Arrrgh! (And not in the fun piratey way): a rant

There are 7 elementary schools in my town. I teach at 3 of them, and Suzie, the other ALT in my town, teaches at the other 4. To make sure the kids are learning the same thing, a representative from each school attends monthly meetings to make and discuss lesson plans (which are written in English and Japanese). This is a good idea. Standardized learning, sharing the workload, why not? However, what seems to be forgotten by the teachers who attend this meeting is that of the 2 ALTs they employ, one of them does not speak Japanese. Me. and Suzie does not speak formal, education specific Japanese. This means that I understand about 5% of what is said at the meeting. These meetings run for a minimum of an hour and a half.

The meetings always start off with a re-cap of how the lessons went the past month. This is good-- it helps us learn what teachers liked, how much students are learning, after all, Suzie and I are not trained teachers-- they are. However, this often turns into a "what the ALT did wrong" session. "The story you told didn't explain Halloween." Well no, it didn't-- because at last month's meeting we all decided it would be a ghost story, using words from the previous lesson. "Previous ALTs wrote up a little handout in Japanese for the kids to read so they could understand." Why didn't you mention that before we finished teaching this lesson? "The students didn't understand." I thought they did-- they all repeated the words back to me, why didn't the homeroom teacher let me know? It's very one sided-- we are not asked to evaluate how homeroom teachers worked with us-- if they read the lesson plan before we started, if they helped explain a complicated game, or translated words when students were confused.

What the teachers also fail to realize is that Suzie and I are both functional adults. This means that we are, in fact, capable of figuring out ways to adapt lessons to different class sizes. So no, we don't need to dedicate the next 10 minutes to deciding how big the groups should be for actives, because really, last time I checked, we have the ability to improvise lessons, we have been teaching for a year now, to classes of 8 students and classes of 30 students.

I appreciate these meetings, really I do. I think it's great to share the workload, to have qualified teachers help with lesson plans, and to learn how lessons went. But the simple things-- like how I can't understand their evaluations, discussing small details to no end, and not giving me or Suzie credit for being able to sort out small problems on our own... arrrgh!

Ok. I'm done now.

Sports Festival, now you can live it! (part 2 of 2)

Here are the final videos of sports day. We have the marching band at Ohyama-- pretty amazing for a group of 1st-6th graders I think.



And here we have Awaga's dance to Queen's "Don't stop me now". My footage isn't that great, but you can tell from the kids in the front that they really got into it.


I guess a teacher who was planning sports day was a big fan of Queen, because here it is again as part of the cheer-off, and also another clip of the "Don't stop me now" dance routine.

Robot reality check

Type of Robot	In the movie	In real life
Pet	Help people	Make people happy
Worker	Make life easy for people	Make cars in factories/clean houses for people
Fighter	Fight	Find landmines/find people in danger
Thinker	Think like people/cause many problems/try to control people	Understand weather/play games with us
Dream	Take us to other worlds/move us into the past or the future/make life better	Still dreams in real life

This was off a handout the 3rd years at Junior High received. I can't tell if this is robot loving propaganda, or not.

Sports Festival, now you can live it! (part 1 of 2)

Yes, now you too can enjoy Sports Festival day, without the 10 hours sitting under a tent, 4 of which are spent watching kids run relays. Here are the highlights from the 4 sports festivals I attended, my last ones ever (sob). My smallest school (Ochidani) was the least exciting, but they did do a nice traditional dance. You can watch them practicing it. I've seen this dance, or slight variations of it every year. Practice practice practice means they learn next to nothing in the month of September. But boy does sports day make mom and dad proud! My Junior High was largely relays and repeats of last year. They changed it up a bit by doing the all-class skipping contest which I thought to be very cool, the winning team jumped 20 times before stepping on the rope!

!

The day ended at Junior High, as it does every year, with each grade standing in a circle and doing 2 dances. The first one is very boy-girl centred, and I was thrown into it on the practice day (I think this made the boy I was paired with cool) and the 2nd one feels like the macarana gone askew. or something.



The Ohyama day was pretty good, they had some new events and they pushed the cute factor. This was by far the cutest thing I witnessed. The kindergarten kids were paired up with a 1st grader and they did this Indiana Jones themed relay. (Awwww).

Stay tuned for more! I promise ode's to Queen and a marching band!

What I love about my job:

-When I’m reading “Mr. Brown can Moo, can you?” by to the 1^st and 2^nd grade. Seeing how happy they are to shout “cock-a-doodle-doo”, “dibble dibble dopp dopp”, kissing noises and slurping ones makes it a good day automatically. Also, I get inordinate pleasure from reading “BOOM BOOM BOOM! Mr. Brown is a wonder! BOOM BOOM BOOM! Mr. Brown makes thunder! He makes lightening SPLAAT SPAAT SPAAT, and it’s very very hard to make a sound like that.”

-The group of girls waiting for me when I come back from lunch at Junior High, who talk to me in English, not saying anything new, but giggling every time I tell them they are cute.

-The group of boys, who have this year, decided I’m cool, who eagerly await my “How are you today?” when I walk though the school halls during cleaning time.

-Getting more responsibility from the teacher who barely used me last year

-How happy the 1^st graders are to see me, it’s the perfect place to go when I’m feeling low and wishing I was in bed, in Canada. Even better if this happens while standing in a sunbeam.

-Gems of English, unprompted and the perfect surprise.

-Sneaking in lessons on geography into English

-The colouring and cutting and pasting I do in the name of work

-That I can read for pleasure without worrying about readings for classes I’m not doing.

-Where I am—Kamikawa is a beautiful town and biking around with the sun on the mountains is gorgeous.