God, what do you write?

I've been slowly preparing myself to say goodbye to my san-nensei in the last month. I think I've been doing all right. I even told Travis last night when we were on the phone talking about it that I was feeling better about it because I was certain that I would still keep in touch with my some of my students after they graduated. Getting a chance to talk to and hang out with my students that graduated last year in recent days has been helping.

But I pointed out that it was still not the same as getting to see them every day. Pretty soon their hallway will be filled with different students and the transfer will be complete.

And now, this morning, the teacher in charge of sado-bu (tea ceremony club) gave me the stuffed animals that were to be their graduation present and asked me to write a message on them. She told me I had until the end of 3rd period.

It's more than half-way through 1st right now, and I haven't gotten any farther than writing their nickname on the first doll. Anyone who's met me, or reads this blog for that matter knows that I'm rather verbose, but today, I feel speechless. I don't know what to say to them.

I don't know how to say goodbye.

I thought I'd gotten better at it after 2 and a half years. I thought that I'd know the right things to say, to write when the time came.

I don't.

Do I try to be funny and light-hearted? Serious and inspiring? Sweet and nostalgic? What memory do I leave them with, after all the memories they've given to me?

Tense

The mood in the school, seemingly normal and status quo, tightens perceptibly as I speak to the the san-nensei. While the rest of the students seem to be relaxing as they hit the home stretch of their first and second years at Ihara, the third years (and their teachers) are dissolving into a ball of nerves and tension over their fates and futures. The talks with their homeroom teachers become more frequent as they take and prepare for one university's exam after the next.

This being my third year, I've seen and experienced it to some degree with the students that have graduated before, but this year, this is my babies' year. My favored 35HR, whom I will always still think of as 15HR. I know that as a teacher, you're not supposed to have favorites, but this class, this is the one that I felt I grew up with. They were the first Japanese students I met and taught.

I still remember how nervous I was as I headed up to the mountains of Yamanashi-ken for our English Summer Camp. I'd been in Japan less than a month and my mind was still adjusting to the NEWNESS of it all, and trying to grasp that I was A TEACHER. I didn't feel like I was. I certainly didn't think of myself as one. But my students made me feel at ease and I immediately welcomed them into my life, my heart.

It feels a bit odd to not be leaving the school with them. I feel that I've learned and struggled in my time at Ihara right along with them. Watching them grow up, grow older, GROW has been one of the most defining things in my experience at Ihara. It is with great sadness that I will watch them leave, but also with great pride and belief in them and their bright futures.

My one consolation for staying behind is that, as graduates, I can more freely hang out with them out of the strict confines of high school. I hope that some of them at least remember me; I know I will never forget them.

The Value of No Planning

I think I'm starting to feel old, as my crazy acts get spaced farther and farther apart. I remember in my first year heading off to Tokyo, clubbing all night and doing it again the next one, simply on a whim. That same year, Albert and I took a midnight walk across the bridge to Fuji, two towns away. Last night (and a girl from Australia) reminded me of how fun it is to be impetuous.

For the last week and a half, my former Australian exchange student, Jessica, has been staying at my house. She was the exchange student in my first year and she and I got along and managed to keep in touch since then. She arrived with her friend Kay last Monday, and though Kay went back last Saturday, Jessica's still here as my temporary roommate until the end of the month. Despite being 7 years younger than me, we get along well and it's fun having another person in the house. Back to last night...

I had come home from work amazed that it was Thursday yet again, and wanted to spend a quiet evening indoors due to the rainy weather outside. I was planning on making soup for dinner, watching a movie and catching up on the sleep that I seem to be constantly missing these days. Things didn't go according to plans, to say the least.

First, though I had laid out my ingredients for the soup I was going to make, I kept getting distracted by entering into conversations with Jessica about people at Ihara, friends and friendships, and differences between Japan and Western countries. Eventually, I got to the point where I didn't want to make the soup after all and was contemplating busting out one of the instant Korean ramen packs that I had purchased at Kaldi over the weekend.

Jess brings up sakura-ebi (the tiny cherry blossom-colored shrimp that my little town is famous for) and how she wanted to eat it. I mention wanting unagi (grilled eel) because of passing by the unagi restaurant the other day and seeing the bentos (boxed lunches) that the teachers had ordered yesterday from the place.

