First Few Days of School With the Students

I apologize that I have not posted anything in the past week.  The truth is, the Typhoon hit this weekend and the local Trains weren't running, and so I had nothing interesting to do or to comment on...unless you want to read about my Weekend Glee Marathon!

Now I know that I have previously posted a couple of pictures of my first few days at the actual school on the first of September, but this week I am finally in the classrooms with the students!  The Japanese Junior High students are just what you would except out of Canadian Junior High students.  Some students are really shy, some are really outgoing (and LOUD), some are struggling with their English classes, and others have a great sense of humour (and are not afraid of yelling "HELLO" to the new ALT until she turns to them to talk to them...even if she is speaking Japanese).  I didn't realize just how much I missed being in a classroom until I was actually there today.

The School I am at currently is a big, beautiful school.  I will get a picture of the exterior tomorrow.  There are three floors and three main hallways.  The hallways have windows that are usually left open no matter if it's raining or sunny, and all of the walls to the classrooms have windows.  These windows are also left wide open, so it is almost like being in an open-classroom in Canada because you can clearly hear what is going on next door...or three or four classes down.  Here are a couple pictures of the hallways:

The classrooms are surprisingly small considering that the average class-size is 35 students, and this includes the Grade 9 students.  The desks are no bigger than a Fourth Grade's desk in Canada.  Actually, I think the Fourth Grade desks are bigger.  I was able to sneak into a class before it started and snap a picture.  I believe this is a Grade 8 class.

Usually the desks are in neat rows, but I think the teacher had arranged the desks in the following way for a lesson.  The students and homeroom teacher eat in the classroom.  Today I ate in 1C, which is a Seventh Grade class.  Everyday as we are eating our lunch that the school provides, the daily announcements are made through the intercom.  The daily announcements can take up to fifteen minutes.  During this time, the students are not allowed to talk.  I forgot to take a picture of today's lunch, but I have a picture from yesterday's lunch.  I'm starting to think that lunchtime at school might be the best meal of my day!!

Right now, many of the English classes are being cancelled because the students are practicing for "Sports Day."  I thought that this meant that they were practicing some track and field events, or perhaps there would be a number of sports the students were working on for sports day, but it seems that my assumptions were totally incorrect. Today I went around the school to see what the students (and teachers) were up to when the English classes were cancelled and the students were working on Sports Day.  So I went on a little investigation and what did I discover, you might ask?

It appears that Sports Day is a competition that the school holds at the beginning of the school term.  The school has been divided into three teams; the blue team, the red team, and the white team.  Sports Day is next week, Wednesday I believe.  What are they practicing if it's not sports related?

The three teams and individual classrooms are working on team building activities.  I've seen these activities before, but usually at a smaller scale.  For example, one of the events is like a three legged race.  You know, the one where two people tie one leg in the middle and you race across a field to victory if you beat the other three-legged racers.  Well, they do this event.  But they do it as an entire class!!

One of the other activities is simple Jump Rope.  Again, it sounds simple enough.  But the entire 35 person class is involved at the same time!!  The class with the most consecutive jumps, wins!  Some classes got past 15!!

Also, one event has all the individuals in a class tie a rope around each other's feet, connecting the whole class like a giant caterpillar.  Once connected, the students must walk together in step, turning corners towards the finish line.  A couple of classes were working indoors on this event.

Finally, the last thing I will mention about Sports Day are the Team Cheers and Chants.  Every morning since I've come to work, I hear students screaming in the classrooms at the top of the lungs.  After getting over the panic that I'm late for school (I just recently found out that the students and teachers are expected to start school at 7:30 with a mandatory extra-curricular activity and then the students are expected to join another after school activity...which means they don't leave the school until 5:00, again, including teachers.  My shift is from 8:35 to 3:45 and I have arrived everyday at 8:15.  Boy, do I feel like a lazy educator!  Anyways, I'm getting off topic).

As I was saying, after I get over the sheer panic that I'm late for school, I start wondering what the heck is going on!  What are those students yelling about?  And to whom are they yelling?  Apparently, they were just working on their Cheers for Sports Days.  Any spare moment they have, they work on these cheers.  Now keep in mind, the windows are completely open so you can here them from a couple of blocks away at 8:15am...lucky neighbourhood:-)

I will post more pictures of these two events on my next blog (for some reason I am unable to add anymore pictures...perhaps it's the video I've tried to insert into this blog.  Like I said, I'm new to this whole blog thing, so I am thanking you in advance for your patience as I try to sort this out).

One final note: I know that I went to Kyoto over a week ago and I said that I was going to discuss it in my blog (and then my computer went on the fritz...yes, I'm still bitter!) but I will hopefully talk about Kyoto another day.  I am planning to take another trip with family friends on the long weekend of the 23rd, 24th, and the 25th.  So perhaps I will comment about Kyoto in a couple of weeks.

Until next time, bloggers!!