Lost in Ogawa

Today was another one of those days where I teach at a local elementary school in Ogawa. Off the top of my head, I believe there are six elementary schools in Ogawa and each ALT visit each school maybe 2-3 times over the course of a semester. I guess it’s more like a visitation that we do. The reason we don’t teach at elementary school that often is because English is not part of the elementary school curriculum. We’re only there to give the kids exposure to English and maybe teach them the very basics like numbers and alphabets and play games with them. When I first chose to teach elementary school, I thought it would be the easiest thing. I figured, hey, they’ll believe anything I say and the little kids will be easy to teach….Wrong! They’re actually harder to teach than the junior high kids. I have to expend more energy and speak much louder for longer periods of time to elementary kids. That’s why I sometimes don’t look forward teaching at elementary schools but the kids are so little and cute as hell!

However, today was somewhat extraordinary. It was my first visit to Ookawa Elementary School. In the morning when school started, the entire school congregated out in the school grounds. I was told to briefly introduce myself in front all the students, maybe 200 to 300 of them. No matter how many times I’ve done it, it’s always a little intimidating. Somehow, I always get through it because by now, I’ve done it a billion times in front of staffs and students alike for the past 3 month. I just can’t believe I’m still introducing myself and not only that, I’m doing it in Japanese!! (Go ahead, you may applause). What followed was rather different from all my past experiences at other elementary schools. We started doing stretches together as a school and we ran around school tracks for about 7 mins. or so. I nearly passed out! This exercising before classes reminded me of a movie called “Gung Ho” starring Michael Keaton. If you saw the movie, you know what I’m talking about (right Mat?).

Today in addition to teaching various classes of different grades, I was scheduled to join the special education/handicap class with 2 teachers and 3 students. This was the first time I’ve ever done a special ed. class. After today, I wish I had the chance to do more. Despite their learning disabilities and handicaps, these kids are so wonderful and cute. Apparently today was this girl’s birthday and we sang the birthday song in English, had some jello, and took some pictures together. Of all days not to bring my camera! Then for the rest of the day, I joined two classes for P.E., rather odd I thought but I taught them a few words and played dodge balls. Yeah, I got them good!! Haha..despite the fact I really didn’t know the Japanese version of the game, the basic concept was the same. After school ended and the kids went home, many teachers came up to me and asked me if I knew how to play table tennis or as I like to say Ping Pong! Apparently, the whole staff was going to play ping pong and they asked me to join them. Next thing I knew, I was partaking in the staff ping pong tournament and the winner would receive some type of prize. I cleared first round by taking down a female teacher but I lost by a point in the second round to a male teacher. After my defeat, I bowed, smiled and said thank you like you’re suppose to. Meanwhile, I thought to myself, “I’m going to go slash his car tires now” haha. Eventually the teacher that beat me took second place overall. They gave prizes to the top 3 players and they had one more prize to give away and for no apparent reason, they gave it to me. I call this prize the “consolation foreigner prize.” Sometimes it’s good to be a foreigner. They treat you real nice, almost like a celebrity. Did I mention some of my students asked for my autograph? After ping pong, everybody retreated to the staff room for desert and tea and I called it a day! Round two tomorrow…

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 10th, 2004 at 1:21 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.