We decide to see if we can get them to deliver to the house, since they have both sakura-ebi and unagi, but since I didn't have their number or didn't remember their name, we embark on an online search for the restaurant. Somehow, we manage to find it and miraculously, they have a website. We spend some time looking at the menu and trying to make out the items listed. Finally, we call the place, but they don't deliver at that time. However, they ARE open for another 40 minutes. I suggest the possibility of taking a cab and we run with it. I call a cab, change in a whirlwind 5 minutes and we're out the door and on our way.

We were the only two people in the place, but we paid no attention and enjoyed the deeply satisfying meal. We left the place realizing how close it was to Shin-Kambara station and that we could've saved ourselves the cab-ride and just trained it, but such is hindsight. We begin walking back to the eki, feeling full and accomplished, but I spy the sign for 696 Cowboys and point it out to Jessica.

I had told her about it a little: it's the only bar in Kambara, cowboy-themed (yes, I did say that: COWBOY-themed), and owned by a friend of a friend who loves Elvis. She wanted to check it out, so we head in. She falls in love with it and we decide to get a couple drinks. The drinks multiplied and before I know it, Yan (the owner, who is a professional caricaturist) has done caricatures of the both of us, and managed to get me up on stage to sing "Born to be Wild" and "Country Roads" with him, the waiter (who plays drums apparently) and some other customer on bass.


We headed home on last train. Jessica's decided that she's going to make it her regular haunt while she's in town and I'm definitely planning on coming back again. Sometimes, spontaneity pays off.

Decisions

Today, I had the first of my ichi-nensei classes for the week. We were continuing the New Year's Resolution/Occupations chapter we began last class. I decided to combine the resolutions with a time capsule by having them reflect on important events of 2008 in the world and their lives, 3 resolutions about different things and lastly what they want to be doing when they're 20, 30 and 70 years old. They'd put them in envelopes and address them to themselves. Then, in either 6 months or a year, I'd give them back to them, depending on if I re-contracted or not.

It was an idea that I adapted from an activity that my JET Program coordinator had us do during our Seattle pre-departure orientation. She had us write down our goals and reasons for going to Japan, address it to ourselves and then promise to not open it until February (about 6 months later and halfway through our contract). She did this because she had been on JET and she knew that that time is one of the most difficult, primarily because of the cold weather and secondly because you're at one of the lowest points of the culture shock cycle. She wanted us to wait to open it until then so that we'd be reminded of why we came to Japan and to check our progress in accomplishing the goals we'd made.

Needless to say, it made quite an impression on me. So I modified it for my kids. It had an unintended consequence on me however. As I said, I was undecided as to whether to stay for a fourth year or not, and would either return the letters to my students before I left in July/August, or a year from now. This morning when we were explaining the activity to the students, I felt like I needed to give them a concrete timeframe for when I'd return it, and right then and there, I told them I'd give it back to them a year from now.

Right after I said it, I thought, Shit, I said it out loud. But then I thought, well, wasn't it just two days ago when I was walking back from the train station that I felt happy and content with everything in my life? I know that I could take it back, after all they probably won't remember it a year from now, much less in a month. Maybe it's naíve that I would hold myself to such a flimsy deadline, but maybe a promise to my students is more binding than one given to anyone else.

Seito

Yesterday, I meant to leave at 4:30 for the second day in a row, but ended up staying with students until 6 afterschool. And I have no regrets about having done so.

Monday, I headed up to the san-nensei hallway to see if some of my favorite 35HR girls were up there studying. Instead, I ran into two 35 boys and two 33 boys. The two were from the "boy's class" I had while they were second years, infamous for the one student that was basically sexually harassing me during classtime. Needless to say, I didn't necessarily have a good impression of any of the boys in that class. But they totally brought me around.

I don't know how it really began, I think I might've asked how the English proficiency test that they took on Sunday went, but from there we ended up talking about music, movies, famous people, languages, university and what they were going to study, and of course, boys and girls and boyfriends and girlfriends. It was then that I realized that I haven't been taking advantage of my unique position at the school as much as I used to. For those boys, I was an 'approachable' girl, because I wasn't Japanese so I'm not afraid or shy about hanging out with them. Plus, as an ALT, I'm not quite a full-fledged teacher, and am also younger than most of the other teachers, so they can relate to me better.

