Sunrise Chronicles

We had our opening ceremony today to start off the last half-term of the school year. You don't know how tempting it was to stay in the nice, warm teachers' room reading a book instead of going to stand in the freezing gym for an hour, but I dragged myself out there.

My biggest task afterward was correcting speech papers for the seniors, who will have to give speeches as their final project next week. Most of the time I could figure out what the students were trying to say well enough to give corrections, but sometimes I was completely stumped. If I can ferret out what the original Japanese had probably been, I generally know what the student is getting at, but when their original Japanese is in error...yeesh.

Take, for example, this sentence: "And please stand up, for one year."

Go ahead, try to guess what the student intended.

I was stumped by that one for a long time. I even consulted with one of my team teachers, and she didn't understand it either. Finally, I hazarded the opinion that the student had gotten the kanji 経って (tatte, "[time] passes") mixed up with the kanji 立って (tatte, "stand") and looked up the wrong meaning in the dictionary. Thus, she probably meant to say "And one year passed."

The department of the school responsible for educating the teachers (and students) about human rights and equality issues frequently leaves handouts on all the teachers' desks. I usually glance through them and then toss them, because they deal with Japanese issues ("How shall we care for our aging population?") that don't concern me.

Today, however, a little corner of the handout was devoted to addressing political correctness.

( Cut for LONG linguistic geekiness )

In other news, there was some tension regarding Ritsumeikan's plans to renovate the school. Next year, the new Ritsumeikan co-ed class will arrive, along with new Ritsumeikan teachers. That means they need to set up bathrooms for the boys and space for more teachers. Apparently, the current teachers are pissed off that Ritsumeikan wrote up a renovation plan that has far more changes than they feel are necessary, and Ritsumeikan has already gone to a construction company and worked up a timetable for the renovation. Ritsumeikan wants to get started on the construction as soon as possible, but the teachers don't like their plan and want them to put it on hold until a compromise can be reached.

I found out that, although the students don't have to show up at the Creative site until noon (which is when I thought I was supposed to show up as well), the teachers are supposed to get there at 9am. They need to do setup and have a last-minute practice session for the song we'll be singing. This made me a bit frantic, because I had been counting on those three hours to do some cleaning and shopping. (In fact, I had a dream last night that my parents showed up unexpectedly on my doorstep, and I insisted, "I was intending to clean Saturday morning! Honest!")

I rushed out and did my shopping right after I got off work. Mainly, I wanted to buy a tripod for my videocamera so I can set it up and (hopefully) record the song at the event tomorrow. As for cleaning...well...^_^;

Although we had perfect sunny weather for the two practice days, the first day of the festival dawned rainy and gray.

And, because this is really all about me, I will say that the combination of the conditioner from the hair dye and the humidity from the rain made my hair defy gravity like some ( random anime chick )

In other news, I polished off the stack of "must read" Japanese novels demanding my attention and turned to some of the English ones my parents brought for me that I had been saving. I have to say, learning a foreign language kinda takes some of the fun out of reading fantasy books with made-up words in them. For example...

Character: "Would you like a cup of sumi?"

Me: You're offering your guests ink?!

Plus the characters were exclaiming "Hai!" all the time, and it messed with my head because it didn't mean "yes."

Today I uploaded Lesson 14. Only one more to go!

I attended the Minna no Salon, which was a workshop given by a lady who moved here from El Salvador. She showed a Japanese documentary video about the country, and while it was playing, she brewed up some El Salvadoran coffee. She made some strong and some weak with cinnamon in it. The smell of the cinnamon was wonderful, but those cups were all taken by the time I got to the table, so I didn't actually get to drink any.

One of the snacks served with the coffee was an El Salvadoran tortilla. It wasn't at all like either the Mexican-style tortilla or the Spanish-style tortilla. It was made out of corn flour, but instead of being thin and flat, it was thick and chewy. It was rather like a dense pancake.

