Teaching 7 year-olds

It isn't often that one gets to write on a February 29th and since I was thinking about what I was doing during leap days past (for example on Feb. 29th, 1996 I was in 3rd grade) I figured that I should do a quick post with some cute stories about teaching elementary school kids.

At one of my elementary schools (Michiue) I've been teaching the 3rd, 4th, 5th, and 6th graders whereas at my other two elementary schools I only teach the 5th and 6th graders since they are the ones required to take English.  The third and fourth grade classes are always fun since I can teach them in my own way (as there is no textbook to follow).  Usually the homeroom teachers will pick a topic and I have to do my best to find good games and ways to explain new words and topics.  Sometimes having the teachers choose topics can be a bit interesting though... a few days ago the fourth grade teacher wanted me to tell the kids what to say when a guest comes over their house so I ended up teaching them phrases like, "Hello, please come in!", and "Would you like something to drink?"...  but how often will nine year-olds be required to say things like that?  On Tuesday the homeroom teacher had me help the class with self-introductions like, "My name is ____.  I'm 9 years old.  I like ___."  The third phrase was a bit difficult for the students since they would automatically say things like, "I like cat" or "I like dog"...  I tried to explain to the students that "I like cat" makes it sound like you often eat cats and I ended up mimicking eating food whenever a student slipped up.  It was pretty funny though.

Recently I've also been switching off between the first graders and second graders at Michiue too and they are soooo cute!  I taught the second graders some fruits and vegetables (though they knew many of the fruits already probably due to parfait ingredients and cake flavors I think).  Then we played a game which is fittingly called "fruits basket" where the kids arrange their chairs in a circle, I assign fruit names to each student, and then I call a fruit.  Everyone with that assigned fruit name must jump up and find a new chair (I play too, it's fun but can be a bit hazardous).  Actually when I was playing the same game with some fifth graders last week one of the students still had his pencil in his hand when he came to the circle; when the teacher noticed he ordered the student to put away the pencil before joining the game.  You can probably imagine that it would be quite dangerous to be holding a pencil while running around trying to find a seat...

The first graders were also really fun when I taught them a couple of weeks ago.  Their teacher wanted me to do colors and somehow most of the kids knew most of the colors already, they even knew "sky blue"!  I was very impressed!  During that class the teacher left time for the kids to ask me questions as well and somehow the students ended up asking me what kids do with their baby teeth in the US once they have fallen out (I think someone in their class had recently lost a tooth).  I wanted to keep it simple so I just told them that if you put your tooth under your pillow then the next day there will be money under it.  Come to think of it I don't think I mentioned the word "tooth fairy" at all... but the kids were very impressed nonetheless.  In Japan the kids will often throw their newly-fallen-out teeth over their houses (I've been told).  It's funny how different those kinds of traditions can be... I wonder where they both came from...

Anyway, have a good leap day!

The Yukimatsuri in Sapporo! - part 2 of 2

The Sapporo Snow Festival is probably better known for its ice sculptures, but I was in the snow sculpture area most of the time (and taking pictures of the snow ones was easier) so... the following are pictures I took on Sunday the 12th in Odori Park.

I believe this was a sculpture of Osaka Castle, though it was much smaller than the original it was still very tall, approximately 35 feet (10.6 m) by my estimate.

There were at least 100 snow sculptures all together, most were 7-12 feet (2 m - 3.6 m) tall.  This sculpture of Jaws was around 7 feet (with the base block included).

This year is a Year of the Dragon according to the Chinese calendar so many of the sculptures incorporated dragons like this intricate one above.

Another massive snow building was a replica of the Taj Mahal in India.  Sapporo is a bit more culturally diverse than much of Japan (Anne says it's because back in the day sea ports in Hokkaido were some of the first ones opened to foreigners).  Hokkaido was also home to the native Ainu people who were more related to some tribes in Russia than to groups on Honshu (Japan's largest island).

One section of the festival had snow sculptures created by groups from Sapporo's sister cities and also sculptures made by foreign teams in general.  This baby turtle was made by a team from Malaysia!

