explained to me when I asked in surprise.

There were interviews with people (some who knew their families were safe, others who did not), pans of the wreckage, before and after shots, aerial footage from all over Japan, charts showing numbers by prefecture of the missing and the dead. It was horrifying. I was transfixed. The guy on the laptop burst out laughing, in his own little world and I wanted to kick him, then felt bad for being in my own little world just like that.

Because much like my readership, I didn't feel it, I only heard about it, I only worried about the people I knew or had met who lived in east Japan. I only saw what they showed on TV (which was unbelievably amazing in a terrible way). Then when I walked by the station, I threw my change into a box held by some high school students who had turned out in droves to chant please and thank you to passers-by. I saw a poster and made a mental note to give blood soon. Because in my mind, that's what it takes when disaster strikes, money and blood, and you give what you can of both. The other thing I hear we are giving is power. Kansai electric has asked people to be super conservative with electricity as we re-route some of our supply to the Tohoku region (the top part). I don't really know if everyone is okay. I don't know that knowing would help me.

On the bus home, I started thinking about what I could do. Part of me wanted to raise my hand and get on a bus (once they start organizing buses, as they likely will) to Tohoku to volunteer to help with cleanup the way high schools in Kobe sent their kids here to help haul away the mud and debris after our floods. Another part of me suggests that that kind of maneuver would not be in line with all the recent injunctions to stay safe.

Can you stay safe just by staying put? Apparently not entirely, not when the earth moves and the sea leaves its bed.

But what I did want to do was make a request to all my friends and family, to anyone who was glad to hear it wasn't Shiso and it wasn't me: please donate $2 to the Japan effort. You can do it any way you like.. I'm sure collections will be happening around you soon, and if not, collect some yourself and send it to me. I think the exchange right now is like 83 yen for a dollar, but I'll round every one to a hundred yen (they have direct deposit bank numbers on NHK, and you can give directly at kiosks in convenience stores). And give blood if you are eligible (this is always a need, but in times of any major disaster, the need increases). Thank you all who thought about me, and trust me, I'm just as glad as you that my evening was about graduation speeches and beer, not mud and broken beams.

I'll keep you updated, such as I can, but once again, what I know just comes from about the same sources as what you know. Stay safe, everyone.

Sotsugyou

I'm thinking today about the future.

It's graduation day. I hate them. I forgot that I hate them. They're never quite what I want them to be. I mean, I went, and we sang, and I cried, and it was poignant. But it was also like stay-awake-challenge 2011, and not only for me, when the speakers got up to say their pieces. Maybe it's because their speeches are all in some level of Japanese I don't really understand. But they were the ones who looked bored when the kids started singing badly, and when the class VP started to give an account of their memories, her voice broken by little sobs.

I had come to terms with the idea that it's not really for the graduates that we put them through all this crap. It's for us, the teachers and parents. It's so we can wallow in the weird feeling of imagining them taking flight, of how happy we are and how sad, that we maybe taught them something, that they needed us, that they don't anymore.

But for me, I love their faces as they march out into the swirling snow (yeah, snow) through the back doors of the gym. Tearstained and squared jaw, they go forward; they have no other choice. The future is there, and they'll go into it. They couldn't stay behind if they wanted to. Not that they want to.. some are glad to get out, and some are glad to go wherever they are going. Some are sad to be leaving, some are scared of where they're headed, or of not knowing where they're headed. And some are all of the above.

But scared or sad or happy or excited, we go, because for all the points of the compass, there's only one direction, and time is its only measure (that isTom Stoppard).

But something else. Before the graduates came into the gym, while I was wandering around trying to keep warm, I stopped and smiled and chatted and joked with the younger students. The first-years squabbled over who was number one, two, or three coolest. The second-years called me beautiful. Then during the ceremony, next year's student body president started crying during his speech, and continued to cry through the rest of the ceremony (I didn't know this til I saw him, red-eyed, at the end).

I remembered the phrase just a judo kid, and choked on it watching the irrepressible Minato deliver his ceremonial paper to the stage. He was never just anything. Now our new class president is just a table-tennis kid, but he has a good heart, and he's sharp, and he has a steady voice. And he cried through the whole ceremony!

At the risk of sounding like a horrible person, I like working with kids whom I've seen cry. I actually have more respect for the kids I've seen moved that much, because it means they give a shit. I like kids who give a shit. The future is brighter for them.

I've been thinking lately about the future, about education and how we're all in this together. About how we need kids to give a shit, and to learn about things, even if they don't think they want to, because the future needs better people. I hear about how this country has a growing population and that one has a shrinking one, but I feel like what we need is not more people (oh hey massive population jump in the last several centuries and the fact that our resources and infrastructure may not be able to keep up at that rate), just better ones.

The world needs people who are smart, sure, but more than that, the world needs people who give a shit. The other day, an acquaintance said "Stupid scares me, because I am afraid it's winning." Sometimes it does seem like stupid is winning, but I have hope. And it's kids like next year's class president that give it to me.

