Well, I just got home from seeing Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I'm still reeling. This was such a great film, for so many reasons. This was definitely a labour of love for JJ Abrams, and it shows. It really shows.
PLEASE BE AWARE THAT THERE ARE SPOILERS BEYOND THIS POINT. I HAVE ALMOST ZERO FILTER, SO CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED. I HAVE NOT READ ANY OTHER REVIEWS, OR ANYTHING ELSE PERTAINING TO THIS MOVIE, SO EVERYTHING WRITTEN HERE IS MY OWN THOUGHTS AND OPINIONS.
First, I'm not sure if it was just my theatre (hoping it was), but we jumped directly into the crawl. Where was my "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..."?!?! That was disappointing, but I stopped caring once the goosebumps started on my arms partway through the crawl. I'm sure that the people around me thought I was nuts if they saw me grinning through the planet and ship shots.
Anyway, I won't give a full play-by-play of my thoughts and feelings because, as much as I'm sure everyone would be utterly fascinated by that, we'd be here forever. So, moving on. But not too far, because the first thing to take a stab through my intense internal fangirling was, "Why can Poe understand BB-8 without a translator or screen?" Later this was followed by, "Why can Rey understand it, too?!" I'm still stuck on this one. I mean, yeah, sure, Han can understand Chewie, but that's different. Chewie's a living thing. There's, like, intonation and stuff to his groans and roars. I'm pretty sure there's a finite number of beeps and whirs that a droid can make. Is it enough to make up a language?
That's... really the only problem I had with this movie. There were some contrivances, sure. Like Luke's original lightsaber. Maz Kanata's answer to Han's question about it, in my mind, amounts to, "We wanted it in here, but we didn't know how, so we're just going to say we don't have time and avoid explaining it altogether." But overall it was well-done, and so I don't really care. If it didn't have some cheese and fancy coincidences, it wouldn't be a Star Wars movie.
So the First Order basically amounts to space-Nazis being led by Voldemort. That's really almost all I got out of them. And really, we were beat over the head with the Nazi parallel during the speech when they blew up the Republic, but it made for a really great visual, so I'll let the cliche slide. But can we just take a moment to consider how much more likely the Dark Side would be to succeed if they would stop making giant space Poke-balls? I mean, seriously. And stop putting your weaknesses where people can access them! Real reason why the Dark Side fails: they just don't learn. I caught (broken pieces) of a conversation a group of guys were having on the way back to the station, and it amounted to the remark that no one on the Dark Side was using the title "Darth" as they had in the past. My theory on this is that, previously, there had always been at least one Sith lord who could carry on the Darth title and name the second one. With Return of the Jedi, both Sith were taken out at the same time, which means that this new pseudo-Sith order had to start on its own, and they just didn't feel comfortable naming themselves "Darth." They're humble like that, y'know? And I'm curious as to where Voldemort is actually holed up, since he wasn't on the Poke-ball planet with everybody else.
The next piece to puzzle out is Rey. My standing bet is that she's a Skywalker, but I'm trying to figure out how. Originally I thought they might have actually gone the Jacin-and-Jaina route, and that Jacin was Kylo Ren while Jaina had been taken to Jakku and renamed. This was reinforced through all of Rey's interactions with Han. She was totally going to end up being their daughter. But still no one was saying anything, even after Leia showed up, and then they pulled out the name "Ben" (Which, seriously, why? Han thought he was crazy, and then the old fool got dead; Leia barely knew him, and when she did, it was as Obi-Wan), so that theory went out the window. My next theory, which is my current working theory even though it has holes so large you could fly a plane through them, is that she's Luke's. She was left on a desert planet, she's a good pilot, strong in the Force, and has at least some connection to Luke since she had the weird lightsaber flashback memory thing (I'm just letting that one go). We never saw her family, and there's an obvious cinematic reason for this beyond "We didn't want to pay more people." But there's a noticeable lack of "OMG DADDY" levels of reaction from Rey at the end. So, is he not her father? Is he her father and she was hiding that secret? Is he her father and she didn't really know who he was but she kind of already knew because the Force told her so she wasn't shocked?
Han's death was.... well, I saw it coming, but I was in denial until the end. I really, really hoped I was wrong about that one. I can understand why it had to happen, story-wise, but Chewie without Han is like a jam sandwich. Sure, jam's tasty, but it's a little weird to be eating without peanut butter. Chewie partnering with Rey is going to take some getting used to.
