The other boy. Oh, the other boy. I wish I could enforce a bit more discipline in the class, but it’s not my job… Let me say something about the teacher. I think she is a lovely person but a lousy teacher. She doesn’t know how to control the class. I can’t say I’m any better, I haven’t really been tested. But her classes are always a bit rowdy. She teachers at another school with a friend of mine and she says that the teacher is the same there – not in control of her class.

Never the less, this student is really disruptive. His name is Bob – he told me that once when I asked what his name was and he regrets it now because that’s what I call him. Yesterday he was particularly charming. He asked me, “do you like….?” What followed was a word that I knew was a bad word in Japanese -what else could it be? It also had the “nyuu” in there, like from “gyuunyuu” – milk – and also in the word for “breast cancer” etc, so I knew it was something to do with the breast area. I was hoping milk, but I knew it wasn’t. Or maybe it was?…

I said, “I don’t know.”
He turned to his friends, and said in Japanese, “she doesn’t know what it means.”
So I said, “What is that?” Perhaps I shouldn’t have, but hey, at least he was talking English.
“It’s..” he said, and made a really weird gesture… He put his hands to his chest and wriggled his fingers, like his nipples had tentacles. I’m still not really sure what he/it means, so I just said,
“Oh, I see. Do you like it?”
“Yes I do.”

Ah, good times. Interaction. Better than most of the time when he just talks about some random crap, I’m convinced he’s just rambling random words, interrupting the class with outbursts, or laughing at me like a bit of a psycho. Charming child.

Today he put some toilet paper over one lens of his glasses. and was yelling out “It stinks!” Over and over again. I asked him after class, “Did you fart?” Of course he didn’t understand, so he just started his loud psycho laugh.

Grade 2 (8) is much better. There are a couple of boys in class that make it fun without really being disruptive.

First they had a short test, which involved writing the present,past and um… tenses of some words. Such as ride, rode, riding. I was “helping” one boy. He really didn’t know anything, so I said, “ing is easy” and so he wrote down all the words in ing. Then I was helping him with the Japanese translation. I thought he would know “read” as I’m sure my students in six grade know that word, and they definitely learn it in grade 7. So I pointed to it. He didn’t know. I quickly mimicked reading a book. He and a couple of other boys laughed loud and were like “Thank you Carlie! You are so kind.” Later, after the test was over, I looked and saw he wrote “open”. Because I opened a book. Oh dear.

Then they had a 5min check of the previous lesson’s work. One of the words was “storm” and they had to translate it into Japanese – arashi. They were saying, “What’s the third word? Is it tornado?”

I said, “No, it’s storm.”
“Is it hurricane?”
“No. It’s Matsumoto Jun.”
Then they asked the teacher if they would get it correct if they wrote that on the test.

There is one boy who I like a lot because he is always saying “Carlie is so nice, right sensei?” He he. I give him A+

We did some new words in the text book but the boys were skipping ahead to the next page’s words such as “Garbage” and “Waste”.
One boy was saying “people are garbage” in Japanese, I turned to him and said in English, “You are garbage.” The class laughed (or were like, what did she say?) and the boy turned around to cry. He was only joking, of course. And the boy next to him was saying “You are waste.” While I guess “you are waste” is correct, I taught him “you are a waste” because that sounds a bit more natural to me. Ah, very educational. I thought perhaps I had gone too far, but the teacher turns around and said to me that I did a good job. Ha. Oh dear.

And thus, my adventures of entertaining myself in the classroom. I am a tape recorder at middle school, and my attempts thus far to get out of that status have not been successful. I find the boys very entertaining in class and the girls are fun out of class.

Last week they had a fun goodbye party where the whole school played games. One of the competitions was for each group to draw a picture of the two home room teachers. The (badly taken picture – I know I don’t always have stunning photography here, but all the pictures were taken by a teacher and they are all bad ) photo below shows two of the better ones.

Another game was playing 2 seconds or so of a song, and the first team to say who sang it or the name gets a point. Every time something from Arashi played my Arashi partner in crime would run out to answer the question. It was great (May have to share more stories about my Arashi partner in crime. There is a hole in my world now that she is gone )

I didn’t get to go to the graduation ceremony, as I had to go to an elementary school. Today I was back at the middle school and it felt oddly (or, perhaps unoddly?) empty. I usually eat lunch with the third graders, and of course the table was empty. Instead I listened and half understood (I think) about when one of the teachers went to school (as a student) he took a huge bento box that was full of rice, other that was full of the rest of the food, and a smaller one for fruit. Man.

