dr4b | Entries tagged with arakawa 7 jhs

I just received a package in the mail full of cards from my 7th-graders. They have a chapter late in their textbook called "Letter to the UK", where I guess they're supposed to write letters to a foreign English-speaking country, so one teacher had an idea that they should write letters to me while I was in the US instead.

It's pretty amazing, really. The only downside is I feel kind of bad because I wonder if this assignment is meant for them to get penpals in another country? I never heard any of the students last year having penpals, though, so who knows, but maybe I ended up selfishly short-circuiting that. On the other hand a lot of their letters were clearly things like "Did you watch any baseball yet? Do you know about Yuki Saitoh? He is very popular." and other things that are for me, like "Did you use the gift we gave you? I have the photo of us in my room!" from a set of girls who gave me some hair ties before I left. And another girl told me about giving chocolates to a particular boy in the school on Valentine's day :) So it was good that they could write to me. But it loses the penpal aspect of the letter where a lot of them wrote "Do you like music? I like AKB48. They are very cute" or whatever. And a lot of the kids made these really nice cards with stickers and cartoons and purikura photos and whatever on them.

Eh, I dunno. I'm glad I have something to remember them by. I feel bad that several of them say "Please come back and teach us again!", too.

Also, the teachers included a DVD of the chorus competition in there! That was really nice of them too :)

My school's principal apparently is a Keio graduate. He saw my Keisousen 2010 t-shirt and totally freaked out :)

I made this up for my 9th-graders to do today in advanced English class. You can play too if you want. I called this activity "Crazy Interview!!":

1. Place in Japan (city/area/prefecture)
2. Country
3. Adjective
4. Adjective

5. Your first name
6. Place in Japan (city/area/prefecture)
7. Number from 1-9
8. Noun
9. Adjective
10. Animal
11. Nature-related thing
12. Famous Building In The World
13. School Subject
14. Noun
15. Job
16. Number
17. Sport
18. Family Member
19. Number

( The actual interview you are inserting these into )

Anyway, it went over better than I thought it would. Some kids wanted to read their interviews with a bunch of people, so I told them them to switch with each other. Some kids just didn't care and spent the class time hanging out doing nothing.

I am going to separate out the rest of my school babbling into another entry, because I can keep this one public with the mad libs thingy.

You know what the best thing is about being a teacher? It's that feeling of being so ridiculously proud of your students that you feel like you're going to explode from the emotion. Even if it has nothing to do with anything you personally taught them.

I don't talk about school much in public entries, but suffice it to say that our school has gone through a lot of crap in the last few weeks due to the flu outbreaks, having to cancel various events and classes and other stuff. We had to postpone our chorus competition until today -- and YESTERDAY, 4 confirmed cases of the "Type A" flu popped up in class 3-2, so they had to stay home today and for the next few days. So after all their work, they didn't get to perform.

In more craziness, the boy who was playing piano for class 3-3's second song ALSO had to stay home today because he was sick (whether it is flu or not, we don't know yet, but he had a headache yesterday and a fever today). And well, 3-3 didn't have a backup piano player -- the girl who played their first song hadn't rehearsed piano for the second song at all, and it was the special song, not the common song. (Every grade sang a song together, then each class in that grade had to sing that song to be judged by, as well as a special song that only that class would sing.)

You know what class 3-3 did? This morning at 8am when they found out they were without a piano player, 4 girls in the class spontaneously arranged an acapella backup line for their song. And the entire class got together and rehearsed it a few times in the morning with a few people taking on the extra acapella backup. And then they got up there and performed it in front of a full auditorium.

THEY WERE ABSOLUTELY AMAZING.

Yeah, there were slight mistakes in harmony and a few notes, but what can you expect after they rehearse with a piano for 3 months and suddenly have to perform a crazy different version on a few hours' notice?

I brought my little USB voice recorder with me and taped the entire concert and I've listened to class 3-3's song several times (am listening to the concert right now still) and I want to cry from how amazing they were and how proud I am of them.

