August 22nd

The rest of my weekend consisted of hibernating in my house and getting some alone time. Ryan was a sweetie and changed the tires and grips on my bike with the ones from his broken bike. So I think I’ll stick with it for a while, although it’s tempting to get one of the ones with the gear cover so I can wear skirts and bike.

Monday was pretty fun. My first real day at school and I did my self-intro and then learned CPR (luckily I was drilled to death during multiple years of swim lessons and my occupational first-aid a few years back) and how to use an AED (defibrillator thing to help restart hearts) in Japanese. I didn’t understand the majority of the talking but I took my turn with the Little Anne doll and the practice AED machine. I can tell someone to call the Japanese 911 (119) now.

After lunch I went to Ogaki for a meeting about the Seino summer workshop for ALTs and we got the rundown on judging the regional speech contest and the various activities for elementary and junior high students. Afterwards we picked Elissa up at the train station and we all had dinner at Cocos then she came home with me.

Tuesday was awesome, too. I spent the morning alternately puttering away at my self-intro class and introducing myself to the huge number of students who were there for a homework check. (Remember, in Japan summer is the space between 1st and 2nd semester. Third semester runs from January to the beginning of March) I got to watch the basketball and volleyball teams practice, too. At one my Kyoto-sensei (Vice-principal) said it was okay to leave when I told him Elissa was here. After I got home Elissa and I spent the afternoon shopping downtown and exploring some. We would have taken an evening walk, too, if it hadn’t suddenly poured rain fifteen minutes after we got home. It was fun, though! I hadn’t been to a lot of the stores yet, either.

Today we dropped Elissa back in Ogaki on our way to the Seino workshop. I’m sad she couldn’t stay for longer but she wants to come back next summer so that’d be awesome! It was so good to have her here and to be able to talk with her and explore with her!

Today was fun but tiring. I was assigned to the elementary group in the morning so we played a few games with 120 children in the main hall and then we broke into groups to learn veggie names and play karuta (a slap card game) for an hour. We ate lunch with the students and in the afternoon I was with the elementary students again. I ‘read’ The Rainbow Fish to four different groups of children, by which I mean I summarized it loosely for them and two other ALTs acted it out with a few paper fish cut-outs. Then we endlessly repeated ‘which color would you like’ while all the children made their own rainbow fish from paper and glue. It was actually not too bad but I’ve learned that I most definitely prefer to make my own lessons to using a lesson plan someone else has handed me. It’s really tiring working with so many students over and over again, too. I definitely need to work on stamina for my Monday schools.

Tomorrow I’ll be helping a group of junior high students draft a play on the situation ‘samurai in the airport’. I’m interested to see how things go!