Mostly I'm still processing, but I just read an article about Oscar Isaac being worried that people would come out of theatres hating Poe, so I'd like to take a moment to address his character. First of all, I love him. He's adorable. In so many ways, in my mind, he's what we would have gotten if Han Solo had been played by Bruce Campbell. Thought I think that comparison also has something to do with why Han had to die. You can't have two of the same character type in the same movie. Sure, Poe has infinitely more integrity and moral fibre than Han, but they're still the wise-cracking, smart aleck pilot at the end of the day. I'm excited to see how his character develops from here. (Also, it was really obvious that he wasn't dead. If he was dead, we would have had a body. It's how these things work.)
Friday, December 18, 2015
Tuesday, December 15, 2015
Alliteration Week, or Christmas Carols and French Food
Elementary school students are adorable, and I love all of them. Particularly the ones in my Grade 1-4 class, because they get to do all the fun stuff. Grade 5-6 has to actually do work and, like, count and stuff. We get to sing in Grade 1-4! ...Which, admittedly, is a lot harder when you`ve got a cough and are wearing a mask, but having 10 small children excitedly yell-singing "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" is entertaining anyway.
I had to drop The Chipmunk Song from my first year lessons. I am displeased. The only recording I could find to use was the one from the 60s, and it`s a bit harder to understand the voices, I think, as a non-native English speaker. I know the one my family has on cassette that has Santa and the Chipmunks telling the story of Alvin and his golden echo harmonica is clearer, but I couldn`t find that version anywhere. We only had time for one song in my class on Wednesday (they had exam stuff to go over), so I did Let It Snow, because it`s easier and shorter than Where Are You, Christmas? The kids seemed to enjoy it, but I had a hard time convincing them to sing along after we finished the fill-in-the-blank lyric sheet. I also changed the `Letters to Santa` to a Christmas vocabulary game, at the teacher`s request, so we had a Christmas word spelling race. It`s so much fun to watch their teams freak out on the person spelling at the board. Like when I gave them the word "present," and one team is screaming at their speller, "No, S, S!!! Not Z, S!!!" Good times.
Wednesday afternoon there was a teachers` meeting at 3:00. I don`t attend these because they`re entirely in Japanese and don`t affect me in any way whatsoever and therefore it would be pointless, so I stayed in the teachers` room by myself. Normally these don`t take place until 4:00 anyway and Morita-sensei just tells me to leave early, but I couldn`t this time, so I was stuck by myself in the room, with a wall clock that puts my old one at home to shame and has me singing the Potter Puppet Pals` Mysterious Ticking Noise in my head ("It`s a pipe bomb! Yaaaay!") because that`s what it sounds like.
Despite the fact that my draft isn`t actually finished (like, "gaps you could fly a plane through" unfinished), I`ve started editing my novel. I`m hoping it will help organize or solidify the thoughts running through my head about what still needs to be written, and force me to focus on what is needed versus what is completely unnecessary and doesn`t warrant continued thought. I`m working in three colours. Green is for additions (though I`m not even really working in that colour yet unless I absolutely have to), red is for corrections, and purple is to note something that needs to stay in, but desperately needs to be rewritten. Sometimes "rewritten" means "this is just a bit off and could be said better," but sometimes it means "what the bleep were you drinking when you wrote this?" It`s... interesting, to say the least.
On Friday I had both of my favourite 1st Year classes, and we had a lot of fun with singing and spelling. Also, I did a short "Christmas Quiz" to see how many things they knew/could guess about Christmas in general, Christmas in Canada, and my family`s personal Christmas. My favourite question is:
"In Mel`s family, she and her sisters usually open their stockings:
a) In the afternoon
b) At 3:00 in the morning
c) After breakfast
d) After dinner."
So of course the kids like to pick b, because it`s the craziest answer and they think there`s no way it`s actually the right answer. And then they freak out and are all like, "Eeeeeh?!?!" when I tell them that they`re right. The JTEs think it`s hilarious when I proceed to explain the whole thing.
"Your stocking gets filled after you go to sleep. So, my sisters and I wake up every Christmas at 3 AM (without an alarm, somehow we just know to wake up then), go through our stockings in the dark so that we don`t wake anyone else up, put everything back in the stocking, and then go back to bed until 7 o`clock!"