The 3rd-years as a whole were singing a song after that as well, but about half the girls were crying so hard by the end of it that they couldn't sing. The girl conducting the song was waving her arms with tears running down her face.

Our principal went up to give a closing speech, but he was crying too. And this is like, a 60-something-year-old guy.

Later in the day when I was doing eiken interviews (I'm helping kids prepare for the oral examination part of an English proficiency test), one of the girls I was interviewing happens to be one of the four that did the music arrangement, and she told me all of the backstory after I gushed for a bit about how completely amazing and awesome I thought they were. She said they were all so nervous and shaking, and that the reason most of them were crying was that they were so sad their friends from class 3-2 weren't there with them, it felt so empty and this was their last time ever singing in a chorus competition in our school before everybody goes away after graduation and it was so sad.

I didn't have the heart to tell her that I won't even be there in the spring...

Seriously, I'm bursting with pride about these kids who I spend half of my time wanting to defenestrate. I think they created a school legend today, in all honesty -- the kind of thing that they're going to remember for the rest of their lives, at least.

Anyway...

As for the rest of the day, I was at school fairly late working on some stuff for tomorrow (you wouldn't believe this but I hand-drew an entire picture for an activity, and it even looks GOOD, I'll have to try to scan it) and after work I went to Ueno and met up with

kawaru, who is in town for a few days for a CIR conference or something.

We went to Gyukaku for yakiniku. I'd actually never been there before, and quite frankly I think I prefer Anrakutei, at least the one in Akabane... it's about the same price but I like the food and atmosphere better at Anrakutei (plus they don't come up to you like "hey, do you guys need to order in English? 'cause I speak English..." at Anrakutei), and of course, drink bar. But Gyukaku is not necessarily bad. We split a "Super Big 500" -- they even have the same name for it -- and yay yakiniku.

After that, karaoke, but Craig could only stick around for an hour, so I mostly made him do lots of songs that require two people or harmony, like some HY, and Winding Road, and Seishun Amigo and stuff. And he picked How You Like Me Now for old times' sake or something. I can't rap, btw.

While we were standing outside Big Echo and I was staring at the price matrix and doing math in my head, some dude comes up like "Hey, do you need help?" and I basically looked at him with a "please die in a fire" glare like "No." He walked off. Craig was even like "WTF was THAT?"

So, home after that. I am not sure where the last 2 hours went. I have been reading news about that Ichihashi guy I guess, and listening to my kids' concert and so on. I'm pretty tired. Tomorrow will be tiring too :)

I forgot to mention it, but on Friday night at Chiba's game, they were playing Michael Jackson music outside the stadium and between all of their inning breaks where they would usually play other stuff.

Then this morning in 3-23 class, two of my students were trying to do a moonwalk. (They had already finished the activity for the day and people were basically "studying", which is shorthand for "goofing off")

The third boy sitting over on that side of the room asks me, "Teacher, do you know Yankovic?"

It took me a minute to realize what he was saying since the pronunciation sounded like "young Koby", but once I realized what he was talking about I said yeah, I know Weird Al Yankovic's music and like it. He said it's really funny and that he saw Yankovic's imitation of Michael Jackson, and he wanted to tell the other students about it, except they didn't really care. And I'm like "Wait a minute, why do YOU know Weird Al? His stuff is all in English, can you understand it?" Apparently his parents like Weird Al or something -- I think his mom's an English teacher so that makes more sense. But I asked if Weird Al is popular in Japan at all and he was like "not really, I don't think people can understand his comedy."

Weird day.

I ate some fish sembei that the 2nd-years brought back from Shimoda as omiyage -- hope I don't get sick. Sigh.

Hard to explain exactly what's going on right now, but suffice it to say that sometimes kids are actually pretty cute and funny and being surrounded by a staff of Japanese people who don't understand English can be a good thing.

That is... you know, in my high school yearbook, I wrote that "in the future I hope to be a high school computer science teacher". And the reason that will never happen is simply that for the most part, being good at computer science means that it makes a lot more sense to go work at a software company and make money, rather than spend the time to get certified as a high school teacher and then go risk my life working in a high school in the US somewhere, making not very much money. (This might not be the case everywhere, but it's certainly my impression.)