During the video, I acted as an interpreter for a lady from Egypt who could understand English but not Japanese. She seemed very interested. I was quite amused, however, when the video showed the remains of a Mayan pyramid. She stared at it and said, "You call THAT a pyramid?!" <g>

After the video and the food, the lady running the workshop went over some simple Spanish words, such as numbers, greetings, and body parts. When she got to the Spanish word for "ear," oído, a number of people in the room started snickering. It seems that is a colloquial term for "rear end" in Japanese.

My senior class had another discussion about nouns with gender on Friday, probably prompted by the previous day's session. Japanese nouns don't have gender, so this is a completely foreign concept for them.

Student1: So you're saying that everything is either a man or a woman? If this paper is a woman, does that mean people think women are like paper?

Teacher: No, it has nothing to do with real people. The word itself has gender. You have to use particles with it, like "la."

Student2: You mean, it's like calling this paper "Paper-kun"? [-kun is a diminutive often used for boys] You would always have to say Paper-kun and not, like, Paper-san?

Teacher: Yes, that's kind of the idea.

Me: <can't resist> You know, some languages don't just have two genders. Some have masculine, feminine, and neuter.

Teacher: <translates> Some languages have men, women, and in-between.

Student1: <amazed> They have o-kama objects?! [o-kama is the Japanese version of "drag queen"]

They were quite fascinated by this concept.

Friday night, the English department had a party at the same place I went last year for Girls' Night Out. For a place that specializes in chicken, they have a fairly decent selection of vegetarian food, and I was easily able to fill up. Toward the end of the meal, we played a game of "men vs. women" where each team was given three clipboards and a topic. The topic would be something like "household appliance maker." The three people with the clipboards would write whatever answer they thought would be most common, then show the clipboards simultaneously. If they were all different, the team got no points. If two people had the same answer, the team got three points, and if all three had the same answer, the team got three points.

The women wound up beating the men with a score of 16-6, and that's including the handicap of having me on the team.

Just as the party was drawing to a close, three other teachers joined us (after their own party) and invited us out for karaoke. We went to a "snack" a few blocks away. In Japanese, a "snack" is a little like a bar-lounge. This one was equipped with karaoke, plus we were the only customers, so we spent about three hours there just drinking and singing.

Well, the others were drinking, but they only had whiskey. I only like sweet drinks. I asked if they had plum wine, but apparently they didn't offer it.

Strangely, toward the end of the evening, the woman running the snack brought me a glass of plum wine. I wonder if she had someone run out and buy a bottle specifically for me. Weird. Anyway, I wound up staying up WAY past my bedtime and not getting home until about midnight.

This morning I got up and continued to work on the handbag for my yukata. It's all finished now except for the drawstring. I made one unfortunate miscalculation when cutting the fabric, but I think it won't be noticeable.

I was buried under an avalanche of papers to grade today, because all of my students simultaneously had writing assignments. As always, it's amazing to see what they come up with.

( A couple excerpts )

In one of my senior classes, the textbook unit is about invitations and parties, so I planned a lesson in which the students have a competition. Half the students were designated as "inviters" and half as "refusers." They had to plan out what kinds of arguments or excuses they would say either to invite someone to a party (or other event) or to refuse (as politely as possible) to attend. Then they paired up, and tried to continue inviting/refusing until one side conceded. We then had some of the pairs demonstrate in front of the class.

( Oh, the drama! )

Friday I finished up two of my remaining three classes, and then the third was cancelled. So I was looking at having nothing next week but working on my yukata. (I sewed the two front panels to the body. It's getting there.)

Then the teacher next to me asked if I could join her for two classes next week. Supposedly this is because her students wanted to have a "conversation" class, which they don't currently get. (They're not English majors.) I said, "Sure...could you ask each student to come prepared with one thing to say?" (It's hard to get a conversation going when no one has a clue what to talk about.) The first of the two classes would be Tuesday, so I figured if they got the message on Monday, that would give them overnight to think up one thing to say.

