Tanaka-sensei taught me this one. When we're doing things like animals with the younger ones, we usually introduce them using gestures or animal sounds, and they guess (well, shout) what they are. ('Mooo'. 'Dog! Dog!' 'No, not quite' 'Buta Buta' 'Oh pig? No, but close!' 'Ah ah! Wakatta! Kangaroo!' 'No' 'Ushi?' 'Yes! how do you say ushi in English?' etc). Now after you've done two or three, they've got the idea - they know it's going to be an animal. The stage is set.
First, you wake up. Big yawn. Stretch. Stumble over, turn on the shower. Test the water. Get in, start washing. Fumble around for the shampoo. (kids: 'Eh?') Start washing your hair, making loads of foam and frothing your hair out. Rinse it off, turn off the shower and reach out for your towel. Dry your face (kids: 'Nan dake?') and start to rigourously dry your hair, showing just how big and fluffy it gets. Use a hairdryer. Start to brush it, making it fluff out and style it into an elaborate Louis XVI-style Big Hair. Slowly look more and more satisfied with it, and eventually put the brush down. Turn to the kids. 'RAR!'
kids: LAIYON!!!!
Genius.
We did the candy betting game today. It's a simple game using numbers, for 1st or 2nd graders. Basically, everyone starts with 10 candy cards. 3-2-1 go. You have to find a partner and ask 'how many?', and negotiate a number of candy cards to bet. 'Three, please! No! Two! Two? OK'. Once agreed, janken, and the winner takes all. Simple.
Now for some simple games such as this one, sometimes the school likes to prepare their own props or cards. Better still, they get the kids to make their own customised versions. Today was a perfect example - each kid had coloured in their own ten candy cards. Great - school is prepared, kids are excited to actually get to use them for something and the scene is set nicely. Can anyone spot any potential flaws here? Allow me to list:
1) There are no spare cards. Result: a couple of kids lose badly at janken three times in a row, lose all their candy in the first six minutes, and sulk (rightly so) for the rest of the lesson.
2) It also means that me and my partner teacher can't join the game, because we don't have any cards. This is a) bad because we can't interact properly and help them to get the English right and b) boring.
3) Japanese kids in particular are meticulous at colouring stuff in. Therefore they get a bit grumpy when they lose all their own beautifully coloured candy and only end up with a few crap scibbled ones they won off the scabby kid who always has a small amount of snot protruding from his left nostril.
4) Following on from 3, this can also lead to arguments at the end of the lesson where Meticulous-chan wants his or her nice beautiful candy that was slaved over yesterday morning back from Snotty-chan who feels just as strongly that they were won fair and square.
5) If someone loses their candy at any point before the game starts, they're stuffed. And they go and sulk with the kids from 1).
6) Sometimes the cards don't have candy pictures on them but something else, like stars or animals, which the kids don't know the English word for. (Candy in Japanese is 'Kyandee'). Now, either your Candy game becomes the ??? game and you struggle on through, or you have to do half the lesson in Japanese.
So why does this happen? It's not because the school is short-sighted or stupid - of course not. They've been doing this for a hell of a lot longer than my partner teacher, and started before I was even born. But that said, we (my office, in this case) are the experts on the candy betting game. We invented it. We have played it a thousand bloody times, we have tried different rule permutations and changed the number of cards. And for the first fifty of those times, we probably suffered from any combination of the above pitfalls, plus some more I haven't even encountered. But for the last nine hundred and fifty times, it has worked perfectly. It's not because we're cleverer or our cards are special - we're not and they aren't. But the process has been honed. Our candy cards are printed on nice thick coloured paper - thick enough that it doesn't break or rip easily, but cheap enough that they're not precious. Unlike those nice freshly guillotined ones straight out of your shiny laser printer, they are easy to count because they don't stick together and they can't give you paper cuts. They are exactly the right size - they fit comfortably into your hand but the kids at the back can see how many I'm holding up. Again, why? Because we've tried all the other kinds and found out the hard way why they suck. It's not the size of our brains that the school are up against, but our encyclopedic back catalogue of cock-ups. We know how to make something work because we've screwed it up so many times.