But so now, through just being a white person who happens to speak English, I get to work as a teacher in a junior high school. And since I've proven I'm capable of making up fun activities, I get a lot of control over what I do in my classes (at least compared to what I was expecting). And since I am in Japan, the students are still reasonably nice and not likely to blow up a bomb in our school or shoot anyone. And I get the opportunity to get almost entire immersion in Japanese. And I don't have to wear a suit! And I get to go home at 5pm!

I wish I always had days like this, where I think things like "I wish I could stay here forever" and such, rather than the days where I think "I wish everyone around me would disappear".

I mean, not permanently, but basically, it was Friday afternoon and I had finished everything I had to do for the time being like preparing lessons and grading today's speaking test (which I'll talk about more in a friends-only entry)... and so I was walking around aimlessly looking for something to do, so I went outside to the schoolyard, and the volleyball and soccer clubs were setting up, and there were no 3rd-years, so it was mostly the 1st- and 2nd- year students that actually like me. So I came over and started passing the ball around with them, and they essentially invited me to go through their entire workout with them (including doing pushups and situps and running and all this other stuff). I couldn't do all of it -- had to quit running after two times around the track, and I also couldn't do one of their weirdo situp things because I just couldn't figure out how to, but everything else I pretty much did, like passing, hitting, etc. Eventually the 3rd-year girls showed up and we had a "match", by which I mean the 3rd-years set up the 5 of them and the best 2nd-year girl and then we had 9 of us on the other side, and they had ME serve the ball to the other side every time, so I was doing my best to serve to a different person each time. I was kind of like "really? me?" but they kept giving me the ball to serve over. I dunno.

The sempai-kohai thing is really enforced here -- when I chased down a ball one of the 2nd-years was like "don't do that, the 1st-years are supposed to go chase down any volleyballs that get away". And once the 3rd-year girls showed up, everyone else really snapped into "yes sir okay sir" mode to them.

Anyway, I had fun, though I got totally sweaty in my corduroy pants and polo shirt and OMG next time I have to only do that if I have some gym clothes with me.

It was great, too, I swear the entire school at one point or another were like "WTF is Deanna doing out there with the volleyball club?" The soccer boys especially were really dumbfounded (but I heard one of them saying "holy crap! she's got an ARM!" when I was hitting/serving).

The teacher who is nominally in charge of the vball club came by afterwards and I was kind of like "um, is it really ok for me to play volleyball with them?" and he basically said "How long have you been playing volleyball?" and I said "...since junior high school" and he was like "...even now?" "Yeah, even now." "Then by all means, please feel free to come to volleyball club whenever you want."

I dunno, we'll see. But hey, I WAS lamenting that I have to miss vball the next weekend or two thanks to Fighters games, so getting some practice in certainly can't hurt!

As for the rest of the day, well, I should be preparing to go to Hiroshima tomorrow I suppose, but instead I'm just kind of zoning out.

Hey, do any of my friends in Tokyo have a Costco membership (mine lapsed), or know somewhere else that I can get American laundry detergent? I'm running out of my big bottle that I brought over here in March, and I really don't want to go back to using crappy Japanese detergent that doesn't get my clothes clean.

Tonight after work I went to the "view travel plaza" thingy in Akabane station and with the help of a travel agent, made my arrangements to go to Hiroshima this weekend. Whew. So I have a train ticket to go down on Saturday afternoon, a reservation at a business hotel near the station for Saturday night, a train ticket home for Sunday evening, and baseball tickets to Saturday night and Sunday afternoon's baseball games at the new Mazda Zoom-Zoom Stadium Hiroshima, as the Fighters take on the Carp for their last series of interleague. (I had the baseball tickets a few weeks ago, but not the travel tickets.) I'm totally psyched! I'm even kind of just looking forward to chilling out on a N700 shinkansen for a few hours. I'm weird that way.