Her response...that would be too hard. Instead, she suggested that I write up a bunch of questions beforehand and bring them to the class, and we could play a hot potato game where the "potato" would be a box full of the questions. Whoever got stuck with the box would have to draw and ask a question. Now, this is a perfectly good game, and I have no problem doing so. But here's my beef: These are second-year high school students, which means they've been taking English as a mandatory subject for five years. FIVE YEARS. And coming up with one thing to say when given a day to think about it is TOO HARD.

Excuse me?

Granted, they're not English majors. But even a student who hates English with a passion should, after five years, be able to come up with something such as "What sports do you like?" if given a day to think about it. Heck, I only took French for a few weeks back in middle school well over a decade ago, and I could at least come up with one sentence if I had to. (I couldn't spell it, mind you, but I could say it.)

Yet they can't. Or, rather, the teachers believe that they can't, and thus never ask them to try.

I probably wouldn't have ranted so much about this, except I just started reading a Japanese novel this morning. It's set in New York, and the main character is a young Japanese man who gets accidentally knocked unconscious. As he's coming to, he hears two people talking about him and wondering whether he's Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, since they can't tell by looking at him. The suggestion is to get him to talk, because "If he talks fast, he's Chinese, if he talks loudly, he's Korean, and if his English sucks, he's Japanese."

There are many, many Japanese people who speak good English. Yet it's always discouraging to see what's going on behind-the-scenes in the education field and to realize that the situation could be so much *better*.

My first period class was apparently canceled due to a kanji exam that was postponed from yesterday. Not that anyone bothered to tell me. I got kind of suspicious when my team teacher didn't go ahead to the classroom as usual, but he's done that a couple times before, so I shrugged and walked to the classroom. It was locked, with no students anywhere around. I waited a minute or so and went back to the faculty room, and *then* my team teacher said, "Oh, sorry, no class today." Thanks.

My guest lesson went reasonably well. One thing that kind of irritates me is that Japanese teachers have really low expectations for their students when it comes to English. (I don't know if they say similar things about other subjects.) As I was walking to the classroom, the team teacher said, "The students don't like...they hate English, so if they can just have a good time with you, that's fine."

I started off with the introduction activity. I wrote ten true/false statements about myself on the board. The students, broken up into teams, had to try to guess whether each statement was true or false. I started with the first team, reading the first statement and asking them "true" or "false," accompanying each word with the Japanese hand gesture (a circle for true, an X for false). I was standing right in front of the students, so I could hear one of them in the group explaining to the others what they were supposed to do. As they pondered, the team teacher spoke up, "They don't know what to do, so I should tell them in Japanese." Way to trust in their abilities. ^_^;

I just urged them to decide on an answer, repeating "true" or "false" with hand gestures, and they finally agreed on a response. Once I wrote their answer on the board, the rest of the class could clearly tell what was expected of them, and soon they were all enthusiastically yelling out "true" or "false." I find that it's really common for Japanese teachers to want to translate things immediately, thinking the English is "too hard" for the students, but I also find that most of the time the students can figure things out for themselves if given little hints like hand gestures...and if it's clear they're not going to be spoon-fed the answer in Japanese.

After school, several students actually showed up for English club for a change. They used the opportunity to beg me to say something in Japanese "because it's a shame you went to all the trouble to learn it yet we never hear you use it." They didn't stop at that, however; they wanted to get me to say something in the local dialect, Kansai-ben.

Student A: Say wakarahen ("I don't know").
Student B: Say wakarahen wa.
Me: <snicker>
<students lay the accent on thick>
Student A: Say wakaraheeen wa.
Student B: Say wakarrrrahen wa.
Me: <convulses with laughter>

They wanted to know what accent I picked up with my Japanese and asked where I learned it. I told them I learned it in Niigata, but that I only learned to read there, not to speak. I never spoke more than a couple words at a time until I went to JCMU last year.

When I left off working on my yukata sleeve last time, it looked like this diagram: right sides together, with the yellow line machine-stitched and the purple dotted line hand-stitched (the ends of the threads left dangling).

