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!