Today was also strange because the sun was shinning but we had three sun showers (which featured a bit of snow in there… and it wasn’t even that cold). Strange day.

So, I’m not sure how teachers do it every year. Thinking back, I was too excited to be moving on in school years to be caring much about what the teachers thought. I’m not sure I’m ready to be a mother because that calls for a greater amount of separation…

In other news, I’ve been sooo tired lately from bad sleep. Only starting to catch up this week, though I’m still tossing and turning a bit early morning. Is it because it is finally starting to warm up? Change in temp is the only thing I can think of. Hopefully I can write some better posts soon. For now, check out Eye on East Asia, a great blog because it linked to my Books for 10 Year Olds post and so it obviously has good taste.

If you are curious to see what type of food is served at school lunches, keep on reading this post, and check out my earlier post as well.

This one was pretty good, but a lot of it. Rice with stuff in it, sweet potatoes, scrambled eggs and soup.

Alphabet soup. I was sitting with kids in grade one, and they liked to put a letter on their spoon and then yell out any letter they knew. Very cute. I had this one again not long ago and they would get a letter on their chopsticks and ask me what letter it was. Very tiring.

Also potato with a garlic coating. A ham and cucumber sandwich. Was actually afraid that this was going to be a ham and chestnut sandwich. Crazy, I know, but school lunches are always crazy. I was sure they said “kyuuri” – cucumber, and it made more sense, but I was worried they said “kuri” – chestnut. I had to eat salty chestnut in rice once, it was not a pleasant experience, soooo salty. I didn’t think it went at all. I was lucky this time.

Deep fried bread. My first experience with that. Wow. Waaay too much oil. I know, that’s deep fried for you, but… wow.

Here’s a week or so in the life of me!

The week starts off with the water in the gutters all iced over. Coming from a country that is nice and warm always, stuff like this is exciting to me.

So at my middle school they were playing volleyball. At the end the winners played the teachers. OMG it was freezing inside that gym, I think I died. I didn’t have gym shoes either, but in the end one of the students let me borrow her shoes and I played for 2 minutes with the teachers, scoring one goal but also losing one goal. So I guess I contributed nothing.

An assembly after the volley ball. At things like this you bow before and after someone does a speech. I think it is a better idea than trying to clap cold hands. It is certainly different though.

The view as I walk from school to the bus stop. I always think that it is just so beautiful around here. The camera never does it justice.

I am taking all these photos from my iphone, so the quality is pretty crappy. I also always seem to get a smudge on the photos, but that is just grubby me.

At the JET mid year conference. Hmmmm…. This was better than the orientation in Tokyo for sure, but still…. The best things I got out of it were a couple of ideas for games (reverse bingo anyone?). There was also information about the teaching English program in Finland and how they can totally speak English by the end of their high school years, but of course everything that was addressed will not be implemented in Japan. They could do it – after all I’m pretty sure if they started the Middle school textbooks in grade 3 here they would be able to do it easily. Thinking that perhaps they would move a bit slower than what they do in middle school, I see no reason why a grade six student could not graduate primary school with the English knowledge of what a current grade 9er (grade 3 in middle school) would have. However it is Japan’s policy that we just play games with primary school kids so it’s not going to happen…

That’s my thoughts/rant for now!

We were the bad kids up the back…

My first time bowling in Japan. Their shoes aren’t clown shoes! I wanted to keep them.

Before bowling we had all you can eat pizza which was pretty good. I also won bowling which is an unexplained phenomenon and I hope I didn’t break the universe.

I still can’t believe people eat the whole fish, head, tail, bones, all. I can’t fathom it. The thought makes me want to throw up.

The bus on the way to work.

From the top of the hill, walking to the bus stop from my middle school

My mountain school. This is all the kids in the school.

They has a skipping expert come in from another city to teach skipping skills. It was actually a lot of fun and I think I want to get a skipping rope when the weather warms up a little bit. I remember when I was a child I used to be able to skip for hours.