Oh, at school I invented a new board game for my first-years. It's the "Have Like Play" game:

The hard part was really making the cards, or more like, finding clip art for various words/things... but yeah, so I'm hoping to get a lot of mileage out of this one, because we can use it for teaching "I like chocolate / I have a cat / I play tennis" as well as "I don't like English / I don't have an eraser / I don't play baseball" as well as "Do you like baseball? / Do you have a book? / Do you play the piano?"

Tomorrow will be the playtest, by which I mean I'm going to bring it to 1-3 Advanced and see how they deal with it to benchmark a guess for how other classes will go. They're the most open-minded and willing-to-do-crazy-stuff class I have of the first-years, so if it bombs, or if it's wildly successful, either way they'll probably have a good time.

Is 2009 really already almost halfway over? That's freaking insane, dude.

Posting this Monday morning because I crashed pretty hard after the nijikai on Sunday night.

Sports Day was nowhere near the disaster I thought it might be, aside from that it started raining around 3pm and now we have to finish it on Tuesday instead. But yeah, aside from a few 7th-graders screwing up scorekeeping, most things went really well. I sat in the head tent with Kubota and Nakamichi and the broadcasting kids all day and mostly just watched things, confirmed scores, and tried to be helpful. I only ended up talking to a few parents since for the most part they weren't allowed to come over to where we were. Met a few former Nanachu students who had come back to watch the Sports Day, some of whom were older siblings of current students.

I brought my little camera and took a whole bunch of pictures and a few movies. If you've never seen a Japanese school Sports Day before this might actually be interesting to you, especially the boys' acrobatics -- people kept asking me if we do that stuff in the US and I'm like "uhhh... no, it's too dangerous, there's no way our school would let/make kids do stuff like this". Infact, I really don't remember ever having events anything like this in school -- I do remember some at summer camp which were like competition/parents-day combined events. Hmm.

For this event the kids split into the Red Team (class 1-1, 2-1, 3-1), White Team (class 1-2, 2-2, 3-2) and Blue Team (1-3, 3-3). Blue Team lost pretty soundly and were just like "it's not fair". We didn't combine scores across, just by year, but still.

Anyway, photos...

Here's the starting parade, with our student council members carrying in the school flags.

( And lj-cut for like 20 more photos and a few movies, and an explanation of the events... )

After the soran bushi dance and a short assembly meeting, the kids were allowed to go home, and we were told that the event would continue on Tuesday for the final three races. Whee.

After the Sports Day the teachers had a "followup meeting" which was really a "let's sit in the lunch room and drink beer and eat snacks for an hour" gathering. Then a lot of them had to go eat a real dinner with the "father's association" for our JHS, and afterwards they were meeting in Oji to do karaoke, and a few were like "come on, come to karaoke with us" so I ended up going to that too. None of the English teachers came to karaoke, but that's ok because I told everyone I wasn't going to sing in English anyway.

As it is, it turns out one of the other teachers LOVES Spitz, and he heard me say that when one of the other teachers asked me beforehand what music I like, so he picked Namida ga Kirari at one point, I followed it with Neko ni Naritai, and we talked about music all the way back to the station afterwards. In general it was actually a surprisingly good time -- 2000 yen for two hours sitting in a karaoke room with 10 teachers, drinking cocktails and singing stuff. The only thing is that a lot of songs I like singing aren't really "party songs" so I was having trouble coming up with things to go with their kind of party atmosphere, but it worked out ok, especially when our music teacher picked some Japanese remix of a Chopin piece, seriously.

But by the time I got home it was like 11pm and I was totally zonked from waking up at 6am and from sports day and from the after-rain stuff and from drinking and so on. Plop. Now it's Monday morning and I think I'm going to go to Jingu and watch some college baseball rookies. Wheeeee!

I made a Chutes and Ladders game for my 7th-graders to practice numbers with. Then I was told to make a big poster version to demonstrate for the class with, so now I have the world's biggest Chutes and Ladders board. Yay.

