the good with the bad

Soooo the September rain that had been strangely absent all month came today, and it was misery-season again. I was, in fact, all set for today to be the worst day of the term, more because I would very much like to believe that there won't be any more really bad days than because of how it actually turned out. In the morning I skipped breakfast because my stomach was giving me trouble, then promptly got hunger pangs during my first- and second-period classes. Was all set to collapse by the end of first-year communication. Because of the heat, though, I didn't get any trouble from students today, just sleepy-moans :T

Throughout the rest of the day I was constantly replaying a song on my iPod, convinced that I would have to know the lyrics by heart at 3 pm. See, yesterday a couple students came into the office and wanted to know if one of us ALTs could sing a couple English songs with their band for the bunkasai (school culture festival). The festival starts Friday, so that means whoever volunteered would have 3 days to learn it and practice with the students. They ambushed AJ first, but he's doing a lot of music stuff with our jazz-man vice principal already, so I offered to fill in on one song. It's by a band called Ellegarden ( "L-garden" ) that essentially is the Japanese incarnation of Blink 182.

Practice after school meant I would have no time to nap and recuperate from my daylong stomach problems before my 2-hour eikaiwa class at the community center tonight. But I'd wanted to get in on some bunkasai action like I did last year, and as I'd thought it was too late already this actually was a nice surprise. As it turned out, the students weren't practicing with their band today anyway; we're meeting tomorrow after classes end. No 13-hour gauntlet for me, hooray! I took the shortcut down the hill and through the forest back to my apartment and promptly passed out on the floor until it was time to warm up some soup for dinner.

The last eikaiwa class I did wasn't so successful - in fact I would say my recent dental work at a Japanese clinic was less painful - so I wasn't expecting a great turnout. 7:30 came and sure enough the only two people who showed up besides the organizer dude were two of the older men. One guy is a retired English teacher and pretty chill, but the other is a Grouchy McNaggypants who has been dogging both my and AJ's classes with complaints and ill humor for the past couple months, pretty much expecting us to make him fluent in English in 2 hours ever two weeks with no preparation or active effort on his part.

Great, I thought, well I guess I'm being punished for all my past slacking-off on lessons. But over the next 10 minutes three of my favorite adult students filtered in, and I had prepared an easy but fun lesson this time, which they all took to surprisingly well. In no time the mood in the room turned from awkward as Tom Cruise speaking at a pathologists' convention to relaxed and groovy. Afterwards the woman who has sorta become my Japanese grandma drove me back and gave me some homemade lemon cake. Luckily I'd baked cookies over the weekend, which meant I could give her some okaeshi straight away :3

All in all, despite waking up wishing I could just spend all day in bed, the day has taken a nice upswing. And it's the longest, hottest day the week will throw at me, so whatever other setbacks and speed bumps pop up, it's still a gentle downhill run to the weekend.

cooling off

This morning I stepped out of my door and it was...cool. And breezy. And...and not humid! And apparently the temperature, at least, is going to keep up its good behavior. This is not a drill! Misery season is officially over :D

That being said, of course the ONE day I actually wouldn't mind some hot summer weather, it's going to drop below 20 C and rain heavily. On Saturday a bunch of JETs are heading up to our prefecture's tanfastic water park / amusement park / outlet shopping center, and I was looking forward to gettin' my swim on in those pools. But I guess if I stay in I can take care of some much needed fall cleaning, and maybe...bake? Cookies sound awesome right now.

Just had the second lesson-planning meeting of fall term, and it definitely went better than the first. Experience, both during the past year and the past week, have taught me what pitfalls to look for in the first-year students' textbook lessons (confusing vocabulary, grammar or verb forms that are just tossed in at random and never explained, etc.), and I think I am getting a lot better at generally jazzing them up with engaging activities and visual aids.