Rice fields everywhere were getting… um… machined over. This one is my back yard.

Tis amazing! There are actually people on my bus today!

View from the bus

Dinner. Home made wong tong soup – perfect for a cold night.

Everywhere was covered in cloud. This is me waiting for the bus…

More cloud.

But when I got to the top of the mountain where my school was I realised I had actually stepped out of the cloud. That was pretty cool.

Middle schoolers serving lunch. At my schools everyone eats in one room.

More fish. But the vegetable thing to the right side has grown on my and I enjoy it now. At middle school you can choose how much you eat which is fantastic. I always had trouble getting through all this food. Now I am trying to be more healthy in my everyday life I’m trying not to eat more than half of the rice. I try not to be guilty about throwing out all the food I don’t eat. I am thinking that if I don’t see the results I want by the start of the new school year in April I’m going to try and cancel school lunches and bring in my own. The downside would be losing valuable interaction time with the students.

After lunch you have to separate all the rubbish. You also wash your milk carton and unfold it.

This is still the cloud day… After school the cloud had cleared at everything looked amazingly clear. You can’t see it through the camera as well, but it was awesome. This is my middle school.

Friday! This is at an elementary school. I was always a fussy eater, but as I got older I became less and less fussy and now I eat quite a lot. Unfortunately, being back in Japan I feel like a fussy eater. I don’t like seafood and I don’t like citrus fruits. These two things are often served. I managed to get rid of the orange that was served with this meal, but had to eat the tuna croquette. *sigh*.

So at this school I always had a fax machine in the corner of my desk. Now I have a fax machine in the middle of my desk and a computer on the corner of my desk. Yeah, thanks guys. I have lots of room to work on. And I can’t even feel comfortable using the computer because I sit next to the vice principal.

View of the primary school as I wait for the bus. Yayayay, it’s Friday and now weekend time!

Well, that was my week or so, let me know what you think! Do you want me to post more stuff like this?

You may have heard about a “traditional” Christmas in Japan, and I’m talking about food here – KFC and Christmas cake. There is lots of information out there on Christmas in Japan, let me throw you a link to Tofugu whose post is nice and quick and easy to digest.

I had a talk with my middle school kids about Christmas, and I think the general consensus was they didn’t really celebrate it. About half had Christmas cake, I think they were all too young for the romantic experience of it all. My English teacher is a bit different perhaps from most Japanese in that she is very interested in Western traditions, she celebrates with her children, they each get one present and they put up a Christmas tree.

I think it is also important to note that at least in my area, kids think that Santa comes from Finland, rather than the North Pole. So I think they have combined more closely Santa and Saint Nicholas, even though wikipedia says St N was from what is now called Turkey, something I didn’t know… There is one man who I haven’t had the pleasure of introducing on this blog yet. His name is Chatty Man, and I have had many pleasant experiences with him. One was him explaining in a condescending way about St N, how he is actually Santa. I believe I had to control my reflex to eyeroll and explain that yes, I know who the big N is…. Sorry, I had to get that frustration out. Lucky for me Chatty Man is at the school I have just left.

It is also interesting that kids in Japan don’t know what elves are. Some of my classes know who Dobby is from Harry Potter, and I was like “yes! He’s an Elf!” Although he is only an interpretation of an elf and the Christmas elves are a bit different, but at least that is a concept of an elf they can grab onto. My 3rd graders at Middle school knew who Dobby was, and then my 2nd graders in Primary school knew too, but then my 5th Graders in primary school didn’t know who Dobby was. (Interesting fact about Carlie: I dislike Harry Potter with a passion).

The kids also got confused when I ended classes with “Merry Christmas!” “It’s not Christmas yet…” Yes, we do say it during the Christmas period, and I wasn’t going to see them again until after Christmas…

Christmas this year felt very un-Christmas like. If I didn’t ask for holidays I would have had to go to work. Instead I went to Nara and had KFC for lunch, the most “Christmasy” thing I did. I have to say I like KFC in Japan. The chicken tastes just as fatty but you don’t have the oil running down your arms as bad. Also the bread on the burgers doesn’t taste as floury and cheap as it does back home. Some nice pluses.

