Marmite and tattoos

I just wanted to make a couple of observations here. 

Firstly, in staff meeting this morning I was pondering my changing attitude to my tattoo here in Japan (because staff meeting is entirely in Japanese, it's amazing the things I think about while the vice-principal informs us of all the serious stuff going on.  Last week I nodded and smiled eagerly because they were talking about Onomichi - a place I know and love.  Turns out they were talking about a train crash in Onomichi and how we didn't know yet if any of our students had been injured.  So smiling was not the right thing...??).  Anyway, today I thought about tattoos.  Before I came I was concerned by how many people talked about the inappropriateness of tattoos here in Japan and the need to cover them up.  As such, I always was careful to wear my watch with the super chunky band that covers my tattoo.  But over my time here I've slowly started to move from a 'when in Rome' mentality to a 'this is my culture, deal' attitude.  Although I obviously don't want to scare any old ladies and I will always cover it at school, I also think more about how I am a cultural representative so it's a good thing if the Japanese can learn from me that I can have a tattoo WITHOUT having gang affiliations! 

I guess one of the big moments for this came when some students at my visit school noticed a bit when my watch strap moved.  To shut them up I told them what it was, but told them it was a secret.  I make the assumption that they told the rest of the class immediately after I left the room and that, by now, the whole school, teachers included, know about it.  But you know what?  The sky didn't fall.  The subject was never brought up again.  Either I found the only three 16 yr olds capable of keeping a secret, or the youngsters here are a lot more savvy about foreign ways than the older folks believe. 

Since that little episode, I've been much more relaxed about it.  I will go to the supermarket 'uncovered', even the one right next to my house only just down the hill from school.  And I no longer get heart palpitations if my watch strap moves while I'm at school. 

Now for my other topic... Marmite.  Marmite currently consumes about 87% of my thinking.  You know all the stats on how blokes think of sex every 4 seconds?  That's me with Marmite right now.  I can't believe the timing, that the shelves are being cleared the week before I come home to stock up!  I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the Marmite gods will smile on me and I will be able to get hold of some...

In other Marmite news, I have converted one of my students!  It was a farewell afternoon tea for the English club kids.  I thought I should do something New Zealandy, so I took crackers and Marmite, plus some Japanese choccie biccies for a backup.  The crackers were like Snax and I spread a thin sliver of Marmite on each.  I didn't expect them to eat more than one each, but one girl, a vegan, couldn't get enough of them!  This student is very unusual.  She plays guitar, writes her own songs, is passionate about animal rights and is going off to music school because she wants to work in the industry.  When her class each asked me a question after my self-intro ('What is your favourite food?', 'What is your favourite colour?', 'Do you like Japan?'), her question was 'Does NZ have an SPCA?'  I happened to have an SPCA shopping bag Mum had left me when she visited, so I gave it to the student.  She was super delighted and has told me she will take it to university with her, as it's her favourite bag.  It's wonderful when you can give these little gifts that mean so little to you, but mean so much to someone else! 

Anyway, today she emailled me that she has bought Vegemite (I had told her about the local import store stocking it.  She also said she had bought Marmite, but that may be a miscommunication.  If she really has got Marmite, I'm going wherever the hell she went to get it, asap!).  She wanted to know what 'recipe recommendations' I had.  I said on toast, with either avocado, cheese or egg.  If anyone else has any suggestions, please let me know.  Although I believe I am rather... undiscriminating... with my Marmite usage.  For example, when Jeff made pancakes, I had a delicious Marmite and cheese pancake.  It was awesome.  I'm drooling in memory of it.  But if anyone does have any other suggestions for usage, I'm sure my little vegan would appreciate it! 

Hope you're all doing well and having a good week.  :)

NZ countdown!

Four sleeps till NZ!  Well, four for Jeff, because he can't sleep on planes, but five for me.  If I can get over my excitement about NZ wine on a plane to go to sleep! 

