Elementary Schools ZOMG!
(sorry about the “ZOMG”, it just seemed to fit.)
October is elementary school visits month in Roy-land! This month, I go to two elementary schools per week for two days each and play with teach the kids about America and English and stuff.
It seems I spend most of my time being either thoroughly enchanted or exhausted by overwhelming energy and enthusiasm. These kids are cuuuute. They are also genki (energetic, vibrant) as all hell! The third graders seem totally content to just grab my hand (en masse) and walk around with me asking me inane questions (”eto… suki na tabemono desu ka?” [”what foods do you like?”]) and not really caring too much if I actually know enough Japanese to understand and/or respond.
They all want me to sign things. The boys pictured at left ended up with my signature on both their forearms. One fifth-grade teacher (the dude at Ainosato) had the foresight to simply sit me down at a desk and have his students line up for signatures. It was like a book signing, I swear.
Lessons are very low on the academics. I only have two days at each school and the kids won’t be studying English often enough to benefit much from a rigorous lesson. Instead, I do my self-introduction and let the kids go crazy with questions. At both schools I’ve done a quick lesson on reading time and played Simon Says in English. They get to interact with an American, get their questions answered, hear English spoken by a native speaker and learn to be comfortable with a big foreigner.
Probably the best way to really communicate this, however, is with some pictures of total cuteness. I put the majority behind a jump so as not to overload my front page. Click through to see the awesomeness!
The above pic and these following ones are of Gonense Ichikumi (5th grade, class #1) at Shinoro Elementary.
Their teacher is buried in this picture, too. Can you spot her?
Boys act pretty much the same the world over…
I got to eat lunch with these kids. The girl on the right was very helpful in getting me sorted. It struck me that women in Japan take a lot of responsibility for helping guests. This girl acted very much like adult women do in taking on the social responsibility of helping me know what’s what (social responsibility is big here — I’ll likely talk at length about it in a future post.)
Some of the 4th graders I visited the day before I got the camera out.
After Shinoro Elementary, I visited Ainosato Nishi Elementary. The cuteness continued…
I got to teach the kids about Duck Duck Goose, which they thoroughly enjoyed. This is sankumi (class #3) playing. Ichikumi (Class #1) created their own version where they played inside the circle. Instead of running around in a simple chase, the goose would get up and immediately beeline for the other kid, who had to dodge around the goose and make a dive for the empty spot. It was more like a game of football than Duck Duck Goose but they were really into it!
Some first-graders come over to say hi in the gym.
I got a whole bunch of shots like these. And yes, they pretty much all had the “V” thing going on.
While at Ainosato, I learned a couple interesting things about measurements. The school lobby has these huge examples of typical world measurements painted onto the main support pillars:
These pillars have meters and yards. I’ve always tended to estimate them to be about the same, but this simple display shows clearly that they diverge pretty quickly. The other side is the cool side, though:
The symbol on the left pillar is not an “R”, it’s the kanji character “尺” (しゃく, [shaku]). A shaku is the old unit of basic length measurement in Japan. It was the average length between knots on a stick of bamboo. Looking at this picture, you can easily see that one shaku is very close in length to one foot. I thought that was totally cool.
October 9th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Roy,
The anecdotes and pictures are awesome. You’re right, the kids are cute. Keep up the posts!