It's been a while

Sorry about that. Was I busy? Was I working? was I out too often? Was I sitting in my room? I can't really tell you - its been going by pretty fast up until now. I was placed as a sub for this week (last day is tomorrow) in a middle school in Otsu, near Kyoto. Ridiculous part is, not only did a girl I was friends with at training get placed in the same city, but I also studied abroad right near there for a semester, so I'm very comfortable here. And so far, I've been having a great time - all the kids are realllllly excited over me, and the general way things work is that a horde of little girls will come up to me, giggle for a bit, and then say "Ku-ru" or "kakkoi" (yr cool), and then ask me a bunch of questions and get excited about my answers (you should've seen their faces when I said I lived about 2.5 hours away from Lake Erie - totally, and 100% over-the-top hyper-excitment. I thought they'd break glass with the shrieks they let out), and the boys generally ask me 2 questions, one always followed by the other: Do you like X? Do you LOVE X??? They pay attention though, and are mostly pretty good students (though a few will be not-asleep, but catatonic in their decisiveness to remain silent and non-participating).

The teachers I'm with are all wonderful, though there is one who makes me... uneasy. She's not mean or anything, but there's just something about her teaching style and overall demeanor that throws me off.

So on to the interesting things in the classroom during my week in Otsu. There are 2 that are worth mentioning, and I'll do so in chronological order. The 2nd day I was here, I learned just how inept I am at drawing, especially on a chalk board. During an introduction to the kids, I mentioned that I like playing guitar, and then went on to try to draw one on the board. What resulted went beyond innuendo, or even being suggestive, and was really just offensive. It took me a minute to realize what exactly I had done, and upon doing so quickly erased it and moved on, but there were a few kids chuckling to themselves, wondering if I actually had just drawn what they thought I had just drawn. Fortunately, nothing came of this.

Number two was way less funny and almost tear-jerkingly sad/awkward. Today (thursday), I had to teach a class that had as part of their schedule a test on how they had done memorizing a short story. It was called "A Mother's Lullaby," and was about a dying little girl sitting under a tree holding a smaller, dying-er (later dead) boy looking at all of the charred bodies shortly after the bomb had dropped on Hiroshima. What made it worse is that this class must have had a lot of kids with allergies or something, so AS I'M BASICALLY YELLING AT THEM (you have to speak loud to be understood) ABOUT HOW THE U.S. NUKED THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR GRANDPARENTS THERE ARE A BUNCH OF KIDS WITH THEIR HEADS DOWN (reading) AND SNIFFLING. I'm not sure exactly what the word is to describe how that felt (or the ensuing test, which was student after student coming up to me and reciting one of 4 passages from this story), but it was weird, and it was very bad.

I guess its also kind of ironic that just before I came to this middle school, I found and started to really enjoy a band called 中学生棺桶, or Middle Schooler's Coffin/s. I get to see them live soon!