I also had my geekiest half hour at school to date. Due to the impending Star Wars Episode VII release (which I desperately need to find an English-audio-playing theatre for, because there`s no way I`m missing that on opening weekend), I chose an ESL article about Star Wars Day on May 4th. The thing is, Tetsuro has never actually seen Star Wars, so he had a lot of questions about the things mentioned in the article. Despite that, it was a really great lesson, and we somehow managed to get in a good back-and-forth, which is good because when he told me that he hadn`t seen Star Wars ("Seriously?!?!?!" I said in my mind) I was afraid this would turn into Mel`s Star Wars Lecture. But the article mentioned enough specific things (The Force, Darth Vader, blue milk...) that he could ask specific questions, rather than just, "So, what is Star Wars about?"
After Ros helped me navigate the horror that was buying a ticket in advance for Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Friday night, I did virtually nothing else with my weekend. A lot of knitting and watching Christmas movies. It was glorious!
Tuesday this week was my high school students (which turned into singular student, because one was out with stomach trouble). Just before my lesson, one of the other high school teachers came rushing over to my desk.
Teacher: Mel-sensei, please come with me to the music room!
Me: ...Now? (thinking, okay, my lesson is about to start in 5 minutes...)
Teacher: Yes, please come!
Me: Okay...
So I followed her up to the music room, where my student is playing Jingle Bells with the music teacher, using actual bells. And we had to wear Christmas headbands while we listened, because Japan. I was highly amused. I was also awkwardly the centre of attention at one point (I think it might have been earlier that morning), when the same teacher had walked by my desk and saw what I was doing (studying Japanese). She was like, "Mel, you`re studying Japanese?!" This exclamation then brought three additional teachers over to my desk to see what I was studying. There was some discussion in Japanese going on about what was actually on my screen at that moment, most of which I didn`t understand, but I did catch someone saying, "That`s difficult even for Japanese people!" which made me feel a lot better, because I just wasn`t getting it.
Wednesday was a kind of year-end cultural assembly? I don`t know how to describe this thing. The whole school went to see a play, but not like Panto or any kind of Christmas play. It was just a play that they got to see because it was the end of the year and this is a special schedule time? ANYWAY. So, we went to see this thing. It was almost two hours of me sitting there, not knowing what was going on. There were three boys, and an old dude from Hokkaido, and some other characters that I had no idea what was going on with, and then the old guy died. Whatever. I got a bit more of the story from my supervisor after. It`s based on a famous Japanese novel called "The Friends," and it`s about three boys who are fascinated with the idea of death, and want to see it firsthand, so they start spying on this old dude, hoping that they`ll see him kick the bucket. They end up being friends with him, and then he does, in fact, kick the bucket. But this is also not the point of my story. The play was at the Cultural Centre, so I had to take the train and then walk to the Centre. I walked with Haruna (from my third year class and English club) on the way there, but on the way back, I was just among this sea of students. Then I hear someone calling my name, so I turn around, and one of my female JTEs is yelling to me from across the street. The following conversation takes place at a crosswalk across a busy street while we`re waiting for the light to change (which took forever):
Okuda-sensei: Are you going back to school or your apartment?
Me: School.
Okuda-sensei: Would you like to have lunch first? With me, Hatori-sensei, Nagamatsu-sensei (the one who sits across from me in the teacher`s room), and the Home Economics teacher? We`re having another girl`s lunch today.
Me: Okay...
Okuda-sensei: It`s a little bit expensive. Maybe ￥2000? Is that okay? It`s French food.
Me: Sure! Wait. Let me check. (I had topped up my train card that morning, and I couldn`t remember what was actually in my wallet.) Yeah, I`m good.
All of this, including small talk about the noisy street, opening my backpack, finding my wallet, checking my wallet, and then putting it back away, happened long before the light changed. We still had to stand awkwardly on opposite sides of the street for a while before I could join her. I love it when my teachers stop me on the street to invite me for French food at a semi-fancy restaurant at the Prefectural Art Museum... So random.
Lunch was delicious! My tuna/chickpea salad thing would have been pretty tasty, but this was so much better. Instead of cold chickpeas and soda crackers at my desk, I got to have a relaxing three-course meal for a reasonable price. The lunch set included either soup or salad (I had the soup - I have no idea what it was, but there was crab in it), fish or chicken (I had a lovely fillet of some kind of white fish that I`m pretty sure was poached, and there was lemon juice involved at some point because I could taste it, and then it was topped with toasted bread crumbs and herbs), and either coffee or tea (tea, obviously). For a bit extra, you could add dessert, which we did. It didn`t say what the dessert was, so I was expecting maybe a mousse, or (god forbid) creme brulee (I was really hoping not) or something. What we ended up with was a plate of four desserts (that`s each, not for sharing). There was a scoop of mango ice cream, a roasted banana with spiced nuts on top (not my favourite), a slice of chocolate orange cheesecake, and a slice of chocolate/matcha (green tea) cake with raspberry compote. Don`t get me wrong, they were small slices, but still. That`s, like, an afternoon tea spread. I`ll have to go back sometime so that I can take pictures of these things. I didn`t want to do it with my teachers, because that felt odd, but if I went with a friend I`d be cool with it.