And who make losing last year's class president bearable.

Neko-gumi

I'm wearing "Festive-Funereal" to school today. I don't think I've done that before. I wore it to enkais and LNFs and Prisms, though. Basically it serves well at any function that is both a celebration and an ending. So, graduation parties are a good example. Anything that is a loss, but much more than a loss.

Today is my last class with the Cats.

And yeah it's like that. I think that the teachers were more impressed, overall, with the Dogs class that went before them. But if I am honest, I was too new when I struggled to get to know them. I was terrified of the Dogs, and their class, at that time. But the Cats have been special to me, at least, despite (because of?) their rougher edges, their less bright-shiny aspect. I feel a lot more connected with them. Also, my favorite students (so far) are all Cats.

My speech kids, my Sequim girls, "my" this or "my" that. I am a proud person, and I have adopted them to be proud of. I am thrilled, at least for those I know, and I believe in them, I think they have good hearts that will go a long way.

And I'll miss them. I love the old class president (also my speech boy). He has been, and I mean this, a joy to have in class. I am not sure I really understood that phrase that appeared on my report cards until this class came along. I would look at the schedule board and think, yes I have a bunch of class today, but I get to have him, or Kumi, or Maho, or Keisuke. I liked going to their classes, I hoped the random selection process of daily conversation would land on them, because I wanted to see what they would do or say when it did.

They have been bright sparks, fueling my curiousity and sometimes even hope.. every JET has those days where they think (realize?) that their job doesn't reeeally have all that much impact. But with a Kumi in your class, it isn't so. (I think my speech boy would shine with or without me, but I like to just sit back and spectate on that for some of them.. I like that I can understand a lot more of what gets said now).

The truth is, I love them, and I hate to lose them, even though I am happy for their futures. Some of them got into even better schools than I expected. They are really going places, even getting out of this small town.

So it's good. But, it's sad too. I'm reading them this, although we won't have time to translate all of it for them.

And I'm still so busy with getting ready for my Shorinji Kempo test (aaah!!! OMFG), trying to put out the March issue of Hyogo Times, along with a huge pile of elementary classes (stupid final exams in middle school)... That I don't have time to do what I would like to do. Which is sit here contemplatively; or go take a walk. Or just go hang out with them, watch them cut up.

Rascism!

We had a little bit of a 'come to Jesus' moment with the cats' class today (no I didn't proselytize any of my Japanese students). I call them beloved ruffians because that's just what they are. One student in particular (actually one of my favorites, partly for these reasons) is extremely loud and playfully irreverent. He's good at doing voices and mocking or imitating tones, all of which make him an excellent student for me (if not for those having to teach him grammar and give him tests). He is the opposite of the feared silent-student, paralyzed by shyness.

I've called him out countless times for being loud, or being rude, but his playful irreverence, so useful in compelling him to talk, basically makes any attempt at sternness fall flat. Which is fine with me; I'd rather merrily point out that he's rude and that might be why he has no girlfriend (I told him this when he said some other guy's girl was chubby).

So today before class, he was playing with a piece of cardboard folded in thirds, which he discovered made a great Cyclops of the X-Men visor, and was playing with it as such here and there during class. At some point when everyone was supposed to be talking to their neighbor, discussing the answer to the little quiz we'd just done, I borrowed it from him and pretended to shoot lazers (SIC) from my eyes. He made a comment that blue eyes are the best, and I said it was too bad mine are green. The girls were like "really?" and I was like "..maybe." (Because in actual fact they are kinda blue, but look very green if I wear green)

They laughed, and in Japanese he went on to say whatever, it was cool, and mostly he thought brown eyes weren't pretty. "No, I don't like brown eyes, or black eyes. I hate Chinese people!" I sort of stopped shuffling the papers I'd gone back to the front podium to shuffle and stared at him. "Excuse me?" (in English) I was stunned by a blatant statement of racism, although I have heard lots of Japanese people feel this way about Chinese people. And as we wrapped up that moment, I told him, "You said a bad thing just now, and I am not impressed."

I knew he wouldn't understand all my words but I hoped my disapproval would be apparent anyway. But his inability to be serious was showing itself, and I wasn't sure whether to push the point. Luckily, Mikan-sensei stepped in right then. Normally he is really easygoing in the classroom, laughs a lot, and isn't overly strict on them. He gives the first impression of a young teacher whose students just love him; I always thought of him as very kind. But he can make students cry (maybe not this loud kid) when he gets serious.. it's always blown my mind when I'm in the staff room and a student is by his desk, and Mikan-sensei speaks to them in deadly quiet tones dripping with disapproval and the kids are just desperate to fix whatever it was they did wrong. Good lord. One first-year asked me if I thought Mikan-sensei kind, and I said yes. He told me, "Well, in club time, he's scary."

