First day at elementary schools!

I survived my first day at elementary schools! As i mentioned in my last post, today i visited my smallest school, Uchiyama Branch School, which is technically a part of a larger elementary school, but because it's damn far from that main school, they have that branch school set up for the local kids. I started out my morning with Uchiyama, driving about 30 or so minutes to get there. Being the overachiever i am, i got there like 3o minutes before i was requested to arrive, so i just sat in the teacher's room and chatted with the tea lady (side note about "tea lady": so each school i've been to so far has had a "tea lady" who sort of does all the odds and ends around the office... i saw one shredding paper, another cleaning the fish tank, another setting up the school lunches for the teachers... but their main job is to serve tea to guests. i think. well, serve tea to teachers too. i prefer the term tea lady over janitor, because in the US, janitors, well... they don't serve tea too). after my teacher (the one out of the three teachers there that is in charge of me and who team teaches with me) came back from class, we had an hour to chat about what we were going to do for the hour of class we had next. figuring my intro would take most of the period, we chatted briefly about work and then quickly started talking about all sorts of random stuff.

so this is how bad my japanese is. when i first met this guy two weeks ago, i was with my supervisor who drove me to Uchiyama. since we didn't have much time to talk, the teacher (Matsumura) wanted to explain something to me/my boss and leave it up to my boss to make sure i understood later what he was talking about. i *thought* i was following what he was saying, and by the end of his schpiel, all i could think was, "what a dick!" what i *thought* he said was something about how i have 15 schools, and because i have so many schools, i can't visit them very often, and hence i can't be a very good/effective teacher. and my boss just sat there nodding his head! i was quite miffed by the time my boss and i left that school. as we were driving onto the next school, i asked my boss what the hell that guy had been talking about, and he explained that Matsumura thought it wasn't fair that i have to go to so many schools, because if i dont spend that much time with each school, that means less English exposure for not just kids, but the teachers too. Since only junior highs are required to have an English cirriculum, elementary schools dont necessarily have good English teachers. Sooo, Matsumura was saying that it was unfortunate that HE couldn't be a better teacher because i can't visit them that often. Yeah. this is why it's important to 1) listen to the ENTIRE schpiel, and 2) learn the language, fool!

At any rate, my first class at an elementary school went really well! Matsumura was there translating everything for the kids, and since there were so few of them, it was easy to maintain eye contact and all that good stuff. Even the other two teachers were there to listen to my self-intro. Oh, and get this. During that hour before class where I was just sitting in the teachers room chatting with everyone, one of the teachers kept phoning people, and i slowly gathered that one of the students was complaining of a stomachache. 5 mintues before class, Matsumura tells me that the kid went home. So, my smallest school of only 4 kids turned into 3 kids for my first lesson. Hilarious, don't you think? That school has 2 first graders, 1 fourth grader, and 1 sixth grader. one of the first graders is brothers with the 4th grader, and the other 1st grader (girl) is cousins with the 6th grader (girl). omg. i soooo wanted to take that girl 1st grader home. soooo adorable!!! she had the typical little-asian-girl haircut (you know, the one with the bangs and straight haircut that stops at the chin), the innocent high-pitched, 6-year old voice, and a cute pink top and denim capris. plus she's super tiny. so you have that image in your head right?

so, after my lesson/intro, we (the three students, matsumura, and one other teacher) went for a walk around the town. or should i say, around the rice fields. this school is seriously in the sticks. then again, which of my schools aren't? anyway, if you step outside the school, you'll find yourself surrounded by rice fields which are sort of in this valley surrounded by mountains (although i guess that's the definition of a valley..). after each kids was armed with a net to catch bugs, we were off. most of the time, that little girl was holding the female teacher's hand since we were walking alongside the road. but at one point, she let go of the teachers hand, stopped dead in her tracks, pointed at a plant on the side of the road and said, "Kawaii!" In that single word, she had my dying. (kawaii means "cute"). There's just something about an adorable 6-year old pointing at a flower and calling IT cute that absolutely makes me melt inside. Don't you feel the warm fuzzies too?! =D

There were two other very memorable moments on that walk that i just have to mention. First. As we were walking along, we passed by this tree with a fruit i'd never seen before. i asked the teachers what it was, and Matsumura pulled out his dictionary to tell me it was a camellia. i didn't know camellia trees had fruits. anyway, so show me what the inside looks like, he yanked a fruit off the tree, stuck it in his mouth and managed to crack it in half. he then removed a seed from the inside and then cracked that open. there was white flesh on the inside of it, and he explained that back in the day, women would use the oil of the seed to make their hair shiny or something. just as he held out the open half of the seed, the 4th grade boy ran up with net and stuck out his hand to reveal the dragonfly he caught and was then holding through the net by one of its sets of wings. The dragonfly was still alive and twitching its free wings too. That was definitely my first time seeing a dragonfly up close though. It was in that moment though, with the little boy and his dragonfly and the teacher with the camellia seed that he obtained by just chomping off a chunk of the fruit fresh off the tree, both with their arms outstretched showing me stuff my foreign eyes had never seen, that an epiphany hit me: "Dude man. I'm in THE STICKS."