I had to drop The Chipmunk Song from my first year lessons. I am displeased. The only recording I could find to use was the one from the 60s, and it`s a bit harder to understand the voices, I think, as a non-native English speaker. I know the one my family has on cassette that has Santa and the Chipmunks telling the story of Alvin and his golden echo harmonica is clearer, but I couldn`t find that version anywhere. We only had time for one song in my class on Wednesday (they had exam stuff to go over), so I did Let It Snow, because it`s easier and shorter than Where Are You, Christmas? The kids seemed to enjoy it, but I had a hard time convincing them to sing along after we finished the fill-in-the-blank lyric sheet. I also changed the `Letters to Santa` to a Christmas vocabulary game, at the teacher`s request, so we had a Christmas word spelling race. It`s so much fun to watch their teams freak out on the person spelling at the board. Like when I gave them the word "present," and one team is screaming at their speller, "No, S, S!!! Not Z, S!!!" Good times.
Wednesday afternoon there was a teachers` meeting at 3:00. I don`t attend these because they`re entirely in Japanese and don`t affect me in any way whatsoever and therefore it would be pointless, so I stayed in the teachers` room by myself. Normally these don`t take place until 4:00 anyway and Morita-sensei just tells me to leave early, but I couldn`t this time, so I was stuck by myself in the room, with a wall clock that puts my old one at home to shame and has me singing the Potter Puppet Pals` Mysterious Ticking Noise in my head ("It`s a pipe bomb! Yaaaay!") because that`s what it sounds like.
Despite the fact that my draft isn`t actually finished (like, "gaps you could fly a plane through" unfinished), I`ve started editing my novel. I`m hoping it will help organize or solidify the thoughts running through my head about what still needs to be written, and force me to focus on what is needed versus what is completely unnecessary and doesn`t warrant continued thought. I`m working in three colours. Green is for additions (though I`m not even really working in that colour yet unless I absolutely have to), red is for corrections, and purple is to note something that needs to stay in, but desperately needs to be rewritten. Sometimes "rewritten" means "this is just a bit off and could be said better," but sometimes it means "what the bleep were you drinking when you wrote this?" It`s... interesting, to say the least.
On Friday I had both of my favourite 1st Year classes, and we had a lot of fun with singing and spelling. Also, I did a short "Christmas Quiz" to see how many things they knew/could guess about Christmas in general, Christmas in Canada, and my family`s personal Christmas. My favourite question is:
"In Mel`s family, she and her sisters usually open their stockings:
a) In the afternoon
b) At 3:00 in the morning
c) After breakfast
d) After dinner."
So of course the kids like to pick b, because it`s the craziest answer and they think there`s no way it`s actually the right answer. And then they freak out and are all like, "Eeeeeh?!?!" when I tell them that they`re right. The JTEs think it`s hilarious when I proceed to explain the whole thing.
"Your stocking gets filled after you go to sleep. So, my sisters and I wake up every Christmas at 3 AM (without an alarm, somehow we just know to wake up then), go through our stockings in the dark so that we don`t wake anyone else up, put everything back in the stocking, and then go back to bed until 7 o`clock!"
I also had my geekiest half hour at school to date. Due to the impending Star Wars Episode VII release (which I desperately need to find an English-audio-playing theatre for, because there`s no way I`m missing that on opening weekend), I chose an ESL article about Star Wars Day on May 4th. The thing is, Tetsuro has never actually seen Star Wars, so he had a lot of questions about the things mentioned in the article. Despite that, it was a really great lesson, and we somehow managed to get in a good back-and-forth, which is good because when he told me that he hadn`t seen Star Wars ("Seriously?!?!?!" I said in my mind) I was afraid this would turn into Mel`s Star Wars Lecture. But the article mentioned enough specific things (The Force, Darth Vader, blue milk...) that he could ask specific questions, rather than just, "So, what is Star Wars about?"
After Ros helped me navigate the horror that was buying a ticket in advance for Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Friday night, I did virtually nothing else with my weekend. A lot of knitting and watching Christmas movies. It was glorious!
