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A Very Akabane Christmas Party
I'm watching college football on TV. How bizarre. Except, the teams are the Nihon University Phoenix vs. the Kwansei Gakuin University Fighters. This is called, semi-appropriately, the "Koshien Bowl", except that this year it was played at Nagai Stadium due to Koshien being under construction. (I'm actually watching a rebroadcast of it, too. It's so funny to hear a whole bunch of Japanese and then "touchdown!!")
It's appropriate to be watching football considering we had our Christmas party at Akabane GEOS today. I tried to go get a copy of Apples to Apples this afternoon just to find out that it's sold out and out of print in Japan now. Oops. But, I did get a new outfit to wear to the party, and that was good.
The party itself was decent. We had 4 kids and 9 adults there, plus me and Eri and Duane, so not too bad a turnout. The party started at 6, but people started showing up at 5:35, or more like, my 8-year-old student and his 11-year-old brother came in like a whirlwind and came into my classroom and started throwing stickyballs and setting up my bowling set and everything. Wheeee. So, I gave up on doing any more setup and started on kid-entertaining duty, playing dodgeball and stuff with the two boys.
Eri managed to get all of the food set up around 6:10, which led to 8-year-old Boy continually being like "Come on, let's eat let's eat let's eatttttt wtf" in Japanese, much to the amusement of pretty much everyone. We put on the movie Charlotte's Web, and the kids were all like "wtf is with this pig movie", but the funniest part is that the 11-year-old boy, who usually only seems interested in sports and destroying things, ended up being RIVETED by it, we couldn't pry him away from the TV, whereas the other kids were all like "omfg pigs are boring".
Duane got into the spirit of making the party "western-style" by setting up a coat room and all of this other stuff. Before we ate food he made everyone get in a circle and hold hands and bow their heads and he said a prayer. Hopefully everyone else thought it was interesting.
Because of the nature of the English level of the students, I probably spoke Japanese about 30% of the time, just in order to actually talk to people. This resulted in the kids being like "wtf our teacher is speaking Japanese", especially when the Boy would say things like "nani kore?" and I'd imitate him like "NANI KOREEEE?"
We had some games, including the one where Duane had put up 31 Christmas tree triangles in our lobby, and had put 25 light stickers on all of them, and told the kids to go guess how many trees there were and how many lights, which also resulted in a ton of amusement as they kept coming over to Duane and guessing in Japanese, to have him say no, and then they'd say it in English, and he'd say no, and they'd be like "WAIT A MINUTE ARE YOU SAYING THAT NI-JUU-ROKU ISN'T TWENTY-SIX??" and stuff like that.
One of Eri's students did some magic card tricks. The kids were all really entertained and the adults were all like "Dude, we can totally tell how you did that."
There was also a gift exchange. 8 adults including me participated, and all 4 kids. I ended up getting a pair of gloves with angora fur trim, which aren't really my style, but they're pretty warm, but I'm really against wearing bunny fur. Argh. I'll probably wear them anyway on the colder days. The present I gave was an abridged English book of A Christmas Carol, and it went to Eri's 14-year-old student who is going to Australia next week for a homestay. I told her to read it on the plane, heh. The kids ended up getting each other things like English/Japanese Doraemon manga, and stuffed animals, and things like that.
After the kids left a little after 8pm, we broke out a bottle of champagne with gold fillings in it, which was brought by one of Eri's students.
I actually spent a lot of the party talking to one of Eri's students that I'd never really talked to much before, a guy who's about a year out of college and is studying English to get a better job. Despite that he doesn't actually take conversational classes, just TOEIC prep, he's actually pretty great at speaking, and probably only needed about 10% of the conversation to be in Japanese. He came into my classroom at one point while I was keeping an eye on the kids, and saw my posters like "wow, is that Ichiro? and Sasaki? and Hasegawa? cool!" We talked about baseball for a while, and also about music and TV shows and stuff. It turns out he was at the goodbye party for Hideki Matsui a few years ago, he said next time he comes to GEOS he'll show me some pictures from it.