 

Of course there were many anime, manga, and video game related works as well.  This gigantic sculpture shows characters from Toriko (a story about a man seeking the ultimate ingredients for cooking with many battles ensuing) on the left and One Piece (a story about treasure-hunting super-powered pirates) on the right.  One Piece is particularly popular among my elementary and middle school students; its manga has gone for 657 chapters and its anime has run for 536 episodes as of this post.

Anyway, on Sunday afternoon the JETs on the "two-days-off-from-school" trip (including me, Anne, Drew, and Julia) took the bus back to Tomokomai port to catch the 7 PM ferry back to Sendai.  We happened to be on a different ferry than the one we had ridden on the way up.  The second ferry was pretty similar except that the color-scheme was more vibrant, it had a karaoke room instead of a mini-theater, and we were placed in a smaller room since there were only about 15 of us.  The room we were in was quite different from the one on the ride up; it was "tatami-style," so there were no bunk beds, in fact there were no beds at all!  We all had futons that were much narrower than the one I use in my apartment.  I bet the futon-mattresses were no more than 50 cm across (about 20")!  It was a bit odd sleeping on the floor on a moving boat but I managed to get to sleep somehow...  The ride itself was much rougher than the ride up had been as well since there was a snow storm coming in (or perhaps "going out"... I'm not sure which).

But despite the weather we arrived in Sendai Port safely on Monday around 10 AM.  Driving home that time was easy since everyone else was at work; we even had time to stop at the grocery store and at the bank.  It was a bit hard waking up on Tuesday morning to go to work since we were still very tired from the trip but I'm happy to say that we managed to hold on!  I'm glad I went on the trip to Hokkaido, it was a lot of fun and it was a nice break from the regular school schedule.

In other news my father is coming to visit at the end of next month when I have a week and a half off at the start of the school year (in Japan the school year ends in March and starts in April).  I'm really looking forward to his visit!

The Yukimatsuri in Sapporo! - part 1 of 2

I took Friday the 10th and Monday the 13th off from work so that I could go on the Yukimatsuri trip and I even took a couple of hours off that Thursday since that was the day we were taking the ferry and we didn't want to be stuck in traffic on the way to Sendai.  We ended up being stuck in traffic anyway... but we arrived with plenty of time to spare!  The ferry left Sendai Port at 7:40 PM and arrived in Tomokomai, Hokkaido at 11 AM the following morning so I was on the boat for about 15 hours (a new record for me).  The ferry was pretty high-tech actually, it had a mini movie theater, a couple of restaurants, a small arcade, a gift shop, around 20 vending machines, and Japanese-style baths.  Our room was divided into three narrow hallways with bunk beds built into the walls on either side; the bunks had curtains too in case you wanted some privacy.  It was surprisingly comfortable.  After eating dinner Anne, Julia (a JET from Ireland we go to the movies with sometimes), and I went to see what was playing in the theater.  It was Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader which I'd heard wasn't as good as the first two in the movie-series but had always been one of my favorite in the book-series so I was interested in seeing it.  Unfortunately it was being played in Japanese and didn't have English subtitles so even though I was trying to pay attention I ended up almost falling asleep right away so we left after a few minutes.

I slept really well considering that I was on a ferry (I can imagine my dad and brother wouldn't have been able to sleep at all since they get extremely sea sick).  In the morning Anne and I woke up early to go to the Japanese-style baths.  I say "Japanese-style" since it's not at all like taking a bath in the US or other western countries.  The last time I took a bath before the ferry was when I sprained my ankle a few years ago and wasn't able to take a shower.  But in Japan people have baths all the time.  To take a bath you first take a shower outside of the bathtub (bathrooms have drains on the floor and waterproof walls so this is not a problem) and once you're all squeaky-clean then you can enter the bath water and relax for a while.  On the ferry there were public baths since there's not enough room for individual bathtubs.  The ladies' bathroom was separated into a changing area (not changing rooms, a changing area), a shower section, and two baths (one was jacuzzi-like with bubbles, the other was plain hot water).  I was kind of embarrassed to go, I mean, I never even changed in front of the other girls in high school gym class!  But I figured that it's part of the Japan-experience so I should at least try it once.  Anyway, I'm glad I tried it, it wasn't as embarrassing as I had imagined, there weren't even a lot of people around since I was there in the morning and people in Japan tend to bathe at night.  Anne said it's better to go with other foreigners though since if you're clearly not Japanese people might stare at you just because you look different.  Anyway, the ferry docked around 11 that morning and then we all took a 2 hour bus ride into the city of Sapporo.

