Graduation

Yesterday was the san nen sei graduation, and it was different than I expected. In terms of the actual ceremony it was exactly what I expected actually: long, heavily scripted and entirely in Japanese. My actual feelings were a lot different though. Since I haven’t had class with these students in quite awhile, and even then couldn’t really talk to them in much detail I thought I would be fairly indifferent to them leaving, but I wasn’t. At one point after the actual ceremony all the students and teachers lined up on either side of the walkway outside the school and the san nen seis all paraded through on their way out of the school. As one student who I am particularly fond of passed, she ran out from the group and gave me a letter and thanked me. I don’t think anything could make me want to be a teacher more.

After that all the san nen seis and their families gathered in the parking lot next to the school to take pictures and talk. Leaving the school seemed to give some of the kids much more courage, since more asked to have their pictures taken with me than were forced to by their parents. At the end the student who gave me the letter asked me if I knew what the Hina Matsuri was (I thought she said Hanami Matsuri, “cherry blossom viewing”, so I said I did), then she invited me to her house on the weekend to see her family’s display. I was really impressed that she was both brave enough to ask me, and that she was good enough to do it all in English. Anyway, I said I would go and then looked up Hina Matsuri on Wikipedia (it means Girl’s Day). Anyway, here are the pictures:

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