Things are pretty sad at school at the moment.  Out of the 12-odd English staff, around half are part-timers, so I assumed they would be staying at our school.  Turns out that for various personal reasons, most of them are leaving!  The teacher whose classes I find the easiest to teach is leaving, having only been here as a long term temp while another woman had a baby.  The woman that I did dinner with last year (and will again on Wed) is leaving for a junior high school.  Another teacher, who tried so hard to be friends that she went and watched Black Sheep to report back on it, mentioned today that she won't be here next year.  This sucks!  At this stage there are still three teachers that I'm friends with who aren't leaving, but two of the three may hear bad news on Wednesday.  Well, it would be bad news for me.  No idea how they would feel about it.  I'm pretty sure Kanmuri-sensei doesn't want to leave after eight years here (don't quote me on that number.  It's somewhere between six and ten), but she is also very very unusual in having been left in one spot for so long, so I think those eight years mean she is extremely likely to be shifted.  Often teachers are shifted every two or three years. 

I went to my supervisor today to try to get any information available on my teaching situation next year.  I had written out a list of questions that I tried him on.  Unfortunately he is of the class of human that, if he doesn't know the answer or doesn't understand the question, tries to give you an answer that sounds right, irrespective of its accuracy.  Nevertheless, I'm going to assume about 2/3 of what I was told will be correct.  According to him, I will continue to teach in the projector room (the rainforests of the world should rejoice in the saving on printing!), I will continue to visit Tode High on Tuesdays, there will no longer be a second ALT that I need to prepare a lesson plan for and I will be teaching both first and second year students.  The good news is that teaching second years will give me more on my schedule.  The bad news is that when I teach first years, the lesson topic is entirely my own choice.  This makes no sense to me, as I could give them great lessons on speaking about the moon in English, but it wouldn't help them in exams or everyday conversation!  Despite the fact they won't have a textbook, I think I'll run through the same type of topics they covered in the textbook anyway, just to give me SOME kind of guideline to work with!  Of course the freedom of spending the lesson however I like will be nice, but it also involves much more THINKING when I don't have a topic to cover with the students. 

Tomorrow (Tuesday) is a public holiday, so Jeff and I are having a Cleaning Day.  That way we can return to a nice clean, sparkly house.  On Sunday we got a head start, cleaning the kitchen (we even cleaned under the stove, Mum!).  Of course the problem with that was that Jeff then cooked spag bol.  There is no concensus on who dripped mincey tomatoeyness on the clean stove, but the fact is the lovely clean stove had to be hastily wiped down to preserve it's freshly cleaned allure!  Hopefully cleaning the floors and bathroom when Jeff has only one more night in the house will be safe.  As long as he doesn't decide to shave his head in the middle of the kitchen floor, or the hamster spit seeds all over my back and the tatami (it's happened before... The hamster thing, not the Jeff thing...), we should be good. 

After our Cleaning Day we have two days of work before heading towards the airport.  On Wednesday night we will stay in our seperate apartments, finalising packing.  Well, Jeff will stay in Jinseki so he doesn't get swallowed by my packing and accidentally zipped into my suitcase.  My technique requires much space.  In my defence, Jeff has been struggling to figure out what to take to NZ.  He told me he was wondering if thermals were necessary, to which I asked if he had ever worn thermals in NZ?  Sheepishly he said no, he hadn't, but that he couldn't remember what NZ was like.  My slightly homesick response was, 'Comfortable.  NZ is always comfortable.' 

Also on Wednesday, I will go to dinner with Inohara-sensei, one of the part-time teachers who is not returning.  I told her I didn't have much money at the moment so I couldn't come if it was going to be too expensive.  She got back to me today to tell me it was 3000 yen (roughly $45), but that if I couldn't afford it the cost would be shared round the other people going to dinner.  Of course not having money because I'm saving it to take it home is not a suitable reason for expecting others to pay your dinner.  BUT I can't get out of it on financial grounds because they said they would pay if I couldn't.  Awkward.  I guess I would still go, even if I wasn't in this tricky situation, just because Inohara-sensei is lovely and I want to stay friends with her even now she is not teaching with me, but it would have been nice to have the option.  I was hoping for a cheap dinner.  It's less that I mind the cost, but that a delicious okonomiyaki costs about 700 yen, a tasty burger and chips costs about 1000 yen, an acceptable Italian meal costs about 3000 and an edible huge traditional meal of sashimi and sliced sea slug costs about 6000 yen.  See where I'm going with this??  In Japan, how much I pay for a meal is a fairly good inverse indication of how much I'll enjoy the meal!  Hence I'm concerned about paying 3000 at somewhere pretty Japanesey.  I'm super super sick of paying lots of money for food that turns my stomach when I eat some simply to be polite! 