Tuesday this week was my high school students (which turned into singular student, because one was out with stomach trouble). Just before my lesson, one of the other high school teachers came rushing over to my desk.
Teacher: Mel-sensei, please come with me to the music room!
Me: ...Now? (thinking, okay, my lesson is about to start in 5 minutes...)
Teacher: Yes, please come!
Me: Okay...
So I followed her up to the music room, where my student is playing Jingle Bells with the music teacher, using actual bells. And we had to wear Christmas headbands while we listened, because Japan. I was highly amused. I was also awkwardly the centre of attention at one point (I think it might have been earlier that morning), when the same teacher had walked by my desk and saw what I was doing (studying Japanese). She was like, "Mel, you`re studying Japanese?!" This exclamation then brought three additional teachers over to my desk to see what I was studying. There was some discussion in Japanese going on about what was actually on my screen at that moment, most of which I didn`t understand, but I did catch someone saying, "That`s difficult even for Japanese people!" which made me feel a lot better, because I just wasn`t getting it.
Wednesday was a kind of year-end cultural assembly? I don`t know how to describe this thing. The whole school went to see a play, but not like Panto or any kind of Christmas play. It was just a play that they got to see because it was the end of the year and this is a special schedule time? ANYWAY. So, we went to see this thing. It was almost two hours of me sitting there, not knowing what was going on. There were three boys, and an old dude from Hokkaido, and some other characters that I had no idea what was going on with, and then the old guy died. Whatever. I got a bit more of the story from my supervisor after. It`s based on a famous Japanese novel called "The Friends," and it`s about three boys who are fascinated with the idea of death, and want to see it firsthand, so they start spying on this old dude, hoping that they`ll see him kick the bucket. They end up being friends with him, and then he does, in fact, kick the bucket. But this is also not the point of my story. The play was at the Cultural Centre, so I had to take the train and then walk to the Centre. I walked with Haruna (from my third year class and English club) on the way there, but on the way back, I was just among this sea of students. Then I hear someone calling my name, so I turn around, and one of my female JTEs is yelling to me from across the street. The following conversation takes place at a crosswalk across a busy street while we`re waiting for the light to change (which took forever):
Okuda-sensei: Are you going back to school or your apartment?
Me: School.
Okuda-sensei: Would you like to have lunch first? With me, Hatori-sensei, Nagamatsu-sensei (the one who sits across from me in the teacher`s room), and the Home Economics teacher? We`re having another girl`s lunch today.
Me: Okay...
Okuda-sensei: It`s a little bit expensive. Maybe ￥2000? Is that okay? It`s French food.
Me: Sure! Wait. Let me check. (I had topped up my train card that morning, and I couldn`t remember what was actually in my wallet.) Yeah, I`m good.
All of this, including small talk about the noisy street, opening my backpack, finding my wallet, checking my wallet, and then putting it back away, happened long before the light changed. We still had to stand awkwardly on opposite sides of the street for a while before I could join her. I love it when my teachers stop me on the street to invite me for French food at a semi-fancy restaurant at the Prefectural Art Museum... So random.
Lunch was delicious! My tuna/chickpea salad thing would have been pretty tasty, but this was so much better. Instead of cold chickpeas and soda crackers at my desk, I got to have a relaxing three-course meal for a reasonable price. The lunch set included either soup or salad (I had the soup - I have no idea what it was, but there was crab in it), fish or chicken (I had a lovely fillet of some kind of white fish that I`m pretty sure was poached, and there was lemon juice involved at some point because I could taste it, and then it was topped with toasted bread crumbs and herbs), and either coffee or tea (tea, obviously). For a bit extra, you could add dessert, which we did. It didn`t say what the dessert was, so I was expecting maybe a mousse, or (god forbid) creme brulee (I was really hoping not) or something. What we ended up with was a plate of four desserts (that`s each, not for sharing). There was a scoop of mango ice cream, a roasted banana with spiced nuts on top (not my favourite), a slice of chocolate orange cheesecake, and a slice of chocolate/matcha (green tea) cake with raspberry compote. Don`t get me wrong, they were small slices, but still. That`s, like, an afternoon tea spread. I`ll have to go back sometime so that I can take pictures of these things. I didn`t want to do it with my teachers, because that felt odd, but if I went with a friend I`d be cool with it.