I fully applaud and appreciate the attitude displayed in making their own props, but if I'm honest I always dread it when we're not using our own. They make a 'tired' flashcard when the corresponding worksheet uses 'sleepy'. There are errors - 'Good By', 'one dollars please' - usually harmless, but awkward and unecessary. And I don't understand why they think they have to - they are seriously busy people. They have 30 kids to both look after and teach 90% of their different subjects - science, history, maths - everything. It's not their fault - we'd make the same mistakes if we hadn't tried it before. So please, for everyone's sake, just let us bring the props for games we invent. You do a heroic amount of work everyday, don't make more for yourself by accidentally causing a massive candy-card related argument before third period.
8:50. Still 40 minutes before I have to go to work. One of the great things about the way my office is sometimes deeply anal with paperwork is that I can take nenkyu (paid leave) in units of hours, not days. So on days like today when I'm working at the school 100 yards from my flat from 9:30 onwards I can take one hour in the morning and wander over there at 9:30 instead of trekking over to the office on the 8:05 bus just to come all the way back half an hour later. Some complain that there is no common sense in Japan - there is, but you can only get at it through paperwork. This is not a good thing, but today I've managed it.
I've decided not to go to the Returner's Conference. (Badly named: it's supposed to mean "Returning To Your Home Country", although it sounds like "Returning To Do Another Year, As Opposed To Going Home". Return implies motion back towards, not motion away. I'm sorry, but it is a conference for English teachers). I've not changed my decision to come home or anything, just that I don't feel like any information I'd receive would be worth the 4 man+ (£200+) it would take to get there and back and stay somewhere. A look through the schedule: 'CVs and Inverview technique': well, we all had that once at school, and then again at uni, and our CVs and interview techniques were obviously good enough to get us onto JET in the first place - what new facts can there be? Yes it's always useful to hear those things again, but surely we've heard them enough times to be able to do it? And besides, CLAIR are not the only people in the world who know how to write a CV. 'Dealing With Reverse Culture Shock', well, I've felt before that some of the self-help oriented workshops suffer something of a cultural mistranslation. Shall we just say that on these occasions the Atlantic ocean feels wider than usual, and leave it at that. Now, the various career workshops do look quite good, particularly fields like translating and interpreting, education, international business, and so on. But I don't want to do any of those, so they're not really applicable. There is an IT career workshop and a Media - Film, TV and Web Production workshop. However, they held are at the same time, so I'd only be able to go to one of them. And again, we had all this 'Career talk from Successful Industry Veterans' stuff in uni. They all have one thing in common: the first thing they all say is 'Well, I never had any career advice'. Great. (Would you have an intro to JET seminar with 'Well, I've never been to Japan...'? No.) And from there they split into two camps: the ones who tell us that the important skills are stupidly obvious ones like being on time and being organised, and that most companies will offer extra training for their own software / programming techniques anyway, and the ones who tell us how wonderful it is to work for Microsoft/Sun/Hewlett Packard, because you get to work in the company's own gargantuan building which has its own newsagents, gym and restaurants, so the only other people you need to socialise with are other employees. Sometimes they even bring pictures. There's only one thing worse than these kind of talks, and that's a Careers Fair - and I've heard through the grapevine that there's going to be one of those as well. At uni they were fun - you could spend about twenty minutes fantasizing about being in the SAS before realising that: a) you are deeply unsuitable for it, b) you'd hate it and c) you might die. But no-one surely actually gets a job from one of these things? Or to put it another way: surely no company worth their salt sends someone all the way to Japan to try and persuade someone to work for them? It's the other way around - we have to persuade them to hire us.