Of course, it may be one of those wonderful buffets (ask Steve or Geoff and Sandra about them!) where you can eat what you feel like, Japanese or Western.  That I would enjoy.  But I'll just have to wait and see... 

Speaking of food... in ten minutes I can leave here.  I am heading down to my apartment, where I will hoover the floor before packing the car and driving up to Jinseki.  On the way I will stop at the supermarket to buy our gourmet dinner of... supermarket salad.  Having said that, anyone who has spent any time in Japan will understand that you can buy all kinds of decent food at the supermarket, so I will have a choice out of about five different salads, or another five different traditional Japanese vegetable dishes.  Pretty good for a meal on the run - sure beats Maccas!  The only catch is I always get distracted by the fried goodies and often accidentally get myself a potato crochette or some pumpkin tempura.  Makes the salad idea a bit less healthy! 

Tonight, wish me the strength to buy supermarket dinner without buying anything fried, no matter how good it all smells!

Coin collecting

But... some good news to follow that up...

I just managed to get a lucky coin!  It's a special 500 yen coin, released last year.  Usually they are gold with 500 written across them, but this one is gold around the edge, with a silver inside and a picture of a castle in Kyushu.  A student had it, but she needed to pay some bill at school, so she reluctantly handed it over.  The teacher who was paid, who needed to pass it on to the school office showed me and explained about it.  I convinced her to let me swap it now I have in my possesion this special coin!  It is in a different part of my wallet so I don't accidentally spend it! 

Now I will attempt to add the picture...

Success!  Now you can all be envious of my awesome new coin. :D

Holiday - oh no, NOT holiday...

Hey there,

Prepare... I'm about to have a moan!

On Thursday the 1st my school had their graduation ceremony and on the 2nd the students started exams. I asked two (note that, not one but TWO) teachers if we have classes after exams. Both said no, there are no more classes.

Guess what? In a conversation on a totally different topic with Nakamura-sensei, she mentioned the classes running next week and the Monday of the following week. Wtf??

I know it shouldn't be a big deal, because I'll just play some games and maybe get them to write a paragraph, so it doesn't require any big prep or anything. But I THOUGHT I was on holiday! I thought I wasn't teaching all month, so I had plenty of time to catch up on my marking, prepare classes for next school year (has to be done early because I'll be teaching first day back after NZ), make resources, study Japanese, work on my infamous book and do all the little planning/sorting things involved in a new school year.

It's not like I don't have enough time to do it during exam week, but if I had known I only had that week, I would have done more on my To Do list instead of relaxing, writing blogs and books and doing less important stuff!

As it is, I feel totally ripped off. Here I was, enjoying my holiday, when I find out I was under false impressions... I am not, in fact, on holiday! Instead, I have been squandering a small break in my schedule!

*** Interlude ***

I just had a conversation with the teacher who informed me last year that I'll be teaching from a grammar textbook and that I may be teaching classes of 40 students. The good news is that my classes will be staying at 20 students (although it's not officially okayed by the Board of Education yet), while the bad news is that I'm only going to see them every second week. That sucks because currently I have a great schedule - two or three classes a day (with the occasional four, usually at Tode High School), with a total of 12-14 classes each week. But there are lots of ALTs out there who spend most days twiddling their thumbs, considering a two class day as a heavy workload. They get bored stupid, so I really really don't want that! Of course, there is a chance they will therefore get rid of the second ALT at this school and have me five days a week, but considering I have no idea why they swap me out for one day a week, I also don't know what would induce the Board of Education to keep me here all week.