Also! Soma FM has a new station, and I love it. "Suburbs of Goa" keeps me sane during the days when Creeper-sensei doesn't have nearly enough classes to keep him out of the office and out of earshot. I have a feeling it will also be very useful when proper flu season starts and everyone steadfastly refuses to blow their damn noses, opting instead to become perpetual snorting machines because somehow that's more polite and less disgusting. Right.

Yahoo had up a list of "Office Do's and Don'ts" that they snagged from CNN the other day, and it really made me pine, if not for America per se, then at least for a professional culture where everyone understands that it's NOT okay to kick off your shoes and prop your rank-nasty feet on the desk edge right next to your neighbor's face, or constantly belch and grunt and hum tunelessly (actually the more accurate term would be "tonedeafly," but I'm pretty sure that's not a word. Well it is now), or leave your phone at your desk all day without setting it to vibrate so that everyone gets to hear the nauseating pop song you set as your text message notification over and over and over again.

Yeah, it's the little things that get to you. But all in all this term actually doesn't look too bad - second-year culture kids are well taken care of with Grammar-sensei so no worries there; I have a fairly solid plan for third-year culture & they're good students to boot; and first-year classes are at least working out better than last year, if nothing else. They're really benefitting from Grammar-sensei's English class, so we don't have to hold their hands quite as much. I don't teach the class from which some students will move up to 2A Culture next year, but I would hazard to guess they'll be pretty alright. The total number of students enrolled for each year has been going down, as well. While that doesn't bode well in terms of Japan's aging population, at least it means smaller invididual class size, and that's better for everybody.

Miscellany

Oh, the world is full of words that I love ♥
Such as "vertiginous," 「ときどき」(tokidoki), and "recherche"

I played a word-game with my second-years today that's like a cross between hot potato and musical chairs, only English words are the potatoes and the music is from the original "Batman" TV series. The penalty for being the one caught out is they have to answer a conversational question in English. I have questions of varying levels, from "What is your name? What is your quest? What is your favorite color?" etc. to "Do you think there are aliens on other planets?" Can't wait to get to that one.

Also can't wait to get to Ise this weekend - LaLa Park, woooo! Just like all the other hojillion Aeon shopping complexes in J-pan, except I've actually bought stuff at this one and it's called "LaLa Park" XD

This is either another instance of "Japan is weird," or "goddamn I'm getting old already" - remember when you used to sometimes find Cracker Jacks or little plastic toys in the cereal box? Guess what I found in mine. Go on, guess. ok i'll tell you, jeez

Unfortunately I have not watched it yet, as my laptop has just run out of DVD region changeovers, but I'll bet it's CRAZY AWESOME FUN TIMES WITH PENGUINS.

Speaking of crazy awesome animals, meet the newest addition to my menagerie (another good word, but I just can't love it like I love mélange):

Who's a sciatic little Tamandua? Yes you are! (somehow the seaming on his back made him curve a little to the right...I like to think it gives him character, though)

I sent the pattern to Ku to be all digitechnofunkisized, thus why I am not able to share it at the mo', but fear not, soon all y'all crafts-inclined type persons can make your very own army of southern / lesser / vested anteaters.
Sorry for springing that on ya, Ku, but many thanks for the postcard. And yes, you can start building that joint USPS - JPS shrine now, because your Vegasoid-monstrosity-card DID get through them both and here's proof:And now it is HIGH time I started making dinner, 'cause there's gonna be a busy day of inaugural events taking place around midnight my time. GUESS WHO'S STAYING UP TIL 2 AM ON A WORK NIGHT I'll give you three chances and the first two don't count (.__.)a

Re-Wired

So even though my instructions were all in Japanese, and despite the infuriating fact that Japanese and American Mac menus have different configurations when it comes to System Preferences, I managed to successfully get my laptop hooked back into the interwebbernets without blowing it up.

This post right here is being written from the comfort of my own apartment, where I steadfastly refuse to wear pants indoors until the temperature consistently stays below 20 C. HOORAY! More than you wanted to know.

