Floinked

ed. note: Grandma told me I need to get back to the blogging business...

Last week, Japan got floinked (flu + oink=floink).. After a month or so of screening passengers for fever symptoms, someone in Kobe came down with the Swine Flu. The floinked high school student had never left Japan, meaning that she or he had contracted the flu domestically. This being said, Hyogo prefecture declared a state of emergency and shut down all of its schools last week. In total, about 4000 schools were closed in the Kobe-Osaka area. In America we tend to get all riled up when a boob pops out on TV or the gays get married, but in Japan they get their panties in a twist about the flu. They already horde a large amount of the flu vaccine and encourage everyone to get it every year. (Which leads to new strains of the flu virus if I’m not mistaken?)

So all last week, I had no classes and was forced to sit in school listening to the inane ramblings of frantic civil servants on the importance of wearing a surgical mask, washing your hands, gargling and avoiding unnecessary contact with the outside world. I avoided the bacteria producing consumer mask, but played into the other rules of the game. Since the kids had been sent home post-haste, they had no homework or anything to study. And since they weren’t allowed at school, this meant no club activities. So thanks the swine flu, kids finally got to experience a true school holiday. According to news reports karaoke booths made good business, and I’m guessing the sole McDonalds in our city had good business as well last week. It only took a global epidemic to give Japanese school children the joy of a true school holiday.

Today the kids are back at school. I think all of the schools in Hyogo have resumed classes. Not sure though. There might be a few strongholds in Kobe holding out for the apocalypse. It’s back to the passive voice. It was being taught by us before the break. It was thought by me that the passive voice shouldn’t be used too often, but it’s a big part of the 9th grade curriculum. It was tried by me to explain to the other English teacher the passive voice is a tricky little ditty that requires a discriminating mind to figure out which situations are appropriate to use said tense. A good example is that the example sentence that this teacher used to teach passive voice: The door was opened by Scott. As Microsoft Word is telling me now, this is an inappropriate use of the passive voice. The other sentence he used was: The classroom is used by us. (Once again Microsoft Word is telling me that I need to change this to a more appropriate sentence form.) It’s no wonder that the students hate English and can’t speak a word after 6 years of study when minute tangents in the English language are pounded into their heads as important and vital to communication. My grammar may be atrocious, but I do remember a few key points from high school English.

In other school news, I am now sort of in charge of a splinter English class. (It’s kind of like an elective, but not in the American educational sense of the word.) So far we’ve done tongue twisters, skits and made little haiku-like poems about their names. I asked them to do a 3-person skit about going to a restaurant, which everyone had down. Except for one group of funny boys who in the middle of their skit demonstrated their skills in defecation mimicking. The jury is still out on what that had to do with ordering lunch at a restaurant, but they enjoyed it.


Lonely Japanese Goat at Tennoji Zoo