English Teachers’ Meeting

Yesterday all the JTEs and ALTs in Asago-shi went to Mark’s school to watch him and his JTE have a lesson, and then we discussed that lesson and team teaching in general in a meeting after. The lesson itself was a lot of fun. The kids were much more energetic having six ALTs instead of just one, plus the lesson was mostly games so they never seemed to get bored. The meeting on the other hand was more difficult. Fortunately the majority of it was in English so we could understand, but that was obviously much harder for some of the JTEs. As you might expect, we couldn’t have a very detailed discussion when one half of the teaching teams spoke primarily English and the other spoke primarily Japanese. Also, the nature of the meeting was pretty different for me because of the Japanese aversion to criticism. Many things were deemed to be valuable, but almost nothing was criticized, which to me seems like half an evaluation.

On a different note, one girl in the class came up to me after (her friend pushed her actually), and asked if I was from Ontario. When I said I was she showed me a University of Toronto pen. I asked if she had been there, and she said no, then we had to go in different directions. Apparently the ALTs at Mark’s school have all been American, so now I am curious about where she got that pen. 

Ikuno Fall Festival

Today Meghan and I went to the fall festival in Ikuno, which is where Okuganaya Elementary is located. It wasn’t quite as long as the one in Asago, but it was still pretty interesting to watch. I got to see some of my students too, which was nice. One kid, who I’m pretty sure is in Kindergarten, actually remembered my name. It’s really impressive because not only do most of my students not know how to say my name, but I have only had one class with Kindergarten. Anyway, here are the pictures:

See the whole album

And a video:

Ojiisan

So today I had my usual classes at Okuganaya, then I was sitting in the staffroom waiting for the end of the day when the Kocho sensei comes up to me and tells me to follow her to the sewing room. Apparently this school of 40 students has a sewing room, and it is full of old ladies. Anyway, I was asked there to meet one of these ladies in particular, who then talked to me about her family for a pretty long time. She started alluding to the fact that she wanted me to come to her to talk more about her family, so I pretended not to understand her. She then explained it all to Takehashi sensei, who explained it to me. I said I was busy after school, but since I technically work till 4 but get off at 3, that left one free hour, which she took. So I went to her house, which was nice, and listened to more stories about her family. They’re very successful by the sounds of it, someone works at the embassy in Ghana, and someone else is in San Francisco for something. She showed me tons of pictures of trips she went on with her family, and showed me brochures from some of the sites in Paris. Then she started asking about what other times I could visit, because apparently that is normal, and I played the “wakarimasen” (“I don’t understand”) card again. She said that sometimes I should come over for dinner, but again I pretended I didn’t know what she meant. As I was leaving I coughed a bit, and she gave me some candies that she said would help. I tried one in the car, and it was in my mouth for exactly as long as the window took to get down far enough for me to spit it out. They were some sort of ginger flavoured things, and they burned like crazy. Anyway, the whole afternoon was bizarre, and I have a feeling I haven’t seen the last of her.

Denshi Jisho

A while ago Meghan showed me the Denshi Jisho website, and I found it pretty useful. I’m bored at work at the moment, so I decided to write about it. Basically it’s an online translator, but one that actually seems useful for Japanese. I’ve tried using Babelfish, and the Yahoo version, but both of those always return some pretty ridiculous results. With this site, however, a number of results are usually given in Kanji, Hiragana/Katakana, and English (so you can see what it means literally).

Japanese Class

For the last few weeks I’ve been taking a beginner’s Japanese class in Toyooka. Toyooka is a pretty small city (maybe a little smaller than St. Catharines) about an hour away from Asago. The class is two hours once a week, and I drive there with Myrie and Mark so it isn’t a very big hassle.

Learning Japanese in this class has been really good for letting me know what it’s like for my students. The teacher speaks English, but not very well, so it is much different than learning French in school was. I don’t find the material especially difficult, but I also don’t feel like I could use what I’ve learned in many situations. In fact the only times I’ve used any of it have been talking to very small children (but they did understand).

Anyway, I’m happy that I’m learning Japanese, albeit slowly. I am also glad that I know what it feels like for my students to stand up in front of their friends and try to say the simplist thing using impossible sounds and intonations.