Anyway, after talking to people for a while we eventually kicked everyone out around 9:30pm. There turned out to be no "after-party", but I guess that's just as well. Eri and Duane and I cleaned up the school, and then went home.
Next time, we definitely need some drinking, though.
It's appropriate to be watching football considering we had our Christmas party at Akabane GEOS today. I tried to go get a copy of Apples to Apples this afternoon just to find out that it's sold out and out of print in Japan now. Oops. But, I did get a new outfit to wear to the party, and that was good.
The party itself was decent. We had 4 kids and 9 adults there, plus me and Eri and Duane, so not too bad a turnout. The party started at 6, but people started showing up at 5:35, or more like, my 8-year-old student and his 11-year-old brother came in like a whirlwind and came into my classroom and started throwing stickyballs and setting up my bowling set and everything. Wheeee. So, I gave up on doing any more setup and started on kid-entertaining duty, playing dodgeball and stuff with the two boys.
Eri managed to get all of the food set up around 6:10, which led to 8-year-old Boy continually being like "Come on, let's eat let's eat let's eatttttt wtf" in Japanese, much to the amusement of pretty much everyone. We put on the movie Charlotte's Web, and the kids were all like "wtf is with this pig movie", but the funniest part is that the 11-year-old boy, who usually only seems interested in sports and destroying things, ended up being RIVETED by it, we couldn't pry him away from the TV, whereas the other kids were all like "omfg pigs are boring".
Duane got into the spirit of making the party "western-style" by setting up a coat room and all of this other stuff. Before we ate food he made everyone get in a circle and hold hands and bow their heads and he said a prayer. Hopefully everyone else thought it was interesting.
Because of the nature of the English level of the students, I probably spoke Japanese about 30% of the time, just in order to actually talk to people. This resulted in the kids being like "wtf our teacher is speaking Japanese", especially when the Boy would say things like "nani kore?" and I'd imitate him like "NANI KOREEEE?"
We had some games, including the one where Duane had put up 31 Christmas tree triangles in our lobby, and had put 25 light stickers on all of them, and told the kids to go guess how many trees there were and how many lights, which also resulted in a ton of amusement as they kept coming over to Duane and guessing in Japanese, to have him say no, and then they'd say it in English, and he'd say no, and they'd be like "WAIT A MINUTE ARE YOU SAYING THAT NI-JUU-ROKU ISN'T TWENTY-SIX??" and stuff like that.
One of Eri's students did some magic card tricks. The kids were all really entertained and the adults were all like "Dude, we can totally tell how you did that."
There was also a gift exchange. 8 adults including me participated, and all 4 kids. I ended up getting a pair of gloves with angora fur trim, which aren't really my style, but they're pretty warm, but I'm really against wearing bunny fur. Argh. I'll probably wear them anyway on the colder days. The present I gave was an abridged English book of A Christmas Carol, and it went to Eri's 14-year-old student who is going to Australia next week for a homestay. I told her to read it on the plane, heh. The kids ended up getting each other things like English/Japanese Doraemon manga, and stuffed animals, and things like that.
After the kids left a little after 8pm, we broke out a bottle of champagne with gold fillings in it, which was brought by one of Eri's students.
I actually spent a lot of the party talking to one of Eri's students that I'd never really talked to much before, a guy who's about a year out of college and is studying English to get a better job. Despite that he doesn't actually take conversational classes, just TOEIC prep, he's actually pretty great at speaking, and probably only needed about 10% of the conversation to be in Japanese. He came into my classroom at one point while I was keeping an eye on the kids, and saw my posters like "wow, is that Ichiro? and Sasaki? and Hasegawa? cool!" We talked about baseball for a while, and also about music and TV shows and stuff. It turns out he was at the goodbye party for Hideki Matsui a few years ago, he said next time he comes to GEOS he'll show me some pictures from it.
Anyway, after talking to people for a while we eventually kicked everyone out around 9:30pm. There turned out to be no "after-party", but I guess that's just as well. Eri and Duane and I cleaned up the school, and then went home.
Next time, we definitely need some drinking, though.
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Heck, I could really fox you by sending the British edition of A2A, so that both you and they are stumped by all the cultural references...
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