Graduation Preparations

My sannensei (third grade junior high) students will be graduating on March 5th, so the past couple of weeks everyone's been busy with preparations for their graduation.

Last Thursday (Feb 21) I stayed after school to help clean the gym. It was a lot of work and freezing cold to boot! I spent an hour/hour and a half along with maybe twenty students and three or four other teachers washing and scrubbing the floor and when I left we weren't even finished. Hard to believe I used to think that having students/staff clean the school themselves was a great idea! You have no idea how hard black scuff marks can be to clean by hand!

This Thursday (Feb 28) was a fun day. Everyone ate lunch together in the first floor general purpose/meeting room. The tables were arranged so there was a mix of ichi-, ni- and sannensei (first, second and third graders) along with the teachers and everyone got a slice of cake along with the regular school lunch. Then for fifth and sixth periods, we had a graduation celebration in the gym. The ichi- and ninensei presented skits in honour of the sannensei, and the teachers (myself included!) sang a song for them as well. Their homeroom teacher, Ito-sensei, also made a video for them.

It was really cute! I thought it was going to just be a slideshow (and there was one) but he actually made a short film where Doraemon (a time traveling blue cat robot) appeared and brought him back to see the sannensei in the past. (Some ninensei students acted the roles of sannensei.) Of course, having only spent six months with them, I didn't get a lot of the references, but they did have one scene showing three of the "sannensei" (acted by the ninensei, remember) practicing for the culture festival after party, so I recognized that. ^_^

Anyway, it's finally starting to sink in that the sannenensei will be graduating in less than a week. Man, I'm really going to miss them!!

And realizing that I will indeed miss them has also reminded me just how blessed I am in the work I'm doing here. I mean, not only do I get to see my students regularly (as opposed to being a one-shot who goes to a different school every day and sees the same class maybe once every couple of months), but I'm based at a small school (38 students in total) so I've been able to really get to know them.

So yeah, apart from the stuff that's been happening in school, I've also been working on graduation gifts for the sannensei. Even though I've been planning their gifts since January, I only really started working on them three weeks ago so most of my free time has been thus occupied.

What am I giving them? One of the few things (apart from chocolate chip cookies) that I can make with any degree of confidence: sock monkeys!

I bought the socks at the 100 yen store (Daiso, to be exact) but they were a little short, so I actually had to reverse the body. See, usually the toe of the sock is the monkey's head, and the opening is sewn into the feet, but I had to sew up the opening to make the head and make the toe into the legs.

I also cut stars out of foam and wrote "Sotsugyo omedetou" ("Congratulations on your graduation) on the front and "Kirita Chugakkou - Melissa" on the back. I then pinned the stars to a ribbon I tied round the monkeys' necks.

I finally finished all of them today, so take a look:

Great Dictionary Conversation Starters

One of the 3rd year students at Kirita decided to use her dictionary to make conversation during lunch on Thursday. She started with some questions from what I'm guessing was an appendix at the back (of the dictionary) and then moved to seemingly random sentence examples from different dictionary entries. Here are some of the gems she used:

- Will you be my boyfriend?
- I want to hold your hand.
- That sweater becomes you very well.
- I have bittersweet memories of my first love.

I'm especially fond of the last one. It led to a conversation between a few of us about first loves and when they occurred. Interestingly, all three girls whom I asked said they had their first loves between the ages of 3 and 5. @_@ I don't think I had my so-called "first love" until junior high school!

Kids Ask the Darndest Things!

I'm always a little apprehensive before an elementary school visit, but once I'm at the school, I usually have a great time.

Sanbongi Elementary School is probably my favourite school. The kids are always genki (energetic, cheerful) and excited to be with me; it's the one school where I get the "rock star" treatment, i.e. kids ask me to sign their notebooks and things.

So today I was teaching the fifth graders at Sanbongi ES and it was my first time meeting them, so I did my self-introduction followed by a time for questions. One of the classes came up with a lot of amusing questions. Well, I guess the individual questions weren't really that funny, but together they totally made me smile:

- Are you married? (This is all in Japanese, of course.)
- What type of person do you like?
- Do you have a boyfriend?
- Do you plan to get married?
- Do you want to get married?
(The last two were asked by the same student. =P)

One student asked me about famous Canadians (I NEVER know how to answer this one, especially since it's always elementary kids who ask it!) and the only person I could think of that they might know was "Avril Lavigne." They misheard me, though, and thought I said "afro." I corrected them, of course, and we all had a good laugh.

Then a couple of minutes (maybe 10 questions) later, as the final question of the class, a student asked: "Since you have long hair, have you ever had an afro?" =P

That was probably the best question I've ever been asked during a self-introduction. ^_^

On a somewhat related note, I had a bit of a chuckle over the answers some of my second grade students at Kirita gave to the question: "What's your type?"

In Japanese, "ogenki desu ka" is roughly equivalent to "How are you?" and "genki desu" is "I'm fine." So in this context, genki in English is "fine," but in general the translation of genki would be more along the lines of "energetic" or "cheerful." Well, my students didn't really know this, so when they were answering the question "What's your type?" a couple of them said things like: "Kind and fine."

My JTE thought it was a bit funny because it was as if they were saying they like healthy/sound-bodied people, but I was thought it was amusing because they were trying not to be superficial but they didn't realize that "fine" is slang for "good looking" or "sexy."

That whole discussion on "types" was interesting too because the last boy (out of three in the grade) to answer the question came straight out and said he liked "cute" girls. Of course there was some ribbing about that to which he responded that the other guys' answers--"kind," "cheerful" &etc.--were "strange" (henna) and not really truthful.

A Happy Valentine's Day

As a happily single person, I could usually care less about Valentine's Day, but it was actually a lot of fun this year. Knowing that V-Day is a pretty big holiday in Japan, I spent the past two nights (Tuesday and Wednesday) baking chocolate chip cookies (using strawberry-flavoured and milk chocolate--yummy!) for all of the students and teachers at Kirita, plus the people in my section at the Towada Board of Education (60 people in total).

I somehow managed to wake up early enough to go to the office and back (~1hr roundtrip) before I had to leave to go to school. It was kind of fun (even though it was snowing and I was tired) because I was the first and only person in the office so I felt a little like Santa Claus (the Valentine Fairy?).

Then at Kirita, all of the students and teachers were appreciative of my V-Day presents, plus I got to do V-Day activities with all of my classes.

And the chocolate!!

I thought the (female) students would only give presents to the male teachers, but a lot of them made enough for all of the teachers (plus their classmates). One thing I learned, though, is that it’s a good idea to keep some sticky notes handy to identify the giver of each present as they’re given; it’s important to know who gave you presents so that you don’t miss giving anyone White Day presents. (March 14th is White Day, a day when girls who gave Valentine’s chocolate receive presents in return.)

Anyway, I came home with quite a haul!

















For more (close-up) pictures of the presents, please see my Facebook photo page at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=91348&l=7d2e2&id=655150561.

After school we had a rehearsal for a play some of us (ALTs) will be performing in Japanese at an "international" event in Towada. Following that the six of us went for dinner at a great Italian place in Towada called "Papa de Mucho."

Since I was in such a good mood, I decided to splurge and ordered the "Papa de" course: salad; pasta; dessert; and a soft drink. They were out of tiramisu, but the chocolate mousse was delicious, so it was fine.