2002-02-11 - 7:43 p.m.
Today was a holiday, so this Monday night feels like a Sunday night -- looking ahead to the coming week of teaching, but at least it’s a shorter week. Last week felt like a marathon. Usually, I’ll be doing Monday, Tuesday and Thursday at my far junior high school, and then on Wednesdays and Fridays I’ll be doing my traveling side show at local elementary schools. But last week I had to do three days of elementary school in a row, and it was pretty exhausting.
The elementary schools are kind of hit or miss. Sometimes, the school will be ten minutes from my apartment, they’ll tell me to come in a 9, I’ll teach four classes, relax during recess, and then they’ll send me home at 2 or 3. But often they expect me to teach all six classes and eat lunch with the kids, and sometimes the schools are 2 hours away, not ten minutes. Knowing that I was going to be doing a lot of elementary school visits in February, last month I made up a few coloring sheets to bring to the schools and they have been a life saver. With the 1-3rd graders I’ve been using a worksheet that teaches them colors (“The bike is BLUE. Color the bike BLUE”) etc., which keeps them busy and quiet for half of the time. For the older kids I’ve been doing Valentine’s cards, which takes a glorious 30 minutes of work on their part. But that one won’t last past this week.
Last week, I went to a TINY elementary school, way out in the country near my junior high school. I had been told that I would be teaching all six grades, so I had planned my usual circus of activities for a classes of 30 or so students. When the vice principal picked me up from the train station, she explained in Japanese that this is a very small school. Just how small is it, I asked. The first grade has 4 students. The second grade has 5 students. The third and fourth grades together and the fifth and sixth grades together both have 7 students. It was a nice change because I could slow down my pace a bit and let the kids pass around my photos and the very popular life-sized hamburger postcard.
So, as I mentioned my insane week at work was rewarded by a three-day weekend. On Friday night I stayed in, ate a box of Kraft Mac & Cheese (brought from the States, a tribute to Beth) and watched videos. Saturday I caught the Olympics opening ceremony, with a gloriously staged recreation of “Utah history” (don’t get me started, but see the recent NYT article on Native Americans’ 15 min. of fame)....but, it was gloriously staged nonetheless. Went into Tokyo on Saturday and then today I went to Yokohama’s Chinatown, which was enjoyable as I now posses enough knowledge to be able to distinguish between Chinese and Japanese vegetables, weird meats, etc.
Yesterday I watched a funny variety show which is on every Sunday night. In one part of it, they put hidden cameras in a family’s bathroom and the parents leave their 5-7 year old kids in there to bath alone. The funny thing of, course, is to see what the kids do in the bath when unsupervised: they fight, they pee, they put clothes pins all over their bodies. The next segment of the show entails making fun of foreigners trying to speak Japanese. The main guy is this white man who can speak perfect Japanese. He tries to teach Japanese to some foreigners who are less gifted than he, and then they put the foreigners in some situation and film their bungles. This time, three black men were interviewed for a job at Benetton by a Japanese woman. The white guy sat through the interview to help them, but they inevitably made huge mistakes, causing the entire studio audience to crack up. One of these guys seems to be a regular on the show, and I think he makes mistakes on purpose. In my opinion three of them had the Japanese level of someone who has lived in Japan for about a year but isn’t taking lessons -- which is to say, their Japanese is better than mine, but I can still understand most of their mistakes, which come from sloppy grammar. A third segment of the show is called “Salary Man Fast Quiz.” The host goes out on the streets of Tokyo late at night and finds two drunk salary men -- office workers -- on their way home. He then puts them in front of a couple of pay phones and asks them a trivia question, and the very drunk salary men must call someone they know to find the answer to the question. I can’t really understand it, but it seems pretty funny anyway.
