About Me

Ikawa-cho Miyoshi-shi, Tokushima-ken, Japan
I was recently accepted by the JET program as an assistant English teacher in Japan for one year.

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

keeping you updated one post at a time

what's up blog,
i am just sitting at my desk in the office today. it is midterm test day, so all i have to do today is read some english prompts out loud for the listening part of the test. thought i would make a most since i have checked every website that i know about and read all of the interesting news that i could find today. joe lieberman is a real jerk, isn't he?
yesterday i went to an english middle school teacher's conference in komatsushima, a little bit south of tokushima city. there was a mock class demonstration that i watched. i had a lot of problems with the way they did things and i could have taken the demonstration as a good lesson of what NOT to do in my english classes. for example, they played background music while the students were chanting phrases, which i thought was miserable. also he assisant language teacher (foreign teacher, my job) basically just stood there the entire time. however, after the lesson, i turned to my teaching partner and said that the only thing i liked was that the girl doing my job was wearing jeans, and that i should be able to wear jeans, which made my teacher laugh a lot.
after the $8 standard bento lunch, the linguistics professor who gave the talk after mayuko's prefectural speech contest gave a two hour and change talk about different aspects of language and what we need to do to be effective language teachers. he said we have to go beyond the purely grammatical and syntactical, into the social and discourse and strategic uses of language. stuff like giving information in a logical order, putting paragraphs together, saying the right thing at appropriate times, and body language were all covered. there were lots of activities and games for the foreign teachers to do with the japanese teachers. for example, the best ice-breaking game was for a teacher to communicate their phone number with a key that read 1 - Lake, 2 - Rake, 3 - Lice, 4 - Rice etc etc since japanese people have an incredibly tough time with the difference between these noises, which is caused by the fact that the english alphabet and its noises is never formally taught. english education starts in middle school (next year it officially will begin in 5th and 6th grade) with no formal phonetic training. one teacher asked a question about phonetics and how we should teach it, since it isnt on the program at all, and the professor said to start young. another teacher asked how all of the lovely theory applies to testing, and the professor said it really didn't, so teaching it would be difficult. it was a fulfilling day where i got to meet some other english teachers.
i have been going to badminton on mondays and karate on wednesdays on fridays, which is good. i have karate tonight! also i have been slowly doing the JET program's advanced level japanese lessons, which can be frustrating but good. due december 10th is a standardized test of 50 questions, the first of 6 such tests that are given throughout the year. if i get them all in on time and get at least 70% of the answers right, i get a certificate that says i passed the course or something.
friday i have to get up early to catch a 6:30 train to the city, where there is another foreign teacher conference, this time for hallowe'en where we all have to give hallowe'en themes lessons. i have no costume and no idea for a costume, so i will probably just wear a tracksuit and pretend to be cool.
i have to work this sunday, because there are classes in the morning and we are going to a cultural presentation, something kabuki related, in the afternoon. for this everyone gets monday off, but i have to go to the mountain school monday afternoon, so i still have to do that, and to replace that work i am getting wednesday afternoon off. tuesday is National Culture Day so that is a holiday and everyone gets off. next thursday is another class demonstration in another city, so i need to go there in the afternoon. it is a busy, confusing 2 weeks. but then october is very done with and november will have some of it gone already. can you tell i want to come home yet?
tonight i think i have to go buy some more recycling bags, i forgot to buy the one for cans so they have just been piling up in the sink. also the karate tournament application is due today, and that costs $25. the train ride to the city is about $30, and that may or may not be reimbursed. i broke a $100 on lunch yesterday, so i think i can get the recycling bags, some bananas, the karate thing, and the train ride all without having to take out some more money. but this sounds risky and difficult, plus the lunch on friday is another $8 standard bento. so i will probably have to get some cash later or tomorrow. oh well.
japanese people rarely drink water. its always green tea, coffee, soup or sugar drinks.
today lunch is sugar covered bread with a little omlette and vegetable soup. one of the less impressive lunches i have seen. curry and fried are more appreciated.
that is everything i can think of for today.
great!

