Once again, this is something I forgot that I do. The following was written on April 11th. I just... didn't post it. Expect my write-up on the first couple weeks of class by next weekend!
The welcome/farewell party last night was certainly interesting for me. It was a lot more formal than the year-end party (calendar year end, that is, not school year; technically this was the school year end party). Mostly we ate while people were speaking. The party was about two hours long, and an hour and a half of that was speeches. I`m not exaggerating about that. We had the opening speeches from the MC and the principal, and then there was a few minutes of socializing/eating. Eating continued to happen throughout the night, because it was, like, a 6- or 8-course meal and we didn`t really have much of a choice if we wanted to actually eat anything. After the social bit, our four teachers who were retiring came to the stage. One of the current teachers gave a speech about each of them, after which each retiree gave their own speech. And let me tell you, these people could talk. I have no idea what they were saying, but they were saying quite a bit of whatever it was. After those eight speeches were done, we had another few minutes to socialize while they rearranged the chairs onstage. Then they called up the teachers who were transferring to other schools (there were 11, I think?) and each of them gave a speech. More socializing while the stage configuration changed again, and then all of the new teachers were called up. Thankfully, they only went through their names, and then one of them made a speech on behalf of the entire group.
You`ll all be shocked to find that I actually did some socializing during the socializing times. You`ll be even more shocked when I tell you that only some of it was in English. I wasn`t lucky enough to end up at a table with an English teacher, so I had a halting conversation with the (biology? math?) teacher beside me, mostly about food and mostly in Japanese. Then one of the PE teachers came over to visit him, and ended up conversing with me as well (also in Japanese), asking where I had been in Japan, and where I wanted to visit next. During one of the breaks I went to speak with the English teacher who transferred out, the bio teacher I used to chat with who also transferred out, and the new English teacher who transferred in. I got a bit of a surprise when I was approached out of the blue by our new math teacher. She`s studying English on her own, apparently, and wanted to say hi and ask if she could come and speak with me sometimes. Uh, obviously!
The rest of the week was pretty standard. I continued to mostly not do work, except for the brief meeting I had to discuss my conversation classes with the two JTEs I`ll be working with (I still haven`t really had a meeting with my first year teachers, but that`s par for the course, really; I think I`m just used to it now).
On Friday, though, we had our first day of school, which meant an assembly for the returning students in the morning, and the entrance ceremony for the incoming first years in the afternoon (it`s a big deal, apparently; everybody`s parents were there). It threw my JTEs for a loop when they asked me about entering high school in Canada.
"You don`t have anything like this in Canada?"
"...No. On our first day of school, we just.... kinda show up? And our homeroom is posted on the wall, and we go there?"
"But the new students who are there for the first time?"
"Yep. We still just show up."
Saturday was awesome. I went into Nagoya to see Jekyll & Hyde at the Aichi Prefectural Art Museum Theater and it was amazing. I knew all the songs and the basic plot already, being the utter nerd that I am, and I`m not terribly concerned with the nuances. The performers were great, especially the guy playing Jekyll and Hyde and the woman playing Lucy. The costumes were standard period musical fare; nice, but nothing crazy spectacular. The set and the lighting, though... I was floored. And they just kept doing new things with it. Every time I thought I had a handle on what they could do, they pulled something new. My favourite was the first time we saw Jekyll`s lab. Until this point, we`d seen him writing in his journal in his drawing room, so I expected we`d eventually see that desk covered in his potion equipment, but no. As he`s singing This is the Moment, he moves up to the second level of the set (because safety), his drawing room glides offstage, and from behind a scrim comes the lab. It`s this hulking split-level piece, with a worktable covered in potions at the bottom, and big mechanical...thing with two levers up the small staircase. On the back, mounted above all that, is a circular vent with a fan that is easily about 12 feet high. Then, still singing, he dismounts the main set stairs onto the lab set, goes up to the mechanical things and yanks on the levers. The desk lights up as though the liquids in the bottles and test tubes are luminescent themselves (like a particularly well-lit bar shelf), and the fan starts turning. Like I said, I was floored.
My first year teachers (two out of three, anyway) came up to me today and basically said, "We`ll have a meeting when we can, but we want to have fun communicating in English, so you`re in charge and we`ll just do what you say." O...kay. Wow. Like, no pressure or anything, right? My first class in on Thursday, so we`ll see how things go. I`m just going to do my self-introduction stuff, though, which I`ve done before so at least it`s familiar material.
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