Adventures in Teaching: Fire Breathing Giraffes and Kyarameruringo

I have officially taught at all five of my schools and finished my self-introduction lesson, so now it’s on to the hard part: actually teaching.  I’m a little nervous about team-teaching and teaching new material in general; now that we’re moving on from my hometown and hobbies, I’m hoping that the students will still be interested in the shiny new ALT.



As an assignment, I had the students make name cards with their names and things that they like so I can start trying to learn their names.  As a comprehension exercise, on the back students had to write down things I like from my self-intro lesson.  For example, Ms Allison likes animals, especially elephants, cats, rhinos and fire-breathing giraffes.



Most of the lessons I’ve team-taught thus far have been recitation of vocabulary (a.k.a. I read from the text book and the students listen and repeat).  I’m hoping that won’t be the norm for every class, because if so I can see why learning English in schools is so unpopular among students – they’re bored.  Honestly, I’d probably get bored too.  I understand why the teachers are teaching this way – it’s so the students will do well on their high school entrance exams.  But that’s just parroting, not learning.  They may learn prepositional phrases, but they don’t understand what a prepositional phrase does within a sentence.  But man – from all of these listening comprehension exercises – are they great listeners.

What I have learned thus far from all of these exercises is that they are extremely good at Simon Says.  At my last school, the first graders were learning imperative sentences, so we played the game.  I rarely tripped up any of the students – they listened to every direction and watched my movements like hawks; I even had to make it harder and not give any gestures with my directions.  I just wanted to say: “Y’all, relax.  It’s just a game” so bad!  It was definitely the most intense game of Simon Says I’ve ever played.

The other thing I’ve noticed about the students is their attitudes in class vs. outside of class.  In class, especially among the older students, they spend half of the lesson either rolling their eyes or drooling all over their desks as they sleep.  Outside of class, I hear choruses of “Allison-sensei!” and “Iamfinethankyouandyou?” everywhere I go.  Last Friday, I didn’t have any classes but still went to my school.  At lunchtime, I ventured out of the teacher’s office and into the first-grade hall.  It was like a circus full of rock stars and puppies had rolled into town.  The boys started screaming and the girls squealed. 

In one of the classrooms, I was talking to a group of girls (they were grilling me on their names) when I suddenly felt something lightly tug on the back of head.  The squealing intensified and the light tugging turned into physical hair pulling from all directions as if they were collecting samples.  Once one of the girls had gathered the nerve to touch my hair, the floodgates opened and everybody wanted to touch the gold hair.  It was definitely a bit of a confronting experience for a germophobe like me, especially since the last time I’d been fawned over about my hair was in Okinawa.  One girl asked me if my hair was so soft because I used American shampoo.  Nope, I use Japanese shampoo and my hair has always been like this.  And I don’t have that much of it, so don’t pull so much.  It kind of hurts.  However, once some of the excitement had died down, a student came up to me, thanked me for letting her touch my hair [ahem, I didn’t give permission to anyone] and gave me a segment of a tangerine.  So they can also be incredibly sweet as well as destructive.

The other day, a group of third grade girls passed me notes with messages like: “I love having you here” and “Every minute spent with you is a precious moment in my life.”  It’s like every day is Valentine’s Day.

Conversely, there are goofballs.  Two in particular at one of my schools are in a match over who “loves” me more.  They constantly blow me kisses and scream in the hallway that they love me and want to be my boyfriend.  One likes to imitate me when I say:

“Wow, really?” 

“Yes!  Wow!”

I know most of it’s for show and they’re trying to get a rise out of me, but I think it’s getting a little competitive.  In an effort to impress me, one brought me a book about Martin Luther King Jr. and told me: “He’s my favorite American other than you.  Do you know him?”

“Yes, I do know Dr. King.  He is very important to America.”

“Oh, you know him?” my other suitor asked.  “Well, he’s my father!”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes.”

That’s pretty amazing, considering Dr. King has been dead for 43 years.  Maybe he hadn’t gotten that far into his copy…

It seems my other obstacle will be introducing “globalization” in the first place.  As this month is October, my favorite holiday is close at hand: Halloween.  For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved Halloween (which is kind of ironic since I hate scary things) and was absolutely delighted to see decorations and costumes at the Diaso (¥100 Shop.  Kind of like the 99¢ Store, but a gajillon times better).  Imagine my surprise to hear that Halloween is not actually celebrated in Japan.  But there’s pumpkin-flavored bread at the bakery and Halloween-scented air freshener at the grocery store (I don’t actually know what Halloween smells like, but the packaging had ghosts, pumpkins and candy canes.  Yes, candy canes).  Surely a country that sells such seasonal flair would partake in such a fun night, right?  Wrong.

So, this month’s “ALT Message” is all about Halloween and its awesomeness.  Unfortunately, my students thus far don’t really understand the Hallmark-ized concept of Halloween or its history.  Just explaining “trick-or-treat” was a task in and of itself.  By the end, one of my students cried out: “Oh! So like Christmas!”  Uh…not quite, but going in the right direction.  One holiday is about the birth of Jesus Christ, the other is to keep evil spirits at bay while they roam the earth for one night.  But there is always that joke about Easter and celebrating Jesus Zombie Day…but that may be taking things too far off course.  They did however like the idea of copious amounts of candy.  Especially “kyarameruringo.”  It took me a couple of minutes to realize that they were saying: “caramel apples.”  Fairly decent translation, kiddos. 

Because the week of Halloween will be spent (hopefully) at my smaller schools, I’m eager to be able to do more with them (i.e. trick-or-treating or a Halloween party at lunchtime or something).  I’m also trying to think of a Halloween costume that I can do here that will make sense to the kids.  I’ve always gravitated towards “combining costumes” like Super Nerd (half nerd, half super-hero) or more obscure characters like Flounder from The Little Mermaid.  I guess I could go as a black cat?  Eh, so boring…

So now that I’ve started formal instruction, let’s hope the kids [and I] can keep up the enthusiasm once the fluff stuff is over.

We like a lot of the same things.  Like Rupert Alexahdeh Lloyed Grint. Very much.



And some of these kids are just natural born P.I.M.P.S.  This one in particular was curious if I had a boyfriend, and wanted to let me know that he likes money.  His a high roller with ¥100 and ¥500 coins (the equivalent of $1.30 and $6.50 right now with the exchange rate).