Car Photo, Kanashima JHS

Continuation of the post from a little while ago - check below for new segment before reading this. Or whatever, read this first if you don't mind a spoiler, see if I care.

Here's my little car! Woo! It don't look like much, but it gets about 500 miles to the gallon. Which is a good thing, because a gallon of gas costs about 500 dollars. It's gonna need snow tires soon, and I've already got an Ice scraper. Now, I don't have much experience in this area, and my company as usual doesn't have much in the way of helpful advice, so if anyone can think of any problems with cold-weather operation of a car that won't be solved by running it for five minutes before driving out, please, PLEASE let me know.

So, since I've been teasing you all about this for heaven knows how long, and I don't have much going on tonight, I will finally let you in on what my schools are like, and my experiences teaching English in Japan. Don't get too excited.

For the past 4 and a half months, I've been teaching at a junior high school and an elementary school in Shibukawa. Both are within biking distance of my house, but it takes a while, so having a car is definitely a plus. I spend every Wednesday at the elementary school, and the other four days at the junior high school. At both levels, the kids are great!

The junior high school is known as Kanashima junior high school, as it's in a little town in the greater Shibukawa area called Kanashima. Kanashima means "money island," I guess because the river forms an island in that area or something. Maybe they struck gold there. Anyway. Here's the website for Kanashima Junior High School, it's not much, but it's what they've got:

http://www.kanashima-j.ed.jp/

If you click on some of the links on that page, you might run across some photos of the sports teams in action, or see the lyrics to the school song - in Japanese, of course. ^_^

Kanashima is just about your typical small-town junior high school. It has about 220 students, divided into two classes of 30-40 students in each of 3 grade levels. That's few enough students to remember most faces, but far too many to remember most names. Especially since they're all Japanese names, which to me are just a collection of sounds. I've been trying my best, but it's really hard. The teaching itself is okay - I generally teach three or four classes a day on a normal week, but it seems like every week there's some special activity or something to alter the schedule (seriously, these kids have a LOT of activities, more on that later), so I end up teaching about 12 classes a week in the four days I'm at Kanashima. Pretty light schedule. Ideally, I see each class twice a week, plus the special education (ajisai) class twice a week, too. An uninterrupted week doesn't often happen, though. For the regular classes, the twice a week lessons consist of one regular class and one "main team teaching class." In the main team teaching classes, the Japanese English teacher tries to have me do activities and teach more than in the regular classes. I consider myself lucky in this, because it means I get to plan the occasional activity, where some assistant language teachers are essentially human tape recorders, just reading out what's in the text, so the students can hear a native say it. I think I've worked out a fairly good arrangement with the Japanese teacher I work with. In both classes, the class starts with a criss-cross game, which is basically a review of a concept that was done earlier in the term - I run that, and decide what material will be reviewed. It usually runs about ten minutes. Then, the teacher goes over the point of the day, with any handouts, and sometimes (usually on main team teaching days) I'll run a reinforcement activity. On main team teaching days, the students use name cards, on which I give participation stamps - I try to run activities so that roughly ten or fifteen students get stamps, sometimes based on participation, sometimes they have to be the best in the class. This arrangement works pretty well all in all, but it does mean that I have to be pretty creative a good deal of the time. Have you ever tried keeping the attention of 35 thirteen year olds at the same time, and keeping them focused and learning? It's not easy. And this is Japan, where the kids are disciplined and eager to learn. I can't imagine what it's like in America, or some of the less well-off nations out there. Teachers work HARD. I have a new respect for them.

The teachers in Japan work extremely hard - I swear, some of them live at school. There are about 20 teachers at this school all told, most of them in their thirties and forties. They're all fairly friendly if I go up and talk to them, but it's very few of them who'll come and talk to me. That's pretty much the situation with the students, too, and essentially the entire nation of Japan. Friendly if you make the first effort.

School lunch is awesome.

It's kind of getting late, so I'll call it a night. I'll include more, with some pictures if you're lucky, and some details about the teachers and students and some stuff about the elementary school next time, and I promise it won't be three weeks. See, this is why I was hesitant to blog - the backlog of stuff that's been happening is tremendous, and I still have only scratched the surface of school life. It's a daunting task. Oh, well - ganbarimasu! (I'll do my best!)