Class Trips

This week, both the second and third graders are away on class trips. The third graders went to Hiroshima, Kyoto, and Nara for the week, and the second graders went somewhere in Yamanashi for a couple days. Most of the staff left to accompany the students. So, Kae is gone, along with the principal, and pretty much everyone else. I wanted to go too, but there probably would have been several meetings if they had taken my request seriously. Plus, it would have cost me something like a thousand dollars. Before they left, I asked the kids to bring me back omiyage (gifts that you bring back when you go somewhere). Most of them thought it was funny. Yuka flipped out (as she is prone to do) and screamed/whined to Kae asking if I was serious. Anyway, I have no classes this week. It’s more boring than usual…

[Side not about Yuka: Once a week (per my request) Kae and I have the students write a “journal” entry. It’s the only real opportunity they have to practice writing in English (writing original thoughts in English is completely absent from the official English curriculum). Each week we give them a topic to give them some ideas. One week’s topic was “If you could have a robot in your house, what would you do with it” – or something to that effect. Yuka wrote that, if she had a robot, she would have a Gundam. (Gundam’s are giant, heavily-armed, flying, pilot-able robots from the popular anime series Gundam). I saw her writing this, and I asked her what she would do with the Gundam – like, would she fly it to the moon, fight bad guys, blow up a city, etc? She told me that if she had a Gundam, she wouldn’t do any of those things. She wouldn’t want to get it messed up and dirty. She would just want to look at it. “Madness,” I thought. I asked her, what if the world was in peril, and we needed Yuka to step into her Gundam and save the day? She said she would not want to do this. She would rather the attractive (animated) protagonist from the series step into the Gundam and save the world. Is this not crazy? She would prefer to watch an animated character (one she is unabashedly attracted to, by the way) fly around in a Gundam than do so herself. That seems crazy to me. What would you do if you had a giant, heavily-armed, flying, pilot-able robot in your possession? Would you use it? If I had one, I would be in that thing so fast…]

The new principal really likes me. He told me as such when he was drunk at the enkai we had recently. He is also not as good as the old principal was at hiding the fact that he has nothing to do. The old principal would disappear into his office and stay there, with the door closed, all day. The new principal, I think, gets antsy. He can only be in his office for short periods of time. When he gets bored, he starts walking around the staff room blatantly wasting time (no papers in his hand, no trips to the paper shredder or the copy machine, nothing). He used to work at an elementary school, so I don’t think he’s quite used to the middle school routine. While walking around, he invariably makes his way to my desk where I always look busy – either studying Japanese, doing actual work (rare), or writing these blogs. The other day I was grading a stack of “journal” entries – I started and worked through the pile. It doesn’t take all that long if you just sit down and do it. Well, he was so impressed at how hard I work, that he suggested that I take a break. I mean, there were about fifty papers, but they each only take about forty-five seconds to correct… He can’t sit down for forty minutes and do work uninterrupted? I guess not…