Sports Fesivals, elementary schools and more!

Once again, I’ve been somewhat busy hence the long delay. It was sort of a busy week last week because school started and all. I’ll put this post in sections to make it seem like I’m a structured person.

First days of work at Sasayama junior high –

Last week I spent three days at my middle school and two days at elementary schools. The three days at my middle school were pretty uneventful. The entire last week was devoted to sports festival practice, so there were no classes. I pretty much just sat around the office and wandered the school building all day. I tried to talk to some of the kids, but middle school kids are impossible to communicate with. American middle schoolers are pretty bad, but imagine middle school in a country where conformity is already a valued trait in society. Basically you get kids whose idea of a nightmare is doing anything different. Which includes speaking English and especially speaking English with the new white devil teacher. Hopefully they’ll warm up to me.

Elementary school visits –

I went to two different elementary schools last week. My schedule is so that I have four elementary schools that I visit twice every two months. It’s not very conductive to teaching English, but oh well. I’m beginning to realize that’s not my job. Anyway, I basically went through a simple self-introduction and taught the kids a few phrases so they could introduce themselves. Then we played games. Mostly Simon Says-esque games. During the recess or lunch time, I played around with the kids. They wanted me to play soccer with them once. Only I found out it was crazy soccer where two games were going on perpendicular to each other. How more kids didn’t get hurt I have no idea. Speaking of getting hurt, elementary school kids are about the same in this country. They usually express affection through physical pain. They will come up to me and just pull my arm hair or try to wrestle me to the ground. I had one kid who just latched onto my leg and would not let go.

The teachers at the elementary schools were a lot of fun to talk to. They generally have more free time and want to talk to me. One lady in my office let me know her grievances about the time card system that is just a waste of energy. I also spent some time teaching whatever English word anyone wanted to know.

Sport Festival –

Sasayama junior high had its sports festival this Sunday. That was quite the event. They divided the school into five teams and they sort of…competed. I say sort of because things like building a human pyramid or all the girls in the school dancing are kind of hard to give points to, at least according to me. Some things the entire team would participate in, like the millipede race. The kids tied all their legs together and had to cross the field like that. There were about 60 kids in each team so it wasn’t so easy. Some things like the relay were divided by age groups within the teams. There were normal 8x100m relays and there were more interesting relays like one relay where it eventually ended up where 6 kids were tied together and had to run 100m. Also there was the piggyback relay where at first one kid would run, than two kids would run and three kids and so on. One of the kids had to be carried at all times, so it was pretty funny to watch seven kids running carrying the lucky number eight. Some teams carried the teachers for their extra person.

Like every good sports day, they had the school divided into boys and girls and the girls did a dance and the boys did human pyramids. This is a good way to work into their heads early that boys and girls are different and will never be equal. The boys did insane things that would never be allowed on an American school campus without massive amount of liability assurance from the parents. Case in point is the 30-boy pyramid. The girls did a dance to three songs. Almost none of the girls looked like they wanted to be there. I’ve seen more enthusiasm from McDonalds workers…in the US. You’d think smiling was a capital crime here from the looks of their performance. But then outside of school, you see girls all the time dancing with extreme enthusiasm.

After the sports festival there was an enkai for the office. An enkai is a work party where workers are encouraged to loosen up after being stiff as a board all week in the office. Like all enkais, alcohol flows and insanity ensues. Some particularly memorable moments was the man who instead of toasting me with “cheers” or “kampai” (Japanese for cheers), would pour me a drink and then hold up his glass and say something incredibly offensive in English. The first time I almost choked when I heard him and about died laughing. You just don’t expect this in Japan. One of the most offensive things in Japanese you can say translates to “this is not a joke”.

This Week –

This week I had Monday and Tuesday off since I had to work the past two weekends. It was quite nice sleeping in while you knew that the rest of the teachers had to be getting to the office early. I didn’t feel guilty at all.

Wednesday I went back to one of my elementary schools for their second visit of the month. Kind of sad that I won’t see them for another two months. They had fruit hour once again, where some lady had brought in various fruit and cut it up and gave it to this office. Fruit is pretty much like gold here, at prices like $1.50 an apple. Also, they have a designated tea lady that pretty much her only job is to serve tea and I guess serve fruit as well. What kind of amazing place is that? I told her that I could take her job and she could teach if she wanted to.

Random –

Also yesterday at school the vice-principal came into the office and turned on the TV like something catastrophic had happened. This is Japan so I knew to expect something like a monkey reading Japanese to kids. Unfortunately it was nothing nearly as exciting as that. But the prime minister, Shinzou Abe, resigned. He’s only been in office since last September, so it is kind of a surprise. But his popularity polls are barely higher than ol’ George, so it’s not really that surprising. In a parliamentary system, the executive (the prime minister) is held directly accountable to the people. They have no guarantee of staying in office for a set number of years like a president. It’s much more democratic, in my opinion, than a presidential system, but usually Japanese politicians bend the rules and the politics hover around dynastic capitalist bureaucracy. So it’s nice to see democracy work for once.

I also filled up my car and figure out I’m paying about $5/gallon. So I’m not really feeling sympathetic to cries of expensive gas in the