The other bad news (which will sound familiar to Jeff), is that all the big changes will be announced by the Board of Education on next week, Friday. In theory, this leaves all the teachers two weeks to prepare for the new school year. This is not much at all, considering the changes we will hear include which teachers are being moved out of the school; whether our 20 student classes are approved; and for me which schools I will be posted at and which days of the week. I had assumed my schedule wouldn't change, but if Myoodai is dropping from 14 ALT classes a week to only 7, maybe they will keep me here all the time. I don't know... Seven classes a week BEFORE removing the ones Sam will teach... that's so few!!

Anyway, the result of that situation is that while most teachers have two weeks to get organised, because we are leaving for NZ I will have only three working days to plan my lessons and figure out what I'm doing. I have been told that my textbook is being revoked and, if I understand correctly, I can teach a totally textbook-less class. I asked if I could then follow the lessons I was teaching this last year (because I never had the students open the textbook anyway) and was told that the third year teachers were going to formulate a plan for what they wanted taught in first year. Fair enough, but they will probably do that while I'm in NZ. Class starts on the 2nd of April, when Sam will be teaching a lesson according to my lesson plan, but I will still be in NZ. So I need to have that first lesson ready to go before I leave. I guess I'll just have to make an intro lesson that is based on writing self-introductions and introducing the ALT. Nothing related to the course because I won't have a clue what they will need me to teach.

Hmm... only just occured to me that when I say Sam will be teaching on the Tuesday I'm in NZ, I'm making an assumption based on this year's schedule. It may just be me missing a class. Gah, I hate this period of the year! I know Jeff is made just as antsy by it, waiting on tenterhooks to find out a) how/if his schedule is changing (it's not) and b) which teachers are changing (he has his fingers crossed regarding a few teachers). We have had several conversations about how we could never be Japanese teachers, getting passed around from school to school with minimal warning and no say as to where you go!

Sorry about that moan there! In case you haven't noticed we are super homesick and can't wait for our holiday!!

 

Hope you're all doing well.

Charly

Procrastination

Procrastination.  It's a bad thing.  Usually.  Except sometimes, you're so busy procrastinating one thing, that you do lots of other useful things.  Like when Jeff was studying.  I was so sad when he finished his 499 paper, because the house was spotless when he was supposed to be worked on that project.  And today, I should have spent all day catching up on the Japanese study that I'm about three weeks behind in (test due next week).  Have I looked at my Japanese today?  No.  But you know what?  I've done about four pages of editing/writing on my blog/book (need a catchier title for that...), something I haven't looked at in months and months.  2,069 words today, thank you very much.  And I'm very, very pleased with myself. 

Just to clarify, that's not because my writing was brilliant or that the thing is looking so polished - there is still a lot to be done.  I view this project as like peeling an onion.  Or painting a wall.  But something with layers.  Oh, stripping a wall and then repainting, that's what it's like!  I'm currently taking out real names, glossing details and noting or plugging holes in the story.  But I'm very pleased with myself because even if it takes me ten years to finish this thing, every little bit I do on it gets me closer to my goal of having written a completed book.  Even without publishing, it would be exciting to say I had written a book! 

That's all I had to say right now...  I'm off to photocopy the grammar points of my Japanese book and jump straight to the test without doing any of the activities or learning any of the new grammar.  Not ideal, but better than just giving up.  I have severe doubts about whether I'll bother signing up for the Intermediate course next year.  At least I don't have to worry about failing this Beginner course - firstly I have Jeff to check my tests for me, and secondly Jeff has the old tests, so when he's not sure of the answer he checks the answer schedule!  Although it does take the fun out of receiving your grade when you already know it'll be 100!  Having said that, I have found that studying by discussing it with Jeff is a really great way to learn and remember the new Japanese.  I find it very hard to remember stuff when I've only read it, so speaking and discussing it means I remember much better.  That's in case anyone wanted to accuse me of straightup cheating ;)

Hope you're all doing well.  I'm enjoying my break from classes and am counting down till we return to NZ!  Yay!