Wednesday, October 08, 2008
The Amazing English Lesson Spectacular
I was right: today was better than yesterday, but it certainly wasn't any less busy.
Tomorrow we're having a big "English presentation lesson" at school, so when I wasn't teaching classes today I was helping the children prepare for tomorrow's fishbowl experience. The first graders are going to talk about animals and what they can do (in the style of From Head to Toe) and the third graders are going to tell a story with pictures of animals that eat a lot (just like The Very Hungry Caterpillar). The sixth graders, being the most advanced, are going to use Powerpoint and a map of the area to point out interesting local sights and landmarks, mostly in Japanese but with some key English sentences like "This shrine is near my house."
Just like the last month's Sports Day, the entire school is bending over backwards to get ready for visitors. Not only has the school undergone some cosmetic changes (such as these steps), all the schools in the district are dismissing their students early tomorrow so that other teachers can come to see the presentations. Today's usual cleaning session was extra-long so the kids could clean the entire first and second floor from top to bottom, making sure none of tomorrow's visitors see something that might be dusty. It reminds me of what we went through when my mom tried to sell our house. We had to clean everyday and ensure that nothing was even left open or exposed. I never understood why because any potential buyer would see our house with the knowledge that we were still living in it. The guests tomorrow are all teachers somewhere, so they know exactly what an elementary school looks like when you look under the desks or behind the cabinets.
It remains to be seen exactly how tomorrow will play out. We've had a number of days like this where we put on a class for a lot of visiting teachers, always followed by a long (and I mean long) meeting where they talk about the future of English education entirely in Japanese and I stay awake by listing professional sports teams (in their respective divisions) in the margins of the pages and pages of handouts. With three simultaneous classes tomorrow afternoon, there must be more than a hundred guests coming so I don't understand where they're all going to go once class is over. Will we all gather in the gym or something? That's not a meeting, that's a lecture.
The only thing I know for sure is that we're going out to eat afterward (I'm predicting Japanese food, imagine that) so I won't be home until well past nine and then I've got packing to do. This is likely my last "proper" posting of the week, although I'll definitely be tweeting throughout my three-day weekend travels. Whatever goes down tomorrow, I'm less than forty-eight hours from my arrival in Earth's Largest City.
Tomorrow we're having a big "English presentation lesson" at school, so when I wasn't teaching classes today I was helping the children prepare for tomorrow's fishbowl experience. The first graders are going to talk about animals and what they can do (in the style of From Head to Toe) and the third graders are going to tell a story with pictures of animals that eat a lot (just like The Very Hungry Caterpillar). The sixth graders, being the most advanced, are going to use Powerpoint and a map of the area to point out interesting local sights and landmarks, mostly in Japanese but with some key English sentences like "This shrine is near my house."
Just like the last month's Sports Day, the entire school is bending over backwards to get ready for visitors. Not only has the school undergone some cosmetic changes (such as these steps), all the schools in the district are dismissing their students early tomorrow so that other teachers can come to see the presentations. Today's usual cleaning session was extra-long so the kids could clean the entire first and second floor from top to bottom, making sure none of tomorrow's visitors see something that might be dusty. It reminds me of what we went through when my mom tried to sell our house. We had to clean everyday and ensure that nothing was even left open or exposed. I never understood why because any potential buyer would see our house with the knowledge that we were still living in it. The guests tomorrow are all teachers somewhere, so they know exactly what an elementary school looks like when you look under the desks or behind the cabinets.
It remains to be seen exactly how tomorrow will play out. We've had a number of days like this where we put on a class for a lot of visiting teachers, always followed by a long (and I mean long) meeting where they talk about the future of English education entirely in Japanese and I stay awake by listing professional sports teams (in their respective divisions) in the margins of the pages and pages of handouts. With three simultaneous classes tomorrow afternoon, there must be more than a hundred guests coming so I don't understand where they're all going to go once class is over. Will we all gather in the gym or something? That's not a meeting, that's a lecture.
The only thing I know for sure is that we're going out to eat afterward (I'm predicting Japanese food, imagine that) so I won't be home until well past nine and then I've got packing to do. This is likely my last "proper" posting of the week, although I'll definitely be tweeting throughout my three-day weekend travels. Whatever goes down tomorrow, I'm less than forty-eight hours from my arrival in Earth's Largest City.
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