The next step is to form the curve of the sleeve. Place a cardboard cutout that matches the arc of the curve just slightly inside the yellow line and fold the material over it, pinning it in place at either end of the curve. Pull the ends of the hand-stitched threads to gather the corner. Iron the gathered material and then lightly backstitch the gathers in place. Remove the cardboard cutout.

After that, it's time to hem the wrist opening. Fold the edge of the fabric over twice to make a narrow hem and sew it with stitches roughly 1cm (~3/8") apart.

I was pretty slow at hemming the wrist opening, so I only managed to finish one sleeve by the end of the hour.

In other news, today was my last day of classes for the year. I still have to go in to work tomorrow, but there aren't any classes, just cleaning and an assembly.

<random linguistic musing>
One of the teachers who went on the Australia trip asked me whether "asthma" had "the" in front of it when explaining one's medical condition. I didn't think much of it at the time, but this morning I pondered it further. We have a number of conditions that use "the" in front of them, such as "I have the measles" and "I have the flu," yet we have a number that don't use "the" in front of them, such as "I have chicken pox" and "I have pneumonia." I tried to figure out whether there was any kind of pattern, such as severity of the disease, but nothing came to me. How is a non-native speaker to know whether to use "the" or not?

A rather ominous report on the student interpersonal relationship front: During the morning faculty meeting, one of the teachers announced that someone found a note reading "Die!" They don't know who wrote it, apparently, but they're quite concerned.

Now I'm going to take a moment to talk about essays. One of my third-year classes, with 26 students, has a writing practice lesson once a week. At the end of the class, they print out their work and turn it in to my team-teacher. He has been collecting these papers for about three weeks now. Yesterday, when he mentioned that there would be a short writing portion on the mid-term exam, the students protested that they hadn't received their essays back with corrections yet. Fair enough.

So, this morning, I find two weeks' worth of essays stacked on my desk with a note asking me to grade them.

Okay, I don't have a problem with grading student essays. That's part of what I'm here to do. But if you're going to have me grade them, don't hoard them for several weeks and then dump them on my desk at the last minute. Sheesh. You're just lucky today was my lightest schedule.

I did, in fact, enjoy reading the students' papers, which included the "scary story" assignment from before Halloween and an essay about favorite seasons. There were even some lines that really brightened my morning.

And, in New Years day we get OTOSHIDAMA from our grand parents and aunts and ankles.
I wish my ankles were that generous.

Some people say that they like winter better for some reason but I hate the cold winter. It makes my nose runny or plagued. I hate that feeling.
I totally agree. The plague is the worst.

I was particularly impressed by this student, who valiantly sticks with this sentence until the bitter end:
Also in winter time when I go shopping by bike, I have to wear really thick and heavy clothes and when I get the place, inside the building, it would be really hot so I have to take off my jacket or whatever that I wear and the jacket makes trouble because I have to hold a lot of stuff that I bought and the jacket!

And on a completely unrelated note, as I was trying to find out if there was a special nautical term for the steering wheel of a ship (my English vanishes in unexpected ways, so sometimes I think there must be a word for something, but I can't for the life of me remember what it is)... You know you've been in Japan too long when you are flipping through the dictionary and spot the heading "rubricate," and your brain automatically switches the "r" for "l."

Then, in my fairytale class, three students performed the sock-check upon entering the room. Wow, it's contagious.

I also feel I should mention, these girls can be really sharp. We're currently doing "Rapunzel," with which only one or two had been familiar. Upon hearing the part about the witch climbing up Rapunzel's hair, one of the girls immediately protested, "Hey, wait, if the witch could use magic to make the tower and put Rapunzel in it, why does she need to climb up her hair to get in?"

Good question. "Maybe the magic method is very hard?" I speculate. Harder than climbing twenty yards straight up supported only by a braided rope of hair? (Is it here I should mention I like the Koori no Mamono version *so* much better? Or is that too fangirly of me?)