Tuesday, December 8, 2015
I Want a Hula Hoop
Wednesday was a meeting with all of the Mie ALTs in the afternoon wherein we were walked through papers we had already been sent, and that made perfect sense if you actually bothered to read them. Which I had. Multiple times. (I was bored.) One of them was about the big two-day conference we have with both ALTs and JTEs coming up in January. So basically we had a meeting about a meeting. And then we did a workshop exercise that was fairly useless because it revolved around grammar, which I don`t teach. Whatever.
Thursday I started work on my Christmas lesson plans for my 1st Year classes (because I can). I can`t remember if I already mentioned this or not, but one of my JTEs told me that previously they`ve done fill-in-the-blank things with Christmas songs, and then learn to sing them. She said that when she last did it, they used Band Aid`s "Do They Know It`s Christmas" and the Mariah Carey song that shall remain nameless for everyone`s sakes (for those of you who just ended up with it in your head anyway, I`m sorry). I have to talk to the teachers and find out how exactly they did this, since we discovered in August that the equipment in the Language Lab (LL) doesn`t really work... I mean, we have a CD player, but that will only work if I can get one of the teachers to burn a CD with files that I give them. Given that they took to basic network functions in the computer lab like a fish to merchant banking when we were in there for my self-introduction lesson, I`m thinking that isn`t likely. So, I`ll either have to hope that my phone/school laptop is loud enough, or we`ll have to see if we can get the computer lab again, and I`ll have to run them through there, because I think there are large speakers hooked up to that system? At the very least there`s a tv... Anyway. I want to do Faith Hill`s "Where Are You, Christmas?" because it`s still kind of a popular song on the radio at Christmastime, and the language and melody are simple enough that the kids should be able to pick it up without too many problems (though I might switch and do NSYNC`s "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" because reasons). For the other song.... Yeah, I`m making them learn "The Chipmunk Song."
I`m an evil, evil person, and I really love this song, and because this is Japan I`m pretty sure the kids will love it almost as much as I do. For the last few minutes of class, I`m going to have them write "Letters to Santa," for writing practice and because I think it`ll be fun to see what kinds of lists they can come up with.
Something weird that I`ve noticed about myself lately is that apparently, while I still don`t like people on the whole, I require a certain amount of human interaction daily. I`ve realized recently (ie this week) how I check my phone rather obsessively for Line/Facebook messages, or comments on my Facebook posts. That`s a huge change from the girl who used to leave her phone on silent and forget to check it for 12 or more hours at a time (making me the worst possible person to ever have as an emergency contact of any kind). So my theory is that I have a certain amount of communication I have to reach each day or something, and I`m not reaching that quota here the way I would back home, because there are very few people around me that I can actually have a conversation with. ...Does this count as some kind of self-discovery? Have I become the cliche of one of those twenty-somethings traveling around the world to "find themselves"? I hope not. Next thing you know I`ll be wearing thick-framed glasses and drinking lattes or something. Or, god forbid, doing yoga. And enjoying it. But I still dislike people as a general rule. Still a relatively asocial badger over here.
Friday night I started with a scratchy throat, and it was somewhat unbearable on Saturday. Luckily I did all of my shopping on Thursday night, so I didn`t have to go out at all over the weekend. I just spent the weekend praying it was only a cold, and that it wouldn`t turn into something that required a trip to a doctor. I`m a little terrified of having to visit a doctor while I`m here. On Sunday my throat was better and it had migrated up into my nose, blocking it completely and turning me into a Neanderthalic mouth-breather. Yay. Most of you are aware that I get sick rarely these days, so when I do, I basically turn into that guy with the man-cold in the Nyquil commercial. I`m just a big baby, buried under blankets and whining (to myself, since I live alone) about how much everything sucks. On Monday, Morita-sensei was taking the afternoon off, and was like, "You should go home and rest. Really, no one cares. Take time off!" But I didn`t want to dip into the rest of my paid vacation yet, because I might need it in the spring and it doesn`t reset until the beginning of August, and and if I took it as sick time I`m pretty sure that I would actually have to go to the doctor`s to get a note. It`s just a cold, and I`m just a giant baby. I`ll live.