Second memorable moment. Along the road, we saw several random booths with a bunch of bagged up veggies like potatoes, onions, cucumbers, etc. Matsumura asked me if i knew what they were. Nope. "You put 100 yen in this box, and then you can take any bag you want." Such a cool system!! Where do you ever see that in San Francisco, right? I'm totally getting my veggies there from now on. So much cheaper than the supermarket!! Anyway, as we walked away from one of those booths, the children were way up ahead of us running around trying to catch butterflies or dragonflies. Aside from the sound of giggling children, the village was pretty serene. Rice fields for as far as you can see. the occasional farmer tilling his land here and there. ladies all decked out in bright colors and bandanas on their heads, ready to work in the fields.
I stopped for a second to truly look around at my surroundings. And i felt something that i normally dont feel in the Bay Area. Peace. Uchiyama is so beautiful, so simple. The lush moutains that surround the valley, the rice fields that await their farmers.... you can't capture that kind of feeling of peace in san francisco. i could be mistaken. but geez, in that moment, i realized just how far removed my new life is from my old one. I'm not saying i prefer one over the other. I'm just saying that this experience has definitely already begun to open my eyes to a totally different lifestyle than the only one i've ever known. mind-bending.

After returning from the walk, we all ate lunch together, and afterwards, the kids asked me to play with them outside. we ended up playing this game that's tag and hide and seek at the same time. basically, someone is "it." "it" has to tag someone, but if you're not it, you have to get up as high as possible so "it" can't tag you. i didn't start as it, but the majority of the game i was. mainly because i refused to take a cheap shot and tag the little girl. i can't even remember the last time i ran like that. that little boy was FAST. sooo out of breath by the end. we played until i saw my taxi, and then it was time to move onto my second school of the day: Otsuki Elementary School.

This school has rubbed me the right way ever since i first stepped inside. the place is sooo new. i think it was built 3 years ago or so, but it's sooooo new, the people are nice, and after today, i know that i'm going to love this school. All the kids are soooo energetic. i can't tell you how great that feels after all the blank stares i got from the middle schoolers the last two days. from the moment my taxi pulled up in front of the school, all the kids started to crowd around the entrance hall, and they were all lined up along the stairs that overlooked the entrance to try to get a look at the new foreinger. i had like 15 minutes of prep time before i had to start my intro in front of the whole school (only 34 kids), and during that time in the teachers room, a bunch of kids would pass by the teachers room slowly to look at me, or just stand in the window and look at me and giggle. i smiled and waved at one of them, and he went wild. he jumped up and down and ran down the hall. it was awesome! haha. for my intro, i spoke super slowly, showed a bunch of pictures, got so many oohs and ahhs at my SF postcards and Stanford calendar.... it was great! anything would impress these kids! they're perfect!! hahaha.

After my intro, i went around the semicircle and shook each kids hand after they did their self-intros for me. After that, there was only about 3 minutes left, so my teacher (Kondoh) opened the floor for questions. Every other kid had a question! it was awesome! again, sooo much better than the middle schoolers! the first question, as i expected, was from a 6th grader wanting to know if i had a boyfriend. To avoid harassment regarding whether i would date this teacher or that teacher, ALTs at both Tokyo and Nagasaki Orientations recommended that you say yes and say they're back home and that's the end of the story. So, i told him yes, i have a boyfriend. And immediately, every child in that room began to giggle and get all excited. i got questions like what food i like (i said okonomiyaki and the kids were elated), what food i didn't (i said natto, which are nasty fermented beans, and the kids again went wild and all began nodding at me), how old i am, etc.

After class was over, they were all supposed to go back to their classrooms, but instead, a group of girls came up to me, one held my left hand, while another held my arm. these girls all surrounded me and just sorta smiled at me. i of course smiled back, but couldn't figure out what they were trying to do. then finally one of the girls started asking me questions and successively everyone started asking me questions. when the teacher said i had to leave, everyone all of a sudden wanted to shake my hand, so i shook everyone's hand. i told them about how a good handshake is a solid one and not a pansy one (don't you hate pansy handshakes too where the other person sort of starts withdrawing their hand when you haven't even clamped your hand down yet? i hate that...), and that made them even more excited to shake my hand haha. seriously -- LOVE those kids. can't wait till i go back!... next month =( unfornately, with my packed schedule, i can only visit elementary schools once a month, and have to visit junior highs 2 or 3 times a month. bummer, huh?

before i wrap this up, i wanted to mention one more thing that cracked me up that i forgot to mention yesterday. two posts ago i made a crack about how the uniformed junior high schoolers reminded me of the army, right? and how japan is probably secretly training its children to become a part of the armed forces in the future? as if all the uniformity wasn't enough to get you suspicious, during 6th period, all the Sasu Junior High students (46 people) were in the gym practicing for their upcoming Sports Day. Can you guess what they were doing? They were marching!! It was hilarious! every last student was marching, kicking their feet up a certain height, stepping in sync, swinging their arms in sync, keeping an exact distance from the person in front of them... totally made my day and totally reaffirmed my conspiracy theory that children are japan's upcoming secret army. muahahhaa.

and with that, i'm off to bed. g'nite!

--evelyn