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Published: January 28th 2007
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yuge218
My Junior High kids at the International School Day. They are a great group....but still didn't eat the couscous! Last weekend was the International School Day that I have been preparing for, for some time now. The International School Day was an event on Innoshima (a neighboring island) to make Japanese students realize how English isn’t just another boring subject, and how it can be used for actual communication and having fun. It was designed to be an event that could be similar to participating in a student exchange to a foreign country without having to spend all that money. Our goal was to have various fun classes where the students would learn something interesting in English, but not learn English. In other words, we were not supposed to teach English, but teach something else in English, so that the students were using the language to learn about something else.
Several foreign English teachers and exchange students from around the area were invited to teach. I decided to teach Appalachian music and dance for my class. It was funny because I was partnered up with one of my English conversation students from Malaysia. So first I had to teach everything to him so that we could teach the Japanese students. Fortunately he turned out to be a big help.
yuge215
My wonderful assistant, Sophi! It would have been a lot of work teaching music and dance all day long all by myself. There were about 67 students total divided into six classes. So by the end of the day my voice was hoarse and my legs were aching.
Each class was 40 minutes long. So, I began each class with a short introduction to Appalachian music and dance. I showed them where the Appalachian mountain range is and a short video I had recorded from an Appalachian music festival in West Virginia. Then I taught them the words to “Soldiers Joy,” which I thought was the perfect song to teach since it’s basically the most well-known old-time song. Of course, I had to change the lyrics a little since the song is actually about an addiction to morphine! Ha! So, once the students got used to the words, I played along with them on my fiddle. It was good fun, but junior high students tend to sing as quietly as they possibly can. Oh well.
Next came the fun part. For the Appalachian dance bit of the class I taught square dancing. This was another challenge though for junior high school age
yuge216
Yassine and Daniel working hard on the curry. They are both native French speakers, though Yassine is Moroccan and Daniel is Frenech-Canadian. Daniel is the guy who organized the event. kids. I had to rule out boys dancing with girls at the very beginning since I knew that would never happen. But even getting girls to dance with each other and boys to dance with each other was hard enough. But, in almost every class, after about five minutes of dancing with each other, the kids would get over their embarrassments and realize that they were actually having fun. I taught the easiest square dancing moves I could think of, and they all worked out pretty well. Then I put on a good square dancing CD (Motown Rounders!), and became the caller. It was so much fun! I had been stressing out about this event for at least the past month, but once the day finally came, it was great! I was so happy to have fun with the students outside of school for once, and I think they felt the same way. Several students told me that my class was their favorite out of all the classes at International School Day (although they could have just been trying to make me happy…it worked!).
The only thing that bugged me the whole day was lunch time. The Moroccan exchange
yuge217
Sophi and Ethan enjoying their couscous! (like all good children should!) student’s (from my English conversation class) lesson was a cooking class on how to make Moroccan couscous and curry (Yum!). He worked so hard all day to make a ton of couscous and curry (for almost 100 people!). Then when lunch time finally came, and we all sat down to eat it, none of the Japanese students would touch the couscous! All of the foreigners (including me!) were chowing down and loving every bite of it. But the Japanese students insisted on eating their curry around the couscous. It was a little disappointing since the whole point of the day was trying new things and experiencing foreign cultures. I think most of the reason that the kids wouldn’t eat it was because couscous is similar to rice, but not quite the same. Japanese people are so obsessed with their rice (I’m not being critical…it’s just the truth), that they reject anything else that is similar but not quite the same. It’s too bad….because the couscous was delicious!
As a side note….I really wish I could have gotten some pictures of my Appalachian music and dance class because it was so fun, but of course I was too busy the
yuge219
2 other students of mine eating around their couscous!! whole time to take any pictures. Sorry! You’ll just have to leave that one up to your imagination. This event made me realize how much I would like to do this kind of stuff ALL the time, rather than teaching grammar everyday.
Other than the International School Day, last Tuesday was my birthday (yay! 23!). I was in Matsuyama (a city two hours south of here) for a teacher’s conference then. Nothing too exciting happened. The day before, my Board of Education gave me a bottle of Cava and cheese, so I shared that with Nick and Ethan in our hostel in Matsuyama. We stuck pretz in the camembert cheese round so that it resembled a birthday cake. It was kind of pathetic, but fun too.
That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading y’all!
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nomi
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jennie, you're crazy! and amazing!!!! : ) you really make the most of everything. ^^ slliiiiigggghhhhttt chance i may be in nihon next month.... still not quite sure....