Mostly Deer

Monday was my first day back to regular classes at my high school.  I was kind of dreading it, because I had this (completely justified, I swear) fear that I`d forgotten everything about teaching and I was going to screw up, or my lesson was horrible and wouldn`t work with the students...  This is why I just shouldn`t have breaks, ever.  Objectively, I knew I would be fine, but there was still that panic in the forefront of my mind going, "You`re gonna crash and burn so bad."

I was fine.  I asked for feedback from the teacher after my first lesson, and he was really enthusiastic about it.  "I think it was much better than the lessons before!"  Ouch, dude.  Way to trample on my professional feelings.  I know I have no idea what I`m doing, and I`ve been making this up as I go since I got here, but I didn`t think I was doing that badly.  I mean, I`ve always thought my first year lessons sucked in comparison to my third year lessons, because I get to do the crazy stuff with my third years, but they don`t have that comparison to make.  On their own, I thought my lessons last term were okay.  Ah, well.  Maybe this will teach them to actually communicate what they want with the ALT.  (But probably not.)

With my crazy schedule this month, I`ll be teaching my Monday and Wednesday classes Part 2 of this lesson before my Thursday and Friday classes have gotten Part 1, so I`m all over the place with my lesson plans.  Since I did a Canadian World Heritage Site lesson for Part 1, I`m thinking Part 2 will be a reading comprehension exercise.  I`ll write a short travel journal entry, but out of order.  The students will have to put the sentences in the correct order, and then practice reading it.  Man, this is not an easy lesson to make materials for.  I mean, the Sphinx?!  Who, in their right mind, thinks something so far removed from their daily lives is a good lesson topic for students who have to be reminded that there`s an `h` in `where`?  And then.  THEN.  We`re doing the comprehension quiz (true and false), and the first statement is, "The head of the Sphinx will fall off in a century if nothing is done."  This is true, but none of the students know this because the word century is not in their vocabulary and wasn`t used anywhere in the passage.  The passage they`re being tested on says "one hundred years."  Ridiculous.  I heard a rumour that we`re using different textbooks next year.  I can only hope they`re more relevant than this.  Except then I`ll have to remake all of my lessons so that I have relevant activities.

Monday night and Tuesday night were horrible.  Out of nowhere, the weather decided to get super cold and ugly.  The wind was blowing so hard that my windows rattled, and every little thing the wind picked up got flung against them, so I didn`t really get much sleep.  At least Tuesday was a Junior High day at my special needs school, and that doesn`t really involve much thinking on my part, because the teacher there plans the lessons out so well.  You`d think the Elementary lessons would be the easiest, but the teacher for those classes has less English, so it`s harder for me to figure out what she actually wants me to do.  Wednesday morning I woke up to snow.  SNOW.  And it snowed pretty much all day, blasting around in ridiculously high winds.  I was less than pleased.

Thursday and Friday were team-teaching conferences for JTEs and ALTs together.  They were... interesting.  And some were definitely more helpful than others.  It was definitely fascinating to hear from other ALTs and JTEs about the activities and work they do in their classroom, and their students` skill levels.  Many of my students are definitely below par.

On Saturday I went to see a mountain on fire!  No, seriously.  Mountain.  On fire.  On purpose.  It`s called Yamayaki Matsuri, and it`s a festival that occurs every year on the fourth Saturday of January in Nara.  This means I got to see the deer again!  I haven`t been to Nara in about two and a half years, so I was definitely excited to be going.  And I dragged my friend Mary with me, so I wasn`t babbling at the adorable baby deer by myself.  It was COLD, though.  Really cold.  But we didn`t really care.  We had an enjoyable, relaxing day.  It`s about an hour and a half trip for me to Nara (Mary was already on the train, because it`s something like another forty minutes to an hour for her to get to me), so we sat on the nice, warm train and caught up, because we hadn`t seen each other pretty much since we met in August.  I found the greatest train snacks EVER (Kinako Ritz Bits Sandwiches)!

Our chat somehow came around to pizza (likely my fault), so we decided to search out pizza once we got to Nara.  Turns out there`s a Pizza Hut about a five minute walk from the station!  Huzzah!  Once we got there, though, we discovered it was strictly a take-out location, so we had to order our pizza and then head back out into the cold to find a bench somewhere to eat it.  The problem: it`s not really a thing to just eat in public in Japan, so things like park benches are really only found at bus stops, and something like wide, sit-able planters are few and far between.  Finally we found a bench in the area outside another train station, so we could stop and enjoy pizza-y goodness.  

The street leading up to the park and temple was peppered with festival food stalls, and despite being utterly stuffed from our pizza, we just had to get these chocolate-coated bananas.  Because reasons.

After that we strolled through the park, just chatting and bothering random deer.  I also heard the deer for the first time.  So, for anyone back home, the white-tailed deer that you see while camping or in your backyard sound a lot like sheep.  They bleat, okay?  Not so much the Shika deer (which is somewhat redundant.  The Shika is the only kind of deer in Japan, so the Japanese word for "deer" is "shika", but technically that word still only applies to the specific type of deer...).  The Shika deer squeak.  Not like short, high-pitched mouse squeak, though.  This is a long, drawn-out squeak like a dog`s squeaky toy being slowly squeezed.  Basically they sound like Wheezy from the Toy Story movies.  

So anyway, we chilled out in the park for a while, until we got to the point where we couldn`t really feel our hands or faces anymore, and decided to go warm up a bit.  It was still a little early for dinner, plus we were planning to grab festival food from a stall and that really wouldn`t help with the warming up, so we found a cafe that wasn`t packed and grabbed some hot beverages.  Then we dragged our rears out back into the cold for dinner (yaki udon, so basically hot noodles and cabbage with sauce), and found a spot for the fireworks and mountain-burning that would be starting shortly.  Around this time is when it started raining.  Partway through the fireworks, it started raining harder (and colder, I swear, and the rain was already pretty cold), so I stopped taking pictures and pulled out my umbrella since I could barely feel my fingers enough to operate my phone properly anyway.

  The fireworks were pretty spectacular, but the mountain on fire was kind of anti-climactic.  All of the pictures we`d seen for the festival showed honest-to-god mountain on fire.  So we went there expecting the monks to come with a few torches and for the mountain to kind of go "fwoosh".  It did not.  The monks all stood on the mountainside (which seems really unsafe when you`re about to ignite the thing) with their torches of sacred fire, and the mountain was ritually lit up using some sort of system that was impossible to determine from where we were standing. 

Many people were heading out, so we went and got Mary a baked potato (it`s a thing here, baked potato as a street food in the winter), and then came back to see if the mountain was more spectacularly on fire yet.  It wasn`t.  Given the rate at which it seemed to be burning, it wasn`t likely to be burning well until probably at least 9 or 10 at night, and there was no way we were staying that late in the cold and wet, plus we would miss our trains.  So we called it a night, and headed back to our homes.  Overall, I would only recommend this festival if you`re actually staying overnight in Nara, so that you can actually witness mountain on fire. 

NOTE: This was posted two weeks after I wrote it, because I got, like, the plague.  Nothing interesting has happened since then, though, so you haven't missed anything.