My Christmas feast. Not a good substitute for Christmas food back home, but as far as KFC goes it was pretty good. I didn’t have any Christmas cake, I think this was enough calories for one day…

Merry Christmas!

I go to five schools, but from Monday onwards only four. At the school I’m leaving on Monday, it’s a sizable school of about 500 children. At this school I go to individual classrooms and eat lunch with only a class. It is my understanding that this is the usual in Japan, that students eat in their own classrooms.

The rest of my schools have 38 – 110 kids. It’s a bit unique in Japan, but at these schools we all eat in one room. I sort of end up at the same table all the time which is nice I guess.

I pay $2.40 for lunch at my primary schools and $2.80 for lunch at my middle school. Usually the money is collected monthly which i put in a nice little envelope. So it is cheap and good value for money – after all one of my complaints about it is that it is too much food!

The Proceedure

Some students put on aprons and masks to serve food. The actual serving changes per school and class – some the children line up with plates and go through conveyor belt style, others the servers serve up everything to the table and then the students arrive to their spot with the food already there.

The Food

I don’t get the food at all. I mean, I guess I just assumed that these would be balanced, healthy meals. They aren’t.

The base of the meal is either a bread roll or a large bowl of rice. And there is always milk. From there… it could be anything. I thought perhaps it would be meat, veges and fruit, but it could be anything… My main concern, however, is the amount of seafood. My predecessor told me that seafood is rare. I knew I shouldn’t have taken her word, as seafood is maybe every second day. I don’t like seafood at all, and because of this I look to lunch with dread…

This here is actually a good day. The shreaded cabbage is a taste I’m a bit over, and I don’t get how this carb overload is balanced, but pasta is a win for me. At the start I had trouble eating so much rice.

Another thing for me to complain about! I have never really been a fan of soups. I find them really bland. Lucky for me, soup is often a common feature in school lunches ;( However, the plus side is you can dip your bread into them. The bread is so dry that I find it really hard to eat by itself (I’m the kind of person who likes butter on my bread) but it is a bit more bearable after being dipped in the soup. On the plus side, even though there is a lot of rice with meals, I do find it to be really nice rice.

Lunch is either eaten with either a fork or chopsticks. It is always interesting to see if people eat things by picking them up whole or trying to break them apart with the utensil provided. There is never a spoon so soup is to be had by picking up the bowl. I can’t help feeling a bit rude every time I do this.

Note the shredded cabbage again. Yay!

The stuff to the top left is mochi – pounded rice, which I find waaaaaay too sweet. The middle stuff, I’m not sure what it is besides seaweed, but with this stuff I’ve gotten to the point where if I have more than a mouth full I want to throw it back up. It’s gross!! The stuff to the right are local grown vegetables. They are potato and carrot and daikon, and are actually really nice but they put on/cook them in some kind of sauce which I am not a big fan of. So it makes it a bit of a challenge to eat. There is something missing from this dish too:

Now, deep fried fish I’ll try. Grilled fish too, you know. It’s gross, but I might be able to bear it. With this, I’m not touching it with a ten foot pole… It’s some kind of fish with babies inside. And you eat the head and tail. Um… no thanks. I think only non seafood eaters can truely understand the horror of this.

An article about how schools use local grown ingredients in school lunches.

Another popular serving is the salad doused in mayonnaise. Which can either be a welcome change to a bland salad or sweetness overkill. This lunch is another one of those good lunches! Yay!

The Rest…

Before lunch everyone always says “Itadakimasu!” and after everyone says together “Gochisosamadeshita”. After you have finished eating you separate all the rubbish. Milk cartons are always washed and then flattered out. And then finally I can breath a sigh of relief… It’s over and I wont have to face that enormous, seafoody event for another 24 hours. Yay!

Yeah, I know. Not liking seafood… I moved to the wrong country.

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Remember those ninjas I talked about? Turns out I’ll soon be living with them!!

OK, I am not going to be in Iga-Ueno, which is where the Ninja Museum is, but soon I will be living in the same prefecture as them. I’m so excited and can’t wait – it’s only about a month away now.

I will be teaching in a small village of about 4000 people. There is a middle school and three elementaries. The schools are all small, with the middle school only having 98 kids. I’m very excited!