The kids are adorable, some very shy, some very not. Some very eager to speak and practice English, some not at all.
This week I've been at Kasugaoka Kindergarten. It is the one closest to us, about a 5 minute walk down the street from our apartment. Convenient. The English teacher here, Takaoka Sensei, speaks the least amount of English of the 3 teachers. This is also the largest school I go to. In the mornings the both of us visit 2-4 different classes ranging in age from 3-5 years old. We are in each classroom for 20 minutes and just do a quick English lesson; ABC's, counting, singing, etc... Then there is lunch. I love Japanese school lunches so far. They come in little hard-plastic boxes with different little compartments with an assortment of food and always another box full of rice. Usually there is some sort of fried meat, a couple different salads, maybe a seaweed salad, maybe a corn, mayo and crab salad, and more foods that I have no idea what they are. Most things I like, others I don't but try to eat anyways. It's been a fun way for me to experience different Japanese foods. It seems that the other teachers view Japanese school lunches as we would American School lunches, not so good. Oh, and there is always amazingly delicious green tea.
After lunch I journey to the English room, which in this school is in a completely different building than the main school. On Monday, Thursday and Friday I have classes that start at 2:30, on Tuesday and Wednesday classes don't start until 4:50 which means I have plenty of free time to work on lesson plans, read, practice Japanese, write, or anything else. The classes in the afternoon are what I call our 'private lessons'. These are the classes which I teach. Here at Kasugaoka they range from 1 student to 5 students, from 4 years old to 11 years old. There are students who come from other elementary schools to take English classes here.
This week has been my first week of making my own lesson plans. I have to admit it's been rather interesting and I've been getting nervous before classes, as the other teacher is often in the classroom observing. I'm learning to have more activities planned then we have time for, we seem to go things quickly sometimes. On Wednesday I'm already starting to feel more comfortable in the classroom. I just try and remember that they mostly want me here as a native English speaker, the rest kind of just falls into place, though I do need to have some sort of plan. To start classes I ask the students a series of simple questions: How are you? (I'm trying to steer them away from saying 'Im fine') How is the weather? What is your favorite food? Etc... I think with some of the older kids I will start having them ask me questions as well. Then mostly we run through vocabulary words and play games associated with the words. We also like to play a lot of Uno, not English, I know; but it sure keeps those kids happy.
Every Wednesday morning I go to Sanae Kindergarten to teach an adult class. Sanae is the farthest school. It is about 15 minutes away by scooter. I have one student in this class named Sumiko. She has been taking these lessons since my friend Janel was teaching here, about 4-6 years ago. She speaks English very well and even teaches English. She comes with any questions she may have with the text book she works from and teaches her grandchildren from. I bring in magazines and articles about the United States and we mostly just talk about things, no real schedule here. I really enjoy this class, as she sometimes helps me with my Japanese homework and we are both learning a lot about each other's cultures.
All and all it's been good, nerve-racking and experimental, but fun. Japan is different in a lot of ways than I imagined and exactly how I imagines in some ways. For some reason I expected most people to know more English than it seems. It's possible that people know more than they let on and are just too shy to try speaking to us. It would also make sense that since they have been learning English from such a young age, they know how to read and pass tests well, but actually using it; speaking and listening is still challenging. I did not come here, though, to speak English, so this works out well for us.
We have started taking Japanese lessons. We found out that there is a group of volunteers that meet in a building downtown 3 times a week to teach foreigners Japanese. This is a free service. So of course we went. There were about 6 other students there on the Saturday night we went. All of which were Asian. Our teacher speaks very little English, but enough to give us copies from a text book for 5 year olds to practice writing and reading Hiragana and Katakana. It's a start. The next thing we know we are being shooed up front to introduce ourselves in Japanese to everyone else there. Eeeeek! I stumble over my words horribly, but it's over in about 30 seconds and everyone is smiling with us. There is someone else in the room who speaks prefect English. He is a Korean man who is married to a Japanese woman and living here in Japan after spending 20 years in Chicago. We are hoping we will see him there again.
As you can imagine, life is good. I definitely still miss home, our awesome family, our amazing friends and our beautiful black cat Bogota. Especially after talking to the Rico peeps on the phone this morning while they were all around the fire pit getting ready to eat dinner. (Love Rico!) But, I'm glad we are here. Our apartment feels more and more like home and we have a fairly good feeling for the city of Hirakata. I'm excited to go more places around here. Tomorrow we are going back to Osaka with Harry. Coming up in the next few weeks we will have to go to Korea and then in August we're going to Shanghai to see our good friends Diva and Robby. I can not wait to see more of Japan and more of Asia.
