School Daze

So hi!  I’m writing from work today, at Tamagawa junior high school, where I’ve just secretly installed the Blogger for Word toolbar on the office computer to make it look vastly more innocuous when I’m sitting here for huge chunks of time when everyone else is working.  Thanks, Blogger!

And I should probably be working too; today’s pretty much a no-brainer (the JH classes are much less inclusive so far than the Elementary school ones, where it’s pretty much my show to run) except for the 3rd-year elective class where I might need to plan a bit more; but the rest of the week is real work.  Tomorrow should be a breeze but Wednesday needs some thinkin’ for: Wednesday is my day at Hidaka Sho, the largest and closest-by of my five schools, not to mention the one with the best collection of really attractive young teachers.  One of them, Yoshimatsu Michi sensei, whooooooo-ooo! is she cute!  We flirt some but the only place to do it is in the staff room, so it’s only in these short bursts.  She cute though.  Anyway, last Wednesday we sat down at the end of the day to plan out the coming week’s lesson, me and the 6th grade teachers; the school is big enough that I get one grade on any given day I go there, and it works its way down from 6th to 1st before starting over.  So next week I get the 6th graders, who have AWESOME teachers named Matsumoto and Higashino, and they said that I could pick between two topics to plan a lesson around: countries of the world, or Halloween.  Well.  Since I’m not sure if I could do an entire lesson around Yakko Warner’s “Nations of the World” song (although it could be kind of completely amazing), it becomes an even easier question than it ought to have been: Halloween.  The problem is, this week’s class is still almost a good month before Halloween, so it would be kind of silly to get all dressed up and Halloweeny when it’s just too early for it.  So I proposed a plan, and the vice principal (‘kyoto sensei,’ everywhere) thought it was great and OK’d it: we’ll do a Halloween lesson each week for the next 3 with the 6th, 5th, and 4th graders, and then in the last week of the month we’ll have a giant Halloween party in the gym!!  It’s GENIUS!!!!!  So we get three weeks to prepare and stuff, and then I get to throw a Halloween party.  So I need to figure out before Wednesday what exactly that entails.  Obviously, costumes: I want to see cowboys, pirates, the walking dead, robots, anime characters, gundams, demons, you name it walking through the taikukan (gym) at the end of the month.  So maybe some costume vocabulary, and maybe a costume-making session?  Obviously, Halloween vocabulary: scary, candy, boo!, witch, ghost, trick-or-treat, costume, etc.  Also, tactile vocabulary: squishy, gross, sharp, gooey, cold, warm, etc., for playing the “pass around the creepy items” game.  Jack-o-lanterns: I’m not sure if we can get real pumpkins in quantity on the school budget, but maybe each class can make 1 jack-o-lantern (voting on designs, selecting carvers) and then there can be a contest at the party.  And we can make them on paper too I guess, to decorate the gym with.  Trick-or-treating; tell me, someone, what’s the trick part of that?  What can I make kids do to earn treats?  Language games or physical challenges I guess.  Suggestions?  I can have different sensei around the gym with different challenges, too.  That would be fun.  Maybe we can bake pumpkin seeds too.  Any more suggestions, please send ‘em my way; I got to plan this out and plan out the party too, and SOON!

And Tuesday’s no good for planning because I’ve got a DATE! with Ayako!  It’s date #3, we’re meeting in Matsuyama at 7 or 8ish and then catching dinner; she’s curfewed at midnight (no, it’s not what you’re thinking, she’s not like 15 or something, it’s just the living-with-parents and parents-being-unreasonable business, the former being a Japanese youth-culture characteristic and the latter being more globally prevalent) and I’ve got to make the last train home at 11:15, so it’s just a quick dinner date, but still exciting.  

Okay, can’t wait to tell you all about my weekend full of adventure, but for now I gotta go look busier.