Thursday and Friday

Thursday:
Junior High. This school was piloting a "new" system for Japan - kids moving from class to class and the teacher remaining in one place. Most schools have the teachers move from room to room. This was very typical of a junior high - some of the teachers were more hands-on, while others were very lecture driven. It seemed that they were sort of not ready for us to be there, and weren't really happy to have us there at first (though once we started observing classes, most teachers were incredibly gracious.

My big take-away from this school was that when it comes down to it, kids are kids. I got a chance to spend time in the class for kids with special needs (the only one in the district) and had a blast. Their English teacher was awesome and spent a lot of time working with kids on basic skills (color identification, counting, movement) in English as reinforcment of their lessons in Japanese. She was pretty amazing.

Friday:
High school. We had studnets who were our guides and who seemed really excited to see us. I observed a health class, and the teacher asked me to talk about drug use and abuse in schools in the states and how teachers and schools were dealing with the problems. interesting. I got a chance to wander around and see other classes, inclunding the pre-caligraphy class which was a blast. The teacher was showing us examples of some post cards she and the students had made and let us try our hands at it. I had some kids write some passages in Kanji for me, and they turned out pretty well. Have pictures, will post once edited.

I had a hard time - on the one hand, the teachers in some of the electives indicated that this was a time when kids were just practicing, as they were having semester exams in content classes next week, but I felt like there were times when we were just such a huge disruption and distraction for the classes. On one hand, the teachers kept saying how great it was that kids got the chance to talk with so many native English speakers, but on the other, I was really worried about how we were distracting kids and teachers.

For dinner, we went out to a nice restaurant and order tons and tons of stuff - some of which I really don't want to know too much about the content of. Also, a somewhat insane amount of sake. But the sake was so smooth, and I think we were all a bit worried about the homestay the next day. An excellent time was had. And I'm the only one who wasn't hung over. Woo!