I knew that when I visited Omura I would be eating a lot. Every time I visit Boss and Keiko they feed me well. I think I gained 10 pounds when they were my host family 3 years ago. But this trip set a new standard in over-eating.
This weekend my friend Alex came to visit me. When I picked him up at Fukuoka airport he looked near-death. Between leaving his house and arriving in Japan he had been awake for about 30 hours. Last time I had visited America he immediately presented me with cigarettes, saying, “I have your smokes ready for you, I know how much you need your smokesâ€. A tradition was born. When he visited in June and again this weekend, I bought the most girlish cigarettes I could find and gave him a pack. This is especially funny since neither of us smokes.
Today I don’t have any classes to teach. My students went on their class trip to Kyoto. As for why I have to go to work when there are no students in the school is the subject for another post altogether. The 2nd year students at my school have been hyped for this trip for months making it very hard for them to focus on anything else. Over their scholastic life, Japanese students will go on a few of these trips. One in Elementary school, one in junior high and one in high school. The locations of these trips will very by area. Here in Oita the students will visit places like Tokyo and Kyoto. As for students living in Kyoto they will often visit cities like Nagasaki (near where I live). I have yet to see a school trip that visits Oita as it has limited educational value and is most famous for it’s hot spring baths.
I pulled this off of my old website. I wrote it more than 4 years ago. Reading it now I see that my writing skills were not so great back then (probably not now either) so I apologize for that. Most of the spelling errors have been corrected. I visited this area of Nagasaki a few days before September 11th, 2001 and I posted this story 2 weeks later. It was a very emotional time for me. I was far away from home, just getting bits and pieces of news. Knowing my family was OK for the time being but not knowing when planes would be flying again or how safe my home was. The following is what I had posted:
Science has proven time after time that there is no better way to learn a foreign language than through the skillful tutelage of pin-up models. At least that seems to be the reasoning behind the PSP “game†Yawahada Eigo Juku. Roughly translated as “Soft-Skinned English Cram Schoolâ€. This is a play on words of the popular Nintendo DS brain training software Yawaraka Atama Juku which means “Gentle Brain Trainingâ€.
As I was leaving school on Friday, I ran into two of my students. The week before we had been practicing the core phrases “What do you like?” and “I like _______ “. These students had remembered the phrases and that made me really happy. It is good to know that your lessons are actually having some impact and sticking in their minds once the lesson has ended.
Here is how the conversation went:
Yesterday I arrived 10 minutes late for Church, as I usually do. And I was slightly more embarrassed than usual because all the nice seats at the back were full and I had to walk to the front, as I did I noticed that people were dressed in more formal clothes than usual. Then I saw my first Japanese bishop. He looked just like his namesake chess piece. I sat down and watched one of my students become a full member of the Church.
Here is the first movie that my students and I made during our “English Time†sessions last year. We met for 25 minutes a day for two weeks and had one 2 or 3 hour filming session. In this time the students learned how to use the equipment, write the script, practice and film. I spoke to them only in English and I believe that this was the most useful aspect of the project. In order to know what to do and how to put the movie together, they had to work on their communication skills. Not their grammar, not their test scores, but real, useful English.
I know that Halloween is long over, but here are some pics from the 2006 party at Tropicoco Cafe.
I needed a costume that could be made cheaply but would still be a lot of fun. I decided to go as an old Japanese drunk guy. The costume was easy because I already had some Japanese clothes like a ginbei (like a yukata with shorts) and my wooden geta. All I had to buy was the bald cap. The one I found came with a moustache and plastic round-rimmed glasses. As the night went on I decided to wear my own glasses instead. I topped the costume off with a sake bottle that never left my hand.
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The seminar really wasn’t so bad this year. The presentations were a bit dry but everything moved pretty quickly. Maybe it was going fast because I knew the last workshop session was the one I was presenting. In any case I picked up a few good lesson ideas to try out. I’ll try some of them out and post them here if they are successful or if they fail in a tragic or funny way.