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.
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