We stayed at a hostel so there were bunk beds again but it was a decent place.  It was around 2 PM on Friday at that point and we were scheduled to meet up with everyone again that evening so that we could go to the Sapporo Bier Garten and have all-you-can-eat grilled lamb and vegetables.  We walked to Odori Park (one of the main areas of the festival) since we heard there was an ice skating rink there.  It turned out to be a small, beaten up rink so we decided to check out some of the festival stalls instead.  The stalls had everything from hamburgers and chocolate-covered bananas to takoyaki (fried octopus) and taiyaki (a fish-shaped cake).  There were many souvenir booths as well so we scouted around for gifts to bring back to our teachers.  That evening we went to the lamb dinner and I ate more meat than I ever have in my entire life!  Part of the problem was that I was the one grilling a lot of the meat since I was seated right in front of one of the mini-grills on the table but wow that meat was good!  As we sat down at the restaurant the servers gave everyone bibs (like the kind people get when eating lobster), and plastic bags to put our jackets in (along with any other items that we didn't want to smell of smoke and lamb by the end of the evening).

The room was big, smoky, and filled with delicious meat.

The table-grill is on the left, some meat is on the right, and someone wearing a lamb-bib is in the background.

I got some omiyage (souvenirs) for my teachers at the Bier Garten gift shop (including chocolate-covered "beer jellies" which sound interesting) and I was really happy to get the shopping out of the way.  I've got to say I'm also really glad that I got some new boots before going to the snow festival since the outdoor temperature was pretty low (often -5 Celsius [23 Fahrenheit] and under) and also there was a fair amount of ice and snow covering the sidewalks.  I think that each individual building must be in charge of shoveling their own sidewalks because sometimes the height of the ice and snow would vary considerably between buildings.  I swear that some of the buildings even had heated sidewalks since they were perfectly snow-free and decidedly damp.  It was nice indoors though since with indoor heating the air temperature was much more consistent (I actually slept with no socks on)!

On Saturday we found a real ice rink that wasn't hard to get to; we took the subway to the last stop and then took a bus but overall it took about half an hour to get there.  It had been about a year since I last skated and I wished immediately that I had rented hockey skates instead of figure skates - I couldn't remember how to stop with the figure skates on!  It was nice to get some exercise and while we were skating Anne, Julia, and I met up with Drew from Kesennuma.  After that we decided to go to Otaru, a town near Sapporo, where they were having their own snow festival.  Otaru is sometimes called the "Venice of Japan" since it has canals but many of these canals have a sheet of ice during the winter though!  Otaru is also known for its sushi, its glass, a certain music box store, and its crazy ice cream flavors.  I got to go to one of the glass factories and got a cool pair of earrings.  The ice cream store was closed by the time we got there and I think the music box store was as well (apparently though they can make music boxes with any tune the customer wants - another JET who went there heard a box playing the Star Wars theme song!).  Instead of sushi, we went to a small ramen restaurant and I tried some miso ramen - it was delicious and I ate the whole thing even though the bowl was ridiculously HUGE!  During the Otaru snow festival the locals make snow sculptures and place candles inside so that in the evening everything glows softly.

 The canals were lit up at night with hundreds of floating candles.

People walked in between the glowing snow sculptures and the canals.

This sculpture had lanterns made of thick ice.

This snow wall had real glass lanterns built into it.

Anne got some "Soft cream Santa claus's Beard" melon ice cream after we saw this sign just because it sounded ridiculous and good.

Anyway, just to break up the pictures a bit I'm separating this post into two parts.  Look forward to the next one coming soon!

