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| JET Adventures 28 - Mid Year Conference |
| Tuesday, November 22, 2005 |
Last week all the Okinawa JETs had 3 days of mid-year conference. The board of education and our Japanese teachers are told that we're going to attend important workshops about how to improve our teaching methods, but really it's just a week of parties, so much so that the leaflet we were sent about it had the seminars listed on one side and the parties listed on the other.
It was all such good fun I forgot to take any photos, so due to popular demand I've posted some more strangely coloured chickens.
The way things are s'posed to be on JET is that you always 'team teach' with a Japanese English teacher, so you sit down and plan lessons together which usually means the teacher tries to teach them something from the textbook and you supplement it with some exciting games to wake the students up a bit. It doesn't really work like that in my school as they give me a lot of freedom to plan my own lessons, throw the textbook out of the window, and teach the class on my own. The advantages to this are that I feel a bit more like a 'real' teacher, I can pretty much teach anything I want to, and the students get a break from the undeniably dull textbooks (why do they all have chapters on the history of washing machines?). The disadvantages are that it takes a lot more work to come up with the lessons, and sometimes my lessons go disastrously wrong and I'm left wishing I could jump out of the window (like the time I tried to get them do speed dating only to have them all stare at the floor and refuse to talk to each other). I only teach 3 classes a day though and with a lot of the classes I only see them once a month, so anything I teach has to be done in only one lesson.
Anyway, the point of all this is that the workshops weren't very useful for me because they mostly talked about how to work with the Japanese teachers and how to create games based on the textbooks. The parties were cool though. Except I made the schoolboy error of overdoing it on the first night to such an extreme that I was hungover for 2 days - pain beyond pain. It was a talent night though and the 'talent' was so awful that getting drunk past the point of oblivion was the only option. I also forgot that long island iced tea contains 4 shots and not 1. And then it was 'ladies night' at the nightclub of choice although I don't exactly remember how I decided that going was a good idea or how I got home afterwards. Seeing everyone was awesome - I hadn't seen some of them since July and my friend Julie from Miyako island and I had a great time catching up. I'm definitely going to go and visit her when the weather gets nice again - after Tokyo for New year, Kyoto for Louise's birthday in January, and Australia with my mum in March :)
It's actually getting cold here now. Well, at least I'm cold. Apparently it's 23 degrees outside and I'm shivering. If only I'd won all those green chickens, I could have made them into some kind of green chicken hat. |
posted by Alice @ 6:27 pm  |
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| JET Adventures 27 - Nishihara festival and Aikido |
| Tuesday, November 15, 2005 |
Yet another weekend, yet another festival. This wasn't just any old festival though, it was in my town and me and the other 3 JETs who live here had been roped into helping out with the 'international' bit of it. This meant we had to turn up laden with stuff from our home countries and "educate the masses about the wonders of the outside world". Sean (another UK JET) and I were going to babble on about David Beckham, Wimbledon and the Queen for the whole weekend before we saw sense and came up with a Powerpoint presentation that would do all the babbling on for us.
We nearly had another world war with so many countries vieing for space in one tiny tent. The England bit was positioned right next to the Argentina bit - slightly dangerous considering it was the weekend of that glorious football match :)
It was the best festival I'd been to so far. Although I was disturbed by one game where you could win real live chicks that had mysteriously been dyed all sorts of colours:
What with it being in Nishihara, most of my students were there too - it was a bit like having the paparazzi around. I couldn't move 10 feet without someone shouting "Arisu-sensei" or "tiger! tiger!" (they saw me at Halloween too). A whole load of them did their Eisa dancing:
Some of them were helping out with the stalls and games. One of them was selling real live mashed potato, I nearly broke down and kissed the girl who'd made it. Obviously the moment the principal of the school and the town mayor turned up to say "hello" to me was the moment I was scoffing my face with it. so. very. embarrassing.
The Taiko drummers I'd met in Izena turned up to play for the festival, as well as the 2nd best Taiko group in the whole of Japan, who were nearly all girls! There was also a huge number of lion dancers grrrrrrr:
In other news, I finally started my Aikido training last week. The Sensei is about a million years old and frighteningly fit. The warm-up alone nearly killed me and that was before an hour and a half of being thrown around and sitting in seiza (that excrutiating kneeling position) listening to Sensei talk sagely about god only knows what. The group is quite wide-ranging, there are school kids there (fortunately none of my students!), middle-aged women, and two Americans, amongst all the other ninjas. I am ultra-rubbish but it's still as fun as I remember it, so I'm going to stick with it and hopefully get better. |
| posted by Alice @ 7:35 pm |
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| JET Adventures 26 - Culture day |
| Friday, November 04, 2005 |
Everyone had the day off on Thursday to celebrate Culture Day. No, it wasn't about the appreciation of yeast, it was yet another excuse to close the roads, break out the silly costumes, and light the streets up with paper lanterns in the name of Shuri Festival.
Shuri is just next door to where I live and used to be the capital of Okinawa with a great big castle which is still mostly there today. The festival had people dressing up like kings and queens in traditional costume, but I was feeling nostalgic for Guy Fawkes night so I missed all the daytime parades and went at night to see the fireworks go bang.
I went with my friend Nick. This shop sold lots of crazy things.
Of course there was candy floss. See how it comes in giant monster bags as big as this woman? They were the smallest bags we could find.
Laden with candy floss, toffee apples, battered octopus, a bag of bread that some young rapscallions ripped us off for, and some beer, I now felt ready for the onslaught of fire upon my eyeballs. The display was kind of like someone had said "To hell with deciding which firework should go when, let's just throw a match in a huge box of fireworks and let them all off at once", oddly juxtaposed on top of a huge screen and a neon green laser show of dolphins and a man beating a drum. Of course, by the time I'd juggled all of the items constituting my dinner enough so I could get my camera out of my bag, it was all over.
More culture - not only is this archipalago riddled with ghosts, but it turns out Atlantis is here too! The Japanese version of Atlantis is Mu, which is coincidentally the name of my favourite Pokemon. |
| posted by Alice @ 11:41 pm |
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