Today I did my last of my preliminary visits to my five schools.\u00a0 I handed out most of the Alaska gifts that I brought, save the mead and calendars I brought for the principals at my middle school.\u00a0 It’s going to be interesting working with different people in different settings.\u00a0 Each school has a different atmosphere, and each supervising teacher has a different level of English, and approach to how to use me in the classroom.\u00a0 This is particularly noticeable between my four\u00a0elementary schools, between which I will spend about half of my time.\u00a0 Three of them are large, from 200 to 400 kids, and one is small, with only 45.\u00a0 The small one has the newest building, and is 50 feet from the ocean.\u00a0 I will only visit there about once every\u00a0month, the other elementaries about once every week or two.\u00a0 The middle school is my base school, where I will be a little more than half the time.\u00a0 Classes start Monday, although I will not give my first lesson until Tuesday.\u00a0 I am anxious about what to include, particularly what sort of activity I should give to accompany my introductory lesson.\u00a0 I want the students to be interested.\u00a0 Thursday and Friday are free days, although I still get paid.\u00a0 I got my first paycheck yesterday!\u00a0 Sort of exciting.\u00a0 I have enough money to go shopping for a car now.\u00a0 If I were hardcore, I’d bike everyday, but not only would that be dangerous in the winter, it would just be a pain in the ass.\u00a0 I’m gonna get a car.<\/p>\n
Of my school visits, one conversation stands out.\u00a0 At Murakami Minami Elementary, I was talking to Inoue-sensei, my supervisor at that school, and Kawamura-sensei after I had been given a tour of the school.\u00a0 We were basically just BSing, and Inoue-sensei gave me his business card, or meishi<\/em>.\u00a0 I asked them if I should get some, since it’s one of those cultural stereotypes about Japan that I’ve always believed to be true.\u00a0 But Kawamura-sensei insisted that most teachers do not have them.\u00a0 Inoue then joked that all men had samurai topknots, and Kawamura replied “oh yeah, and we all carry swords too.”\u00a0 I found that extremely funny, hearing Japanese cultural stereotypes challenged, and made fun of, by two ordinary Japanese elementary school teachers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Today I did my last of my preliminary visits to my five schools.\u00a0 I handed out most of the Alaska gifts that I brought, save the mead and calendars I brought for the principals at my middle school.\u00a0 It’s going to be interesting working with different people in different settings.\u00a0 Each school has a different […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jet","category-murakami"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/seanholland.net\/seanmisen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}