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

a few pictures before i go home

blog,
i have two pictures for you. the first one if of the giant spider that lives by the takoyaki shop in a big roadsign. it is very big, i am not kidding. if you hold your thumb and index finger apart at their maximum distance i would say that this spider is about that big. you do not want to find this thing in any part of your house. this is a female, because the females are the big ones. they keep triple layer webs, one main layer and two less intricate layers behind and in front.

this next picture is much nicer. it is just of the yoshino river. i took it when i was walking across the bridge to buy some snacks at the convenience store. it was a very nice day.

what else do you want me to take pictures of? i am trying to upload some videos on youtube but it is not working at all right now because i think i have to convert these AVIs to MPEG4s.
great!

let's see if i can make a post without firefox crashing more than three times

so blog,
it has been a few days since my last post. i thought i would keep you up to date this morning.
everyone, and by everyone i mean roughly more than half of the teachers and students i work with, is wearing white cottony facemasks that simply can't do much fo anything against any kind of airborne infection. as paranoid hypochondriacs, they seem to have mastered the art of the self-induced placebo effect. since japan is a country where people rarely touch and instead opt for the bow, in terms of swine flu, which they call "new type influenza", they really have nothing to worry about. but all of this worrying keeps them healthy anyway. i can't take anyone wearing the mask seriously, so i wont be donning one myself.
let's see. i didn't win a single game last monday at badminton, and only four women came to my english discussion group last night. this is okay though, because 3 days will mark the third full month that i have been here, which is exactly a quarter of a year. this means i almost half way done with half of my job here. i decided a while ago that i don't want to recontract for another year, because thinking about american food makes me delirious even now, and i miss too many other people and things.
today he first graders have a speaking test, and it is my job to grade half of them on pronunciation, volume, fluency, and accuracy. it is going to be a rough situation since most of them prefer to talk to a point an inch in front of their face while looking at their own feet. but english is crazy and sounds mostly like nonsense, and they dont have any choice at all in learning it because it is on every high school and college entrance exam.
it has been getting quite cold since autumn started. my house has, in addition to no central heating of any kind, no insulation of any kind, so i have to heat my bedroom with a space heater a few hours before i go to bed, and i can't leave it on all night because i don't want to burn down the house, so it is always very cold by morning.
if my left leg feels at tight and achey as it does right now, i will be skipping karate tonight to let it heal up more. i think it is still bruised from last wednesday's karate where all that leg did was kick people and get kicked.
in better news, today there is yaki soba for lunch.
i took a few pictures the other day, i will try to get them up by this afternoon.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

i just finished a bag of dried squid

oh my blog,
right now, there are people on tv totally eating big cooked centipedes.
great!

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

always drink water

oh blog,
i taught two classes today and even posed for the school yearbook. i don't have anything left to do today but sit and look busy for a few hours, so i thought i would make a blog post.
i took some pictures the other day at a festival at the rest stop across the river. the rest stop is called "oasis" and has a little room with nothing but twelve different vending machines, and a big market, and a stage for people to dance on where everyone can watch. they do these dances so the tour buses always bring people to sit and relax.
some middle schoolers did a drum show, which was neat.

here is the view of the river from behind the rest stop. there are some boats and people are getting on for a ride.

one of my first grade students was there with his family. i got to take this picture with him, which was followed by him hitting me in groin.

oh, i went zorbing on monday, which was appropriate because monday was national "health and sports day". zorbing, so you dont have to look it up, is when they strap you in to a giant plastic sphere-within-a-sphere and roll you down a hill. there are two options as to how you want your zorb; you can either take it dry, with a harness, or take it "wet", which means the ball gets water in it and you get soaked, without a harness. i took the harness route, which is okay, but i will have to wait until it gets warm again to zorb wet.
here is a picture of what it looks like when someone is going down the hill.

you just spin around and around and bounce until you hit the padding at the bottom of the hill. here is the view from the top.

one ride is only 700 yen, or little more than $7. it was fun and cool but the bouncing was a little hard on my neck, and right before it ends i felt like i was spinning way too fast.
i am thinking about going to okinawa for christmas.
i think i am going to have some instant yakisoba with microwave chicken pieces for dinner tonight. next week there is an academic conference which will i believe be mostly in japanese, and the week after on halloween i have to go to the city for a foreign teacher conference. but those things will be over very soon.
great!

Sunday, October 11, 2009

post to a blog

hello blog,
i just went to a small festival at the rest stop across the river. watched nice dancing, ate some sacks. i even had a yogurt peach tea.
this spider is just about everywhere. now you know what it looks like. there are at least ten of these on my house right now. hopefully the cold will kill them soon, because they are scary.
tomorrow is national health and sports day, so i get school off but there is still badminton club, which i am looking forward to.
i got to hold a cute two month old baby.
great!

Friday, October 9, 2009

recent events

blog readers,
today, at the office of an elementary school i was offered four cups of coffee, where i accepted and drank three of them.
i am having some computer trouble. right now i am operating in safe mode, which is very convenient, except i cannot do anything that requires sound. so skyping becomes impossible, which is a problem since skyping helps me feel closer to people i am very far away from. i am waiting for an english speaking (i know, right?) acer representative in tokyo to call me back and help me troubleshoot the problem. i have a vague idea what could be wrong, and i really just want to send the computer in and have them fix it, which will probably cost money, since it doesn't sound like i am covered even by the foreign travel warranty.
in other, better news, there was no 5th or 6th grade class today because those students went to a sports day at another school, and when the teachers got back, there were 2 large sized hokka hokka (takeout restaurant nearby) bentos for me.
great!