The one thing was that, after I suggested to one of the boys that he text me in French after he graduates, another one asked if we could "asobimashou" i. e. play together after they graduated. I agreed, and then one says, "Tequila!" followed by chimes of "Beer!" Ah, they are adolescent boys after all. At first I tried to point out that even if they were graduates, they were still 2 years younger than the legal limit, but I realized that that would've been hypocritical, so I trailed off with a "Well, as long as you're not in uniform..." Then, when we started packing up and heading home, they thanked me "for my time." I thought that was really sweet.

Yesterday kinda went the same way: I had to wait for the teachers to return to the teacher's room from a meeting that I didn't know was happening, to stand guard against the students having full access to said room. 5 o'clock hit, and I 'osaki-ni-shitsurei shimashita'-ed myself out of there. But, I got to the hallway linking the two buildings and heard the girls playing basketball in the gym to my left.

Bouyed by the great experience of connecting with the boys the previous day, I mounted the steps and walked over. The 6 girls playing swiveled their heads as one as I got to entrance, followed by greetings of welcome. I stepped in and for a while just watched them practice their shots. After a while, their coach came and they began various drills. I stayed to the side and chatted with two of the girls: one the manager and one a player who wasn't feeling well that day, punctuated by my eardrums getting nearly blown out by the signal going off every 6 minutes per drill. When they started shooting practice again, I decided to shoot some hoops too.

It's been a while. I think the last time I did so in a real gym was in high school, over 7 years ago. I'm a horrible shot. But, I didn't care. At some point during it, I started enjoying it. Shooting, dribbling, running after the ball after it rebounded off the backboard. The whole time, I thought about Pin and his love for this game, and I understood a bit. I'm certainly not going to play in a game anytime soon, but before I left, I asked them to teach me to how to shoot a ball.

I stayed til their practice was over, and after they stood in a circle, bowed and said thank you to their coach with an "arigatou gozaimashita" (something that I'm a bit familiar with, having to do so in tea ceremony club), they came over to me, stood in a circle and thanked me with the same Japanese formality. I felt a bit over-whelmed since I thought I was just being "jama" and in the way, interrupting their practice and all. But they thanked me for my time (just like the boys) in English, and invited me to come again.

How can you not love these kids?

Can you walk this way? Talk this way?: Retroactive Post

Over the last couple of days, I've been asked to grade papers for all the English course students. The first years wrote the first drafts of their self-introduction speeches, the second years wrote letters to this woman that they had read about in their textbook and the third years wrote a brief composition in response to whether Japanese people are modest or not. Doing so has given me a better idea of their different English abilities and just the sophistication and growth of thier writing and thoughts.

Another thing that happened yesterday was my main first-year teacher pointed out an observation he had about our English course students. He had expressed concern that their speeches were rather simple, "I was happy." "It was beautiful," but believed that this was simply a result of English being thier second language. However, on the 3 day trip he went with them this week, reading their diaries written in Japanese, the thoughts remained on the same level, thus prompting him to believe that it was rather a lack of writing skills and not language skills. So he wants to work on developing their writing styles this term.

I point this out because it's so different from what the other JTEs seem to be doing with their students; he seems to want to teach them to be learners of English, and not simply learn English. And I'm a bit chagrined to find that he's the one that this is coming from. I feel like it's easy to adapt to the Japanese style of teaching English once you're here, and for him to remind me of that, I feel more inspired to 'rock their worlds.' Today, I really feel like a teacher. It's great. And I'm a bit sad to think about leaving this country and this life.

J'aime mes étudiants: Retroactive Post

I had a sorta crappy day at work yesterday, mostly because I had my last class with 25HR for the school year, but rather than feeling a sense of closure, it felt anti-climactic, disingenuous, and ultimately unsatisfying. But today more than made up for it, when I got back my ninensei students' last assignments. I had wanted them to either write an essay in English or make a poster about their reflections and memories of this last school year and their goals for the next one, and they just blew me away. Sure, the English isn't perfect, but these kids are absolutely amazing. It makes me happy to know that I'm was their teacher. Now, on to the next set of kids...