Kanji Time

So I wanted to explain a bit more about kanji, the complex-looking characters that you might imagine if I mentioned reading and writing in Chinese or Japanese.  I spoke of kanji briefly when I was talking about my personal seal way back in October.  Kanji originally came to Japan from China (along with Buddhism and other ideas) approximately 2,000 years ago.  The people in Japan had a spoken language at the time (an older form of Japanese) but didn't have a written language so they decided to adapt the Chinese characters to their language.  It proved to be quite difficult since Chinese and Japanese use completely different grammar structures.  Thus a syllabary (basically an alphabet where each "letter" is a complete syllable) was created called hiragana.  Hiragana uses simpler characters and is altogether rounder-looking than kanji (at least in my opinion).   So, when it was impossible to use Chinese characters for things like verb endings and prepositions, hiragana was used instead.  

To be literate in Chinese means knowing maybe 4,000 Chinese characters (though apparently you can read a newspaper pretty well if you know about 1,000).  To be literate in Japanese means knowing about 2,000 kanji, though again if you know the most common 1,000 then you can get by.  After reading that one might think that Japanese has fewer words than Chinese but unfortunately that is not the case.  For the most part in Chinese either each character represents a separate word and has only one sound to go along with it or two characters together can also represent one word (with two syllables, one for each character).  Some of the sounds of Chinese were also imported into Japanese when the writing system was first being introduced to Japan.  In the beginning, Chinese characters were associated nouns, verb stems, and adjectives which already existed in the spoken Japanese language.  Of course, many Japanese words are longer than one or two syllables and in many cases kanji began to be associated with multiple sounds from the original Chinese and also from Japanese (which can be very confusing).  In general, individual kanji will have the original Japanese pronunciation and "compound" words which combine two or more kanji take the Chinese sounds instead.  Unfortunately many kanji became associated with many different sounds over time as the kanji were simplified to make them easier to write and some kanji which had originally been separate were combined (among other things)...  Now somehow a common kanji like 上 has many meanings (including: above, up, over, top, summit, and on), has three Chinese sounds associated with it, AND approximately 20 Japanese sounds (though this example is a bit extreme).

Actually in English there's one good situation I can think of where we use kanji-like characters, and that's when using numbers.  For example, if you look at "3", you know it means "three" and that it represents a number.  Numbers can also have different sounds associated with them depending on the situation, for example you know that "3rd" represents "third" and not "threerd".  Now you just have to imagine doing that for about 1,990 other characters...

So, now I'm trying to learn the ~2,000 "most common" kanji.  I have a book series that I'm following which uses the Heisig method.  Basically the first book teaches you how to write the kanji and associate them with English meanings, the second book teaches you the different ways to say each kanji, and the third book deals with multiple-kanji words.  I'm proud to say that I've passed the 500 kanji mark at this point (in the first book), though I have trouble sometimes if I see a kanji I know but I can't remember the specific English word I'm supposed to associate with it...  Sometimes it's like my mind is coming up with brain-teasers since I know what the meaning is supposed to be like and can often remember how many letters the English word has.  Last weekend I was trying to think of a word that had a meaning like, "trying to convince someone to do what you say and maybe white-washing it a bit so your way sounds more desirable", and I knew the word was 4 or 5 letters long.  Eventually I had to look it up but the word turned out to be, "urge" (迫).

When I was at Michiue Elementary last week, I was teaching the fourth graders the names of the months in English.  The students were ridiculously impressed by the fact that I could write 一月 on the board correctly (this means "first month" aka "January").  In fact, the students started clapping...  I was a bit embarrassed since 一 and 月 are some of the very first characters that you learn how to write and they aren't exactly difficult... what would the fourth graders say if I told them that I learned 裁, "tailor" yesterday? 