Monday, October 5, 2009

actually

blog,
sadly, i was just informed that in the event of a "super typhoon" which will cancel school for all of the students, "teachers must work", and i would still be expected come in here. great!

stuff and things

oh blog,
here are some of those pictures i told you about.
but first! i got invited to badminton for adults by the lady who sits next to me in the office at the elementary school near my house who is also in my english conversation group. her english is pretty good, in fact. so last night i went to badminton with my gym clothes and new gym sneakers, which i had never worn. we practiced for a half hour and then got split into teams where we played a bunch of other teams. the vice principal is so good that he can play doubles alone and win all of the time. i was paired with a nice woman, and we lost our first 3 matches, including the third against the vice principal. but then we somehow won the last 2, 15 to 14 and 15 to 13 respectively! it was a lot of fun and i think i am going to go back every week. it is good not to be interacting with only schoolchildren.
and now, you may look at some digital photographs.

this is a scuplture of a dancing man on a bridge over the river in tokushima city. doesn't it look nice? that's because it is.

here is a water tower or some other type of feature that has, surprise, illustrations of some dancers on it.

i call this one "would you like something to drink?" there are nine vending machines lined up in a row, because you are probably thirsty already.

and here is a picture from the morning before i went back to tokushima city for the prefectural speech contest. it's like 6:45 AM and there are two old ladies talking about things. what are they talking about? you can see the rice fields, which are everywhere.
so those are the pictures i have to show you.
there is a "super typhoon" called Melor, Typhoon #18, headed directly for japan, directly for this island. it is supposed to be here tomorrow and it is supposed to be horrible. if you don't believe me, you need to look at this:

and probably read this too. if i am lucky (or unlucky?) i will get a call at around 6 AM tomorrow telling me that school is cancelled and that my services (stamping english workbooks with the date, repeating sentences, being cheerful and have people call me "young" all day long) are not needed.
lunch today is milk, rice with some little vegetables in it, a miso type soup with carrots, tofu, some other stuff i dont understand, and a piece of what looks like salmon with maybe some egg cooked over it, sprinkled with bread crumbs in a tin foil dish. today's lunch does not look like it is going to get higher than a 7 on my lunch scale of 1 to 10, 10 being delicious.
that's it for today. keep tuning in for more blog updates.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

The Results

blog,
we did not win the speech contest. we are not going to tokyo. we did get "a very good result" which means a big certificate and a big box with a big trophy in it, which mayuko deserved, and now we do not have to practice anymore. this is kind of ok because the tokyo contest is 3 days long. we went out to eat with mayuko's family at what i feel like is the japanese equivalent of denny's without actually being denny's, because they have denny's here, it just wasn't called that and had japanese food. we all had variations on a little piece of hamburger meat which they call "hambaagoo" - mayuko and her dad got the one filled with cheese. i really don't want to get into the content of the speeches, but mayuko had the best pronounciation out of just about everyone!
how do you celebrate having the best banana of your entire life? i think i just had this banana. it was the perfect ripeness, perfect number of honey spots, best firmness, no rotty parts at all.
but to balance out this good thing, a bad thing has happened. do you know the rubber inside slippers i have been bringing around from school to school; well the right one has apparently shrunken substantially in my car. a yahoo! answers search provides the idea that rubber shrinks when COOLED, which would mean that it got very cold last night in my car and that wearing it on my warm foot should help it to EXAPND again, but it is very tight and uncomfortable right now.
i got invited to play badminton at school here tonight at 8 with some teachers from various schools. i do not have my own racket, and i dont think i have played badminton in several years, but it can't be too difficult to hit a little "shuttlecock" over the net with one of those things.
anyway, i am going to the elementary school up in the mountains in the afternoon today, and i heard that rachel, the company provided teaching assistant/lesson planner is also going to be there, so i probably won't have to do much work myself, which is ok. although i was told to make a powerpoint (i have the word "ski" written next to this) and "bring cards of acitvities" of which i have none. let's hope rachel has good ideas.
gotta help teach a class or two before lunch. at this point teaching means slowly and clearly reading something and then having it repeated back to me upwards of five times in a row, with the hope that the kids either memorize it or get an idea for how it sounds.
there are a few photos on my camera that didn't get uploaded for some reason. they happen to be the best ones that i took. look for them some time in the near future, between now and when i come back to america.