So this has been a very strange week for me. Usually, I have an average of 2 or 3 classes each day, and on Thursday it jumps up all the way to 5 a day.
However, at tSFF they’ve been practicing very hard for the Choir Festival this weekend, so many of my classes got switched around-and at tSRL, Thursday and Friday were midterms, so the most classes I’ve had in a day has been 2. At tSRL, I’ve only had 1 all week!
Today, I unfortunately had only 1 class-which was a huge bummer, since today is Halloween, and I had a couple of fun Halloween activities planned (okay, only one. The teachers here are always very anxious about time constraints, so I can’t do anything that will take too long or be too involved.) Since my Halloween plans were a little scrappy, I also planned an activity for free period, an “English Hour” that I plan for every Friday. Of course, it’s actually only about 20 minutes long, and since almost all this month students have been practicing for the festival during that time, I’ve only gotten 1 or 2 interested students.
Today I decided to hold a very brief, mock election, in honor of the actual elections on Nov. 4th. With the Choir Festival only 2 days away, I was actually very surprised that about a dozen or so students came and voted. Here are the anticipated results!
l Obama: 10 out of 14 (70%)
l McCain: 4 out of 14 (30%)
So if American voters are anything like Japanese junior high school students who have no real grasp of American politics (With my limited Japanese and their limited English, I had to really water the system down, and explain that McCain likes guns and Obama likes gay people), then Obama will win in a landslide!
Yesterday, because the tSRL was in midterms, I actually got to visit the town’s kindergarten, which is in fact made up of youngsters ages 3 to 5 years old. They had me wander out into the playground for about 20 minutes, and though the kids were a tiny bit shy at first, they quickly warmed up-and their English was great! When I ask my 7th graders “What is your name?” usually the response is petrified silence. Here I was asking 3 year olds, and the response was “My name is _________. Nice to meet you.” It was crazy! And also unbelievably adorable, especially when I tried to teach them tag, but they all simultaneously decided that chasing me was far preferable to chasing each other. I got to participate in a class with the 3 year olds, and I loved it. It was just kind of wonderful to work with a bunch of students who hadn’t yet built up this wall of anxiety between themselves and a foreign language. Of course, I got some of the treatment in reverse-tiny Japanese children chattering at me as if I understand every word.
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Haha, that sounds great! Especially the bit about playing with 3 year-olds. You wouldn't know it by lookin' at me, but I LOVE playing with toddlers.
I really hope I get the chance to do that, too, in [x number of] year(s) (yeah. . . there's some big shit potentially goin down. tell ya more about it soon)
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