Domo

What's the story morning glory?


Slowly walking down the hall,
faster than a canon ball.

Beat Up by Schoolgirls

Today I encountered some of my Junior High School students and was assaulted shortly after seeing them. I took a vicious series of flailing arms and fists to the shoulder area, and was also victim of a swift kick just below the kneecap. Since I left in an emergency last week I had no time to personally tell the students or parents that I would be missing for the week. My Junior High's were under the impression I abruptly left without saying goodbye and that I wasn't planning on returning. It was actually quite scary and sort of sweet.

When class ended both of them took out their cell phones and exclaimed: "Let's take some pictures!" Just in case I do plan on leaving without any notice, they now have a few photos. They also asked for my keitai e-mail address... to which I responded "uhh.. I don't have one." Probably the best thing to do!

Pictures and Names

If there's one thing I've learned over these months of working with children is that their innate ability to captivate adults is unquestionably something to be experienced rather than explained. With that said, I'm going to make an attempt at explaining a few funny, random, and sweet moments.

The picture above was given to me by a student who had to quit my lesson for personal family reasons. On her last day she gave me a sealed envelope of a picture she drew. It's of me and her, and although I'm clearly a woman in the picture it was still touching. She wrote our names in English, and also her Japanese name in Katakana. Off to the side are a diamond, star, and heart; some of the shapes we just recently learned about in class. I'm going to miss this 6-year old =*[.


This next one is definitely more on the random side. Using pirates, sailors, and a whiteboard for one of our English activities, my high school students came up with the most ludicrous team names I've ever seen in my life. On the left are the "Banban Sailors WOW" and to the right lie the "Nacching LION is so COOL Pirates." Yeah. Exactly. How can you not get it?

My next anecdote unforuntately doesn't have any picture evidence but nevertheless is one of my favourties. One day, one of my 10-year olds and I were practicing animal vocabulary, along with "like" and "don't like". He boldly said: "I don't like skunks," a grammatically perfect sentence. When he came to write the sentence on the whiteboard, he wrote "skanks" instead of "skunks." As you can imagine, I almost collapsed to the ground laughing at what he had done. I'm so proud of my students. For those of you wondering, yeah, I did eventually correct the written sentence. Haha.