Graduation

Hey there,


This is a just for me to share a student's work with you, as I feel I've been overdoing it on facebook lately! 

This is one of the better answers I received - very few mistakes.  But is this what's to become of my intelligent students??

Tell me your favourite part of Japanese culture:

I like the loyalists in the last day of the Tokugawa Shogunate.  There is a lot of man who rise to greatness in turbulent times.  One of these guys, I like Yodo Yamauchi.  He was heavy drinker.  He always drunk sake.  I wanna be like him. 


Oh man!  lol 

Today was graduation day.  I was prepared for one hour of sitting in the freezing gym listening to presentations in a language I don't understand.  It was two and a half hours.  I finally ducked out for a toilet break after two hours, deeming disturbing everyone to be preferable to wetting myself. 

I noticed many of the parents, students and teachers taking naps during the presentation, but I couldn't overcome my cultural notion that sleeping during important ceremonies (or, indeed, sleeping during work hours at all) is a total no-no.  However, I had to question the Japanese love of overlong, overformal ceremonies, when they also love to nap anywhere, anytime.  Surely one cancels out the other?  Let's just skip to the chase and save ourselves an hour and a half of pomp, hey? 

However, today I learnt an important Japanese fashion lesson.  Apparently to be a woman dressed formally here, all you need to do is wear a black jacket and pin a huge fabric flower to your lapel.  Bonus points for glitter, lace, pearls, or anything big enough to pull your top so it's lopsided.  On one woman, it looks nice.  On a whole tribe of women, all decked out in flowers of varying pastel shades with the odd metallic from the ones under 40, it looked ridiculous. 

Personally, I felt stink that I had nothing special to wear today.  Various outfits in my wardrobe are suitably formal so that I didn't feel underdressed, but it would have been nice to do something special when everyone else was looking so smart.  So now I'm wondering if it's taking the piss if I get myself a nice black tie.  I used to have Dad's black silk one on a permenant loan (he stole if from a Coke advertising set, so he couldn't complain too much!), so I'm thinking of getting my own.  Then I can slap on a nice black tie with a white shirt and look suitably formal without having to go all Japanese with a pin-on flower.  Opinions... is that rocking the boat crossing gender clothing norms, or just being acceptably non-uniform (which is what us foreigners do best!).

Ok, I'm going to head home now.  I am pretty sure (haven't been told officially or anything) that I have no more classes for the school year.  Which means I have three weeks to catch up on journal marking, Japanese study and all the other odds and ends that have been accumulating.  And after that three weeks... NEW ZEALAND!  Yay! 

The only downside is that we have no downtime between getting back to Japan and starting work (I think I'll miss the first two days or something.  On the bright side no opening ceremony.  Yay!!).  That means I'll have to prepare some lessons and stuff so I'm all ready to go.  I still don't know what textbook I'm using and whether I'll have 20 students or 40 students per class.  Obviously that changes things a bit...  But I'm very excited about being able to train them from the start.  I'll give them all a piece of paper with common classroom requests and phrases.  It will include things like 'make a circle', 'where is it?', 'please read it' and other things they should totally know from junior high school but have forgotten or pretend not to remember.  Grammar points to cover early will be that 'Are you ready?' cannot be correctly answered by 'Ok' and that 'I like baseball.  Because it's fun.' is not, in fact, two sentences.  No matter how badly you are trying to hit the five sentence minimum.  I will also clearly establish my expectation that they will bring their notebook to every class and that they will stick loose paperwork into their book or folder.  Then, if they don't comply with those things and get caught out, they will be performing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes to the class. 

It's been hard taking over from someone else mid-year, when I have no idea what type of classroom expectations he had or what type of classroom commands he used.  As he was American, I think a fair number of the common commands and phrases would be different.  Anyway, clean slate with these students.  And because I'm staying for another year, I'll be taking them right through.  I will start the journal writing exercise early with them (my recent experiments with it suggest it will be highly beneficial writing practise) and I hope to see the new students do better than the group that have just finished their first year.  The school has been trying to fix an issue with English scores dropping, so I'm excited to potentially make a positive impact with instilling English journals.  Even if they only improve by 3%, 3% each times 280 odd students is... well, a lot of percent!  Writing it like this, it sounds egotistical/overly enthusiastic to think I can fix an issue a whole school is grappling with, but I really think regular writing practise in an informal format (eg. not just practising set phrases for the exam) could make a real difference in students enjoyment and understanding of the language. 

Well, you'll hear all about it if I pour my heart and soul into this idea and it doesn't take off.  And by 'heart and soul' I mean spare time and lunchbreak! 

Hope you're all doing well.  NZ... see you soon!!!