Anyway I almost didn't notice when he began because it was in Japanese and I thought we were just moving to the next part of the lesson. From what I could gather, he asked them "Why do we study English? Your entrance exams are already over, anyway, so why are we doing this?" and the loud kid responded with something I didn't understand, which I later imagined to be something about international citizens of the world, globalization, etc. Mikan-sensei asked "Oh is that why? Is that why you are studying?" and the loud kid said that was why he was, at least.

Mikan-sensei said something I didn't fully follow, but I heard the words "say bad things" in there. He paused, then added a bit about thinking before you open your mouth to speak.

It wasn't til just a moment ago I remembered his wife lived in China for a while (London, too; she's a cool lady, very international, her English is amazing!).

Anyway, he totally did exactly what I would have hoped to do with the moment were it my own class in my own language! Yay for internationalization!

Students in the USA

How much do you remember from middle school?

I'm supposed to present to the first-years (7th grade age) on Friday about American schools, and I am specifically targeting MS and JHS level just because that is what they are in and that is what they would identify with, I think. But it's staggering to me how much of my memory and even photo collection is almost entirely from high school.

I'm trying to recreate in my mind the kinds of classes we had, what it was like to be there, the lunchroom and food, the school bus. All things pretty much foreign to these kids who bike to school and eat in the classroom every day.

First of all, a "middle school" is different from a "junior high school" in that MS is normally grades 6-8 (in my case, 7-8), while JHS is 7-9. I didn't know that. But it does explain why 中学校 (chuugakkou), which is quite literally "middle" and "school" gets translated as junior high school.

The major differences between my middle school life and the lives of my Japan JHS students might surprise you. I've already mentioned taking the bus to school, while most of my kids bike or walk. This is perhaps part of the reason for the small sizes (relatively) of the school where I work, compared to where I grew up. (The other reason is shrinking population and location of course) There are more schools serving smaller areas. I went to a larger school serving a larger geographical space.

Teachers where I'm from have (more or less) their own classrooms which they decorate to their subject, and students rotate based on their schedules into the corresponding rooms. Here, the teachers ferry themselves and their materials for each class from the teacher's office into the classroom. Ownership, then, of that room is more the class. The major advantage is that the kids are more responsible for taking care of it, here. In the US we do not have "souji," or cleaning time. In Japan we have it every day, about fifteen minutes in which everyone cleans their assigned space. This eliminates the need for a custodial staff (kinda.. there is the one lady who is in charge of all that, but she doesn't clean every room each day) which makes sense, at least in a school as small as this one (student population about 170).

But the major drawback of teachers not having their own subject-specific rooms is that every room looks the same. In this case, pretty dingy (old building, years of half-assed cleaning technique by generations of students), and each classroom is decorated with general announcements and some photos or memorabilia of the class's achievements to date. Rather than the math room being full of math posters, stocked with math materials. I like to have all my shit at hand in case I want to change the plan (ever so slightly) on the fly. There is a special room for science lab, and one for art, and a music room, but all the more regular subjects just use the class's room.

This also means that all the students in a class will be taking their classes together. Where I'm from, we mixed it up. It was more exciting because, even if your BFF wasn't in your homeroom, they might be in your science class, or English, or something.

Of course the food is different. The eat in the classroom and everyone gets the same stuff. You don't really get a choice here, and are expected to eat all of it. At my MS, there were like four lines of choices, and if you had some extra money you could buy an ice cream or some other little side item. The cafeteria experience is so fundamental to my concept of school lunch that I hardly differentiate between elementary, where there was one line and you chose your food as you moved along it, to the upper schools where you first picked a line, then the sides that went with it.

I'm trying to recall it, and I think we had seven classes a day (my students here in Japan have between five and six). Rotating within your "team" you went to math, science, social studies, language arts, and English lit, then there was the trifecta of chorus, band, or PE (of which you were in one), and finally a six-week stint in each of the rotational classes: art, technology, Spanish, French, computers and typing, and possibly music. I feel like there had to be six, but I can only generate memories of those first five.

Sports at my middle school were never my cuppa, but I'm looking at their webpage now and it seems like there isn't much on offer. Basketball teams exist, then there is an intramural volleyball thing, then all the clubs are very service-intellectual oriented (Jr. Beta, Science Olympiad, Yearbook, Peer Helpers, Student Council, etc.), and I remember only meeting with my club like once a month or something (I was on the Perspicacity Press, or student newspaper, you betcha). Here where I work, clubs are a huge deal and meet every day, morning and afternoon, to practice. Most of them are athletic clubs, with the exception of maybe the band, because they don't march much.

The band at my old middle school looks like it's still in swing, along with chorus and an orchestra. Nice.

Anyway, I'm going to have a field day because the first-year class is the group who likes to ask questions and is full of kids who show genuine curiosity about what I have to say. It is for this reason I love them.

Finally, I'd like to note that the photos from American schools in the textbook are all pretty awful. I'm trying to figure out whether it's the awkwardness of that age, or because all the pictures are from the early-mid nineties. I think it's both.