Get your Culture on!

I love 3-day weekends! Today is CULTURE DAY, a national holiday, so no school! Woo-hoo! I'll admit that I'm not going to be taking in too much culture today.. no plans for the art museum or anything... but I DID have sushi for lunch. Does that count?

On Tuesday night (Halloween night) I had a Halloween Party for my English club students at the International Center.

There were about 25 people who showed up in total; about 10 girls from my school's English club and 5 from my friend's high school, and about 10 other ALTs (assistant language teachers) from our teaching program that I had invited. I ordered an orange pumpkin (for a small fortune... pumpkins in this end of Japan are all green, not orange) and so we carved it together. We ate pizza, played some games, had a mummy wrap race, and chatted in English. I did my best to try to recreate the Halloween spirit but it's kind of lost on high school girls who still want to wear their uniforms and not much of a costume for fear of making fools of themselves.... I WILL say that Halloween seems to be becoming a more popular holiday in Japan, though. All my students know about trick-or-treating and of course like the getting-candy-for-free aspect of it...


I have also been doing my part to bring "American culture" to my lessons of late, and even a bit on Halloween. I did a short listening warm-up about the History of the Jack-o-Lantern. Do you know the story of "Stingy Jack"? I honestly didn't until I came to Japan. You can read the story at http://pumpkinnook.com/facts/jack.htm It's a good explanation for why we Americans like to light candles in vegetables with faces.... because these are the things they don't quite understand!

We're also starting "Show & Tell" Presentations. Although it's something I did in elementary school, it's actually really good for my high school students learning English because it gives them a chance to talk about something that is important to them. As a demonstration (AND to show them I really do understand how hard it is to get up and talk in front of others in a foreign language) I did a "Show & Tell" presentation in Japanese... and I was actually a little nervous because I'm not used to speaking Japanese in front of a lot of people. (But I guess it's good practice for me, too, as I'll have to give my farewell speech in Japanese next summer in front of the 1200 students at my school.) I told them that was the only time I'd ever speak Japanese in class (because I am pretty strict about that since it's the only time a week when they have an English-only environment, even if I can understand what they're saying sometimes in Japanese) and I think they appreciated seeing me struggle a bit so hopefully it will motivate them at all.

I had been trying to figure out a fair way to decide their presentation order, so I decided to do it in Alphabetical order. This way seems perfectly normal to us, but was a little bit new to them in that the boys and girls were mixed together. In Japan it is still very traditional (at least at my school) because in a class that's half boys and half girls, the boys will be first in the class list, then the girls. They are also listed in order of the Japanese syllabary (not letters, but syllables) which coincidentally also starts with "a," (a-i-u-e-o, and followed by ka-ki-ku-ke-ko) so people with A-names didn't luck out in this case. (Though the A-girls are used to being number 20 or something and now they will be second or third.) It also really changed the order of some other names. For example, "Sa" used to come before "Fu" and "Murakami" used to come before "Moriyama," but not anymore! Ah well, it's good for them to change it up a bit...