Anyway, I'm traveling to lovely Sapporo, Hokkaido this weekend for the yearly Yukimatsuri (snow festival).  Apparently it's going to be pretty amazing and have tons of winter-related activities like ice sculptures, skiing, snowboarding, and ice skating along with amazing food (king crab, miso ramen, lamb, and beer ~ too bad I don't drink).  Also, even though Hokkaido has a colder outside temperature, they use insulation in the houses there so I might actually be warm!  I'm going up with a bunch of other Miyagi JETs, we're going by overnight-ferry if you can believe it (luckily I don't get seasick!).  Actually, according to my four year-old cousin Rosie I've been "on vacation" in Japan since September and I kind of feel like that's the case with all of the traveling I've done recently!


By the way, if you're having trouble reading the kanji above then just do this:


If you're using Internet Explorer as your browser (in other words, if you press the blue "e" to get on the internet):

1. Go to "View," and then "Encoding"
2. Select "Japanese (Auto-Select)"

And for Firefox:

1. Go to "View," and then "Character Encoding"
2. Select "Auto-Detect," and then "Japanese"

If that doesn't work then Google your browser's name and "read Japanese online"!

Back to my Real Life (and Snow)

 So as you may have guessed, winter vacation has ended (and ended almost a month ago actually) and I have returned to school.  A couple of my elementary teachers asked me to talk about New Year's Eve in America.  Basically, New Year's is a very big deal in Japan; you spend time with your family, eat specific New Year's food (like ozouni with mochi), and maybe even visit a shrine.  At midnight all of the Buddhist temples ring their bells and you're supposed to watch the first sunrise of the year with your family.  Visiting a Shinto shrine and praying for a good year is also common (you can get your fortune for the year on a slip of paper).  In Japan there are tons of traditions associated with New Year's but when the students asked me what I usually did over New Year's all I could think to say was "watch fireworks".  Anne tells me that many of the older pagan traditions of New Year's were absorbed into Christmas which I guess explains the tree, but seriously whoever sorted the traditions could have left a few for New Year's.  I didn't want to mention to the kids that it's a holiday known for partying and drinking too much so I told them that in America New Year's is a time to spend with friends and that adults may drink champagne... haha.  When the students asked me what special foods we ate, I told them there weren't any specific foods (just party-type foods and snacks).  They were shocked to hear that there was no mochi involved and were even more shocked when I said that mochi wasn't common in the US.  The only time I ever saw mochi was in a specialty super market and it was mochi filled with ice cream so it wasn't exactly traditional (but still delicious and highly recommended).  Anyway, I showed them some pictures of fireworks from around the world and they were satisfied with that.

There has been a fair amount of snow recently, maybe about a centimeter or two every couple of days.  This amount of snow wouldn't register with me at all except that the roads are never plowed (if you can believe that) and so it feels snowier than it actually is.  I'll admit that I saw one active snowplow a few weekends ago when Anne and I were going grocery shopping but that was in Tome (the next town over) and they get noticeably more snow than we do on the coast (since they're in the mountains).  I'll also admit that I was very spoiled when I lived in Massachusetts since my town was particularly well known for having clear roads in the winter (which wasn't so good when I was in school since we never had snow days but it's something that I appreciated when I got a car).  So what prevents me from crashing on Japanese roads?  I believe it's a combination of the winter tires and the textured roads, but I don't know for sure.  Maybe I've been lied to my entire life and snowplows aren't necessary for small snowfalls... (I think my internal world is about to collapse so I guess I'll talk about something else semi-related).

So, about a week and a half ago it was snowing outside as I was sitting at my desk at Hashi JHS, we were in a break between classes and I was feeling grateful that the teacher's room is usually quite warm (unlike the classrooms which can vary widely in temperature).  Suddenly there was a noticeable earthquake, maybe a 3 on the Japanese-scale, and the other teachers flicked on the TV to see how strong the earthquake had been and to see if there were any notices or warnings.  I was a bit shocked, not because of the earthquake (since we have them everyday) but because there was an earthquake while it was snowing.  My readers are probably thinking, "duh!", but for some reason I never thought that there would be two weather-events at the same time (though of course an earthquake isn't a weather-event, I guess that's where my problem lies).  Anyway, I guess the moral of the story is: mother nature doesn't stop a snowstorm for an earthquake's sake and vice versa.