Speaking of the apartment, I've made some improvements so that it doesn't look quite so dreary and empty of all warmth or comfort. According to the terms and conditions of my contract, my new curtains are technically a no-no because I didn't ask the school if I could put them up. But I really doubt the superintendent is going to evict me for taking down those fugly pastel floral sins against interior decor that pained my eyes on a daily basis before I threw them in my closet. As for that cluttered box in the corner, anyone who has ever lived with me can tell you I just don't feel at home until I've made an ungodly mess somewhere about the premises. IT BEGINS.

It has come to my attention that I don't have a lot of pictures of Shima / Isobe yet, so I will try to remedy that over the weekend. There was a JET outing to Nagashima Spaland (a local water park) planned for Saturday, but it has been raining on-and-off for the past week, and this weekend is supposed to get ugly again so I'm staying home. I should clarify that "raining on-and-off" in Shima / prettymuch all of southeastern Japan means "End-of-Days-caliber downpours for several intervals lasting at least 3 hours each and brief spots of sun in between." I remember lots and lots of rain when I first got to Nagoya two years ago, but not the subway-flooding that was reported there last weekend. Apparently this is a record-setting year for rainfall outside of "the rainy season." AJ tells me that, actually, most of the rain Japan sees comes outside of "the rainy season," and the weather forecasters always do their best to sound surprised and slightly indignant, but no one seems keen on copping to the fact that their parameters for seasonal weather patterns are just plain outdated and need to be changed. Oh, Japan.

The weather hasn't dampened the spirits of my students, though, I'm happy to report. All told I have 6 distinct classes, although one of them is just a smaller group of the same students. 1A and 1B are my first-year English classes, and they're, well, your typical freshmen (except Japanese students don't enter high school until the 10th grade, so by American standards they would technically be sophomores). Slow to warm up and too shy most of the time to give an audible response. The 1A class is more advanced, so they show a bit more enthusiasm.

I have three third-year classes, but my 3A Culture class is pretty much a group of six girls from homeroom 3A getting extra credit for spending an hour goofing off and maybe incidentally learning something. The big 3A class is Reading, and they're a bit of a rowdy bunch, but they do well enough with group activities. They seem to like me well enough to listen to me most of the time, and they're the least shy about volunteering answers on an individual basis. 3BC is a Reading class that AJ and I teach together; there are about 40 students, and the Japanese teacher assigned to the room with us half-jokingly and half-fearfully refers to them as "the monster class." He hangs in back shushing the boys occasionally, and AJ and I are left to our own devices. We're not really held accountable for much more than keeping them occupied for an hour a week.

2A Reading is the only class I haven't taught yet. If my other upperclassmen are any indication, they'll probably be a fun bunch. Shima-ko isn't really a high-performing school, as you may have guessed. I think only about 20% of the students plan on going to college. Many families in and around Isobe live in farming communities, so after completing high school a lot of the kids stay at home to help keep up the rice fields. There aren't a lot of jobs in available in this area, and those that are open usually don't require college degrees. I've even met a guy my age working as a translator in Ise (next city up the road to the north; actually qualifies as a real city, too, although it's not as large as say Tsu, the capital of Mie) and I'm pretty sure he hasn't gone to college. He's one of the younger students in the community English class AJ and I teach every other Tuesday night. I'm pretty sure he only comes to swap music with AJ, though; his level of English is way beyond most of the people there.

Still, it's nice to have mature students who come to class because they want to. Switches it up a bit. And there's a very motherly older woman, Masako, who lives not too far down the road from me and who has questioned me at length about my favorite Japanese foods. In Japan, this is as good as saying "Come to my house and I will cook dinner for you." So I know where I'm headed after work tomorrow (n__n)

I will leave off with a picture of the wee-tiny little crabs that wander all about the town wherever there are drainage pipes leading to the river. They could fit quite comfortably in the palm of my hand, if I were stupid enough to try and pick them up. This little guy is regaining his composure after a tense face-off with a crawfish about twice his size. It was the cutest narrowly-averted-epic-battle I have ever witnessed. Much waving of claws and sideways dancing.