Thursday I started work on my Christmas lesson plans for my 1st Year classes (because I can). I can`t remember if I already mentioned this or not, but one of my JTEs told me that previously they`ve done fill-in-the-blank things with Christmas songs, and then learn to sing them. She said that when she last did it, they used Band Aid`s "Do They Know It`s Christmas" and the Mariah Carey song that shall remain nameless for everyone`s sakes (for those of you who just ended up with it in your head anyway, I`m sorry). I have to talk to the teachers and find out how exactly they did this, since we discovered in August that the equipment in the Language Lab (LL) doesn`t really work... I mean, we have a CD player, but that will only work if I can get one of the teachers to burn a CD with files that I give them. Given that they took to basic network functions in the computer lab like a fish to merchant banking when we were in there for my self-introduction lesson, I`m thinking that isn`t likely. So, I`ll either have to hope that my phone/school laptop is loud enough, or we`ll have to see if we can get the computer lab again, and I`ll have to run them through there, because I think there are large speakers hooked up to that system? At the very least there`s a tv... Anyway. I want to do Faith Hill`s "Where Are You, Christmas?" because it`s still kind of a popular song on the radio at Christmastime, and the language and melody are simple enough that the kids should be able to pick it up without too many problems (though I might switch and do NSYNC`s "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays" because reasons). For the other song.... Yeah, I`m making them learn "The Chipmunk Song."
Something weird that I`ve noticed about myself lately is that apparently, while I still don`t like people on the whole, I require a certain amount of human interaction daily. I`ve realized recently (ie this week) how I check my phone rather obsessively for Line/Facebook messages, or comments on my Facebook posts. That`s a huge change from the girl who used to leave her phone on silent and forget to check it for 12 or more hours at a time (making me the worst possible person to ever have as an emergency contact of any kind). So my theory is that I have a certain amount of communication I have to reach each day or something, and I`m not reaching that quota here the way I would back home, because there are very few people around me that I can actually have a conversation with. ...Does this count as some kind of self-discovery? Have I become the cliche of one of those twenty-somethings traveling around the world to "find themselves"? I hope not. Next thing you know I`ll be wearing thick-framed glasses and drinking lattes or something. Or, god forbid, doing yoga. And enjoying it. But I still dislike people as a general rule. Still a relatively asocial badger over here.
Friday night I started with a scratchy throat, and it was somewhat unbearable on Saturday. Luckily I did all of my shopping on Thursday night, so I didn`t have to go out at all over the weekend. I just spent the weekend praying it was only a cold, and that it wouldn`t turn into something that required a trip to a doctor. I`m a little terrified of having to visit a doctor while I`m here. On Sunday my throat was better and it had migrated up into my nose, blocking it completely and turning me into a Neanderthalic mouth-breather. Yay. Most of you are aware that I get sick rarely these days, so when I do, I basically turn into that guy with the man-cold in the Nyquil commercial. I`m just a big baby, buried under blankets and whining (to myself, since I live alone) about how much everything sucks. On Monday, Morita-sensei was taking the afternoon off, and was like, "You should go home and rest. Really, no one cares. Take time off!" But I didn`t want to dip into the rest of my paid vacation yet, because I might need it in the spring and it doesn`t reset until the beginning of August, and and if I took it as sick time I`m pretty sure that I would actually have to go to the doctor`s to get a note. It`s just a cold, and I`m just a giant baby. I`ll live.
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
November Showers Bring December Flowers
My first year classes were cancelled last week because the teachers wanted to get in an extra grammar lesson before the end of term exams next week, so I`ve been alternating between marking, writing, and reading. The homework I have on my desk is based on the proficiency test class we did. They have a picture of people at a crossroads doing various things, and they had to write at least four sentences telling me what the people were doing. Most of them were writing things like: A woman is buying a hot dog. A man is buying a shirt. A man is using a computer on a bench. Things like that. The thing that I didn`t notice is that the image I used shows everyone on a mobile phone.
A few students noticed this, and I would get sentences about people using a phone. But one student decided to basically make a story out of it. This is what I got (grammar and spelling corrected):
Everybody is using a smart phone.
The dog uses a smart phone, too.
The baby doesn`t use a smart phone.
There is a person walking with a smart phone.
Walking with a smart phone is dangerous.
This PSA has been brought to you by 1st Year, Class 2.
I had my relay race on the weekend. I was absolutely terrified, because I`ve never run a relay before, I didn`t really know where we were going, and the teacher who was giving me a ride barely speaks English. Thankfully she`s friends with my supervisor, who told me that she had been to Tokyo Disney the same weekend I was, so we had something to chat about in slow, tiny-vocabulary sentences. ...Not that I wouldn`t have been able to pick up on the Disney thing on my own, because as soon as I got in her car, Holy Minnie Mouse, Batman! EVERYTHING in this car was Minnie. There were plushies on the dash, floor mats, seat covers, steering wheel cover, air freshener, visor clips, kleenex box cover, seat belt cover thingy... Yeah. It basically looked like Minnie Mouse had exploded inside her car, which was hilarious and oddly comforting. We spoke for about half an hour about Disneyland and DisneySea (she met characters all day, while I did attractions), and then I think she got too nervous to try to speak any more English, because she remembered that she had the Tangled DVD in her car, so she put that on in English. I sang along, while she hummed and occasionally sang in Japanese. It was fun.