After work I went to dinner with Eleanor, who I seriously don't think I ever met at CMU, but we know an awful lot of people in common (Benoit suggested she get in touch with me in the first place when her company sent her to Japan this week). We hung out in Shinjuku and Shibuya and I basically walked around and babbled about everything.

We had dinner at the Shinjuku Momo Paradise which is huge and awesome! I realized just now that I think I went there like, 5 years ago, but didn't know it at the time. Weird.

I don't really feel comfortable with writing much about my school life in public entries for fear of someone finding it like it happened at GEOS. What I will say is that I taught three classes today and the kids are... crazy. Inevitably whenever they were told to ask me questions, every class wanted to ask "where do you live? how old are you? do you have a boyfriend? are you married?" and other personal questions, to which the Japanese teacher was like "you can't ask that, sorry" and they're like "well, we don't really CARE what her favorite food is, ok?"

A conversation that kinda happened in all three classes, as I was doing my introduction:
Me: "My hobby is watching baseball. I love the Nippon Ham Fighters."
Students (in Japanese): "Eeehhhhh? The Fighters???"
Me: "Yes, the Fighters. My favorite player is Hichori Morimoto."
Half the students: "Who the hell is that? Only Darvish is famous."
The other half, mostly boys: "Oh, Hichori huh? He's from Arakawa-ku also! That's cool."

One annoying thing: I've gained about 2 kilograms in the last week of working at the school, probably due to two factors: 1) changing my sleep schedule so drastically and 2) now I'm eating 3 meals a day instead of 1.5 or so. I eat something for breakfast at 7am, usually something very light, and then I have school lunch at 12:30pm, and then by 6-7pm I'm starving so I eat dinner. School lunch is quite good -- today it was dumpling soup and half-sandwiches, jelly and butter, plus fruit salad. Yesterday was curry rice. The day before was some weird but tasty fish. Considering it's like 300 yen per day it's a pretty good deal.

Anyway, after school today I came home and changed, and then went to meet up with my friend Kohei down in Kudanshita, after begging out due to tired and rain last weekend. We were supposed to go hanami-ing, except as it turns out, all the sakura disappeared in the last day or two. The good part is, it wasn't crowded. The bad part is, there wasn't any sakura to look at. Alas. We bought beers at the conbini (well, he got me a weird grape-hai or something) and walked through the park, eventually giving up on finding flowers and just sitting down to drink and look at the moon instead. Then we went to the Yasukuni Shrine, which WAS crowded, though it was mostly around the big food stand there -- apparently it was full of yatai last week, but no more. Waiting in long lines for crappy food wasn't our thing, so we went wandering.

After walking for a while, we stopped for some curry bread at a place claiming to have the best curry bread in the world (it wasn't bad but it wasn't the best), and then eventually, after ending up in the middle of Jimbocho, had dinnerish food at a Mexican restaurant called El Arbolito. I thought it was fairly decent, we had a lot of avocado-based stuff (including some fabulous guacamole that had raw tuna mixed in) and he had pork rinds and I had sangria and whatnot, and the music playing was Japanese salsa, and it was just like a hole-in-the-wall Mexican place in the US, kinda, except twice as expensive, much cleaner, and no Mexicans working there. But Kohei is super-picky about Mexican food since he actually lived in Mexico at one point, and even he thought it was pretty good.

And then we went home because it was past 10 and I was getting tired. Yet now it is past midnight and I am still awake. I guess I'm dumb that way. I'll crash fairly soon though and in the morning I get to go watch college baseball, at long last! I'm psyyyyched!

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Deanna

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February 2019

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Every Day an Adventure

Entries tagged with arakawa 7 jhs

Wow

Who knew?

Mad Libs

Chorus and stuff

Moonwalking in Arakawa

Some days in school are kind of pleasant

I joined the volleyball club today at school

I like board games / I play board games / I have a board game

Sports Day at Arakawa 7 JHS

Things I Did Today

Looking at cherry blossom trees is kind of pointless without cherry blossom trees

Profile

February 2019