Now, there's one problem with all this, and that is that it comes across as - and in fact is - a rather arrogant stance to take. Yes, I've thought about it, looked through the letter and my bank statements, weighed up the pros and cons and decided that on balance, not to go is the best course of action for me. But at the same time, I've basically thrown the papers in the bin with a nonchalant air of 'I'm OK, I know what I'm doing, I can get a job just fine and I don't need your help LA LA LA LA LA can't hear you'. So, if I'm going to do that, I need to back it up. I suppose my take is that how useful you're being depends on how far removed you are from your current task. My task in hand is to get a job. If I'm in a job interview, then I'm bang on. If I'm writing my CV or working on my demo, then I'm preparing for the actual task - I'm one step removed. If I'm listening to someone tell me that I need a demo, then I'm two steps removed. If I'm sitting in a workshop waiting to see if they mention a demo or not, I'm waiting for someone to tell me to do something to prepare for the thing I have to do - that's three steps. If I'm listening to someone tell me that I need a demo when I could actually be sitting down making one, then I'm completely wasting my time. I know that sounds harsh, but these things always come out as 'Do the thing you were going to do anyway but instead of starting today just came here to make sure we said that and not anything else'.
Usually that's exactly what I do do. This time I'm going to chance it.
First of all, sorry. Second of all, Kat, you really need to find something to do. Third, sorry again. The photos are finally up.
Cambodia looks stunning from the air. I suppose my initial idea was that it would look a bit like Thailand - mostly green, a bit of forestry here and there, and rural areas and urban centres fairly distinguished. It doesn't. It is mostly brown, with hundreds of tiny villages consisting of no more than thirty buildings, connected by probably less than a kilometre of dirt track to one another, all very close together but seperated by scrubland. I could probably see at least twenty villages outside the plane window at any one time. Once we landed it got no more similar. The influence left by France from colonial times is extremely pronounced. In particular, the houses (mansions, really) in Pnom Penh look like they have been taken straight from Paris, painted yellow and stuck next to each other. It must be somewhat surreal to the people who inhabit them now. While there are a few well-off Cambodians, certainly some of these buildings are lived in by fruit-sellers and street-stall chefs, who can't have much more to their names than some clothes and a hammock. Outside Pnom Penh, the housing quickly turns to simple wooden houses, usually on stilts. As we travelled by boat up the Tonle Sap river to Siam Reap, we saw many small hamlets on the riverbank, and further up whole floating villages, the houses built on top of rafts and floating in the middle of the water. Supposedly this meant that there was more land to then cultivate, a hard earnt benefit given that everything, even excercising the dogs, had to be done in small wooden rowing boats.
Siam Reap brought back some more familiar features, internet cafes becoming once again ubiquitous. Like Thailand, it bears its touristy influences well, and while being firmly set up as the base to visit Angkor, the temples never feel excessively pimped - the ruins support the community there and the community look after the ruins. Finally, we had made it. Martin and I decided that we'd go all out and head in on the first day at 5am to watch the sun rise over Angkor Wat itself. From there, we headed north up to Angkor Thom, the massive walled city that apparently in its heyday would have had up to a million inhabitants. The ruins everywhere are really quite breathtaking to behold, but it was strangely difficult to latch on to their significance. Throughout the first day, we were frequently left thinking 'It's all deeply impressive, but why did you bother? What was your burning need to do all this?' Angkor Thom in particular's grand claims to being some bustling culturally splendid ancient metropolis sat somewhat at odds with the calm woods that filled in the gaps between serene stone monuments. The answer to all this is of course that much has dissappeared over the years - apparently you could only have a stone house if you were a god, mere mortals having to make do with wooden homes which have long since gone. Not much really clicked into place until we got over to the older temples, which were much smaller but crucially honoured and revered the same strands of history and mythology. Shiva's home of Mount Neru and the Churning of the Sea of Milk were recurring themes that are echoed throughout the more well-known temples, and it wasn't until that became apparent that the process of simply making things bigger and better as power increased while honouring age-old traditions make itself obvious. Having it all written down in a Lonely Planet helped too, naturally.