The race itself was interesting. We didn`t have a baton for me to fumble (thank god), but instead passed a sash from runner to runner. There were five of us on the short course team, and each of us had to run a 600m circuit through part of a park near the F1 track in Suzuka. I was most definitely not cut out for this kind of thing. All of the Japanese runners are basically SPRINTING the 600m, whereas I would take about 5-6 minutes to run something like that normally, because I train for distance, not speed. So I was running faster than normal, the air was quite cold, and about a third of the way into the course there`s a giant freaking hill. So I think I dragged my team under a bit, and developed a spectacular cough for the rest of the day, but we didn`t come in last (14th out of 17), so I consider it a win.
The next set of homework (that the JTEs collected for me in their grammar classes) was writing a passage about their favourite singer/group. I love the bluntness of Japanese school students sometimes: "My favourite singer is Michael Jackson. Among his songs, I like Billie Jean the best. His singing voice is cool. But he is already dead." ....Yes, yes he is.
Tuesday was a Junior High School day at my special needs school. I had three classes back-to-back in the morning, and then in the afternoon we planted winter flowers in the school`s planters. Because that`s a thing. Winter flowers.
We drew "team" names randomly from boxes, so there would be two teachers and two students in each team. I ended up with (I think) the math teacher, and two of my second year students. I really liked the way our planter turned out! We ended up with almost all white flowers, which started out as coincidence when we were the last team to reach the first couple items for our arrangement, and then we decided it was a design choice and selected white for everything else where white was an option. It was a lot of fun, and I hope we get to do this again in the spring!
A few students noticed this, and I would get sentences about people using a phone. But one student decided to basically make a story out of it. This is what I got (grammar and spelling corrected):
Everybody is using a smart phone.
The dog uses a smart phone, too.
The baby doesn`t use a smart phone.
There is a person walking with a smart phone.
Walking with a smart phone is dangerous.
This PSA has been brought to you by 1st Year, Class 2.
I had my relay race on the weekend. I was absolutely terrified, because I`ve never run a relay before, I didn`t really know where we were going, and the teacher who was giving me a ride barely speaks English. Thankfully she`s friends with my supervisor, who told me that she had been to Tokyo Disney the same weekend I was, so we had something to chat about in slow, tiny-vocabulary sentences. ...Not that I wouldn`t have been able to pick up on the Disney thing on my own, because as soon as I got in her car, Holy Minnie Mouse, Batman! EVERYTHING in this car was Minnie. There were plushies on the dash, floor mats, seat covers, steering wheel cover, air freshener, visor clips, kleenex box cover, seat belt cover thingy... Yeah. It basically looked like Minnie Mouse had exploded inside her car, which was hilarious and oddly comforting. We spoke for about half an hour about Disneyland and DisneySea (she met characters all day, while I did attractions), and then I think she got too nervous to try to speak any more English, because she remembered that she had the Tangled DVD in her car, so she put that on in English. I sang along, while she hummed and occasionally sang in Japanese. It was fun.
The race itself was interesting. We didn`t have a baton for me to fumble (thank god), but instead passed a sash from runner to runner. There were five of us on the short course team, and each of us had to run a 600m circuit through part of a park near the F1 track in Suzuka. I was most definitely not cut out for this kind of thing. All of the Japanese runners are basically SPRINTING the 600m, whereas I would take about 5-6 minutes to run something like that normally, because I train for distance, not speed. So I was running faster than normal, the air was quite cold, and about a third of the way into the course there`s a giant freaking hill. So I think I dragged my team under a bit, and developed a spectacular cough for the rest of the day, but we didn`t come in last (14th out of 17), so I consider it a win.
The next set of homework (that the JTEs collected for me in their grammar classes) was writing a passage about their favourite singer/group. I love the bluntness of Japanese school students sometimes: "My favourite singer is Michael Jackson. Among his songs, I like Billie Jean the best. His singing voice is cool. But he is already dead." ....Yes, yes he is.
Tuesday was a Junior High School day at my special needs school. I had three classes back-to-back in the morning, and then in the afternoon we planted winter flowers in the school`s planters. Because that`s a thing. Winter flowers.
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