Bizarre Teaching Moment #2: Play Ball!

~Salutations everyone, and happy June. Graduation time has rolled around again, so congratulations to all those who are leaving their respective educational institutions! Once you've suffered through "Pomp and Circumstance", you can laugh at me, who graduated last year yet somehow ended up in a school to pass along my *wisdom* and knowledge of movie quotes to those younger than me. If only you could be so lucky.

Today's bizarre teaching moment occurred about two weeks ago, with a student who is around five years old. At the time, he had been my student for less than a month, and I was having a devil of a time getting him to say anything in English. One day, I was dutifully taking him through a new phonics lesson for the letter 'U', which included two pictures of objects that start with 'U'. The boy mutely nodded when I showed him the 'umbrella' and said the word to him several times. Repressing a sigh, I began to pull out the next picture, a baseball umpire, when the student jumped off of the floor, pointed at the picture, and yelled out "Ump!".


I sat there in amazement as he shouted out baseball terms: Strike!, Home run!, Ball!, Out!, Safe!, Play Ball!, Foul Ball!, and even Chip!...all in perfect English. Recovering from my shock, I somehow cobbled together a baseball-type game using vocabulary cards as bases and a fake microphone as a bat, with a miniature soccer ball as a baseball. Incidentally, your Word of the Post is Yakyū (ya-cue), which is of course the Japanese word for baseball.

As if this wasn't strange enough, during the next class with this boy I set up a sort of soccer game using the soccer ball and vocabulary cards as the goal. While we were kicking the ball around the room, I kicked it into the wall, and the boy stopped and walked up to me. Shaking his head ruefully, he said (again, in perfect English), "Penalty Kick!", and promptly kicked the ball into the goal (future Japanese World Cup champion?).

So now, I use a sports-type game in every class with this particular student, and he's been speaking a lot more. In fact, if anything he's been babbling nonstop about Japanese baseball players (Ichiro Suzuki is his hero) and the upcoming World Cup tournament in Germany, which he is obsessed with.

Coming soon: more bizarre teaching moments, and more pictures from Okayama, where I am non-voluntarily going this weekend! Oh, the joys of mandatory follow-up training. I can hardly wait to present a model lesson designed for five-year-olds in front of my fellow teachers [/sarcasm] . Well, there's the signal--when you start to write in HTML, you know it's time for bed. ~Oyasumi!

Rose Festival

~One of the best things about living in Nagaoka is that there are many festivals. Every couple of weeks, the people here throw a party for something; a few weeks ago it was the Boy's Day Festival, and on Sunday I attended the Rose Festival, a celebration of (you guessed it) roses. However, the name of the festival is just an excuse to party. The Rose Festival had a lot more than just flowers: there was music, dancing, and lots of food!

^ The main flower garden in the middle of the festival. Reminds of the gigantic 'M' of the University of Maryland that cost $10,000 a week to maintain.

^ The Flowermobile. Sometimes kids would climb inside and have their picture taken.

^ One of the live music shows. This band was quite good. Afterwards, there was a string quartet, a rock band, and some solo singers.

^ A big part of the festival was the many booths set up to sell flowers and other plants. They did a brisk business. There were also many booths selling drinks and ice cream.

^ Doc, playing golf amidst the flowers. How Japanese! I walked through this same flower garden a few weeks ago, and the garden gnomes (garden dwarfs?) weren't there. I think the festival organizers put them there for comic relief.

^ A fountain in front of the north building of the Nagaoka Lyric Hall. There was some kind of concert or orchestra performance inside the Hall, but I couldn't make sense of the signs.

I wandered around the festival for over an hour, and I did not see any other foreigners. This meant that inevitably, whether I wanted it or not, I somehow became a part of the festival. Several times, I was stopped by Japanese people who wanted to have their picture taken with me. And a picture of their children with me. And a picture of their spouse with me. I should have charged money! Still, I had nothing better to do, so I obliged and smiled for the cameras.

^ The Rose Festival was centered around a building in Nagaoka called 'The Hive'. Judging from the name, I was expecting either a gigantic beehive or a zergling-infested nightmare. Upon investigation, the Hive proved more like the latter (if by 'zergling' you mean 'small child', which are much the same thing). In reality, the Hive is an auditorium/conference center with an attached restaurant and industrial museum.

The museum is dedicated to Nagaoka's industrial achievements:

^ Ancient...

^...and modern.

A section of the museum was devoted to Nagaoka's most famous son, Admiral Yamamoto. After fighting the Russians in 1905 and studying at Harvard (!) in 1919, Yamamoto was the commander of the Japanese strike force that bombed pearl harbor on December 7th 1939, despite his "personal wish to avoid war with the United States" (...rrright).
^The strangest part of the exhibit was a display of "Admiral Yamamoto Curry"--a food product based on him. Reminds me of when Cap'n Crunch was promoted to Admiral Crunch.

^ An ice cream vending machine in the Hive. Brilliant!

^ The main event of the Rose Festival was some kind of flower-judging contest going on in the main auditorium of the Hive. At least, I think it was some kind of contest. Every so often, one guy would make an announcement, and one of the other people would jump out of their seat and give an extremely long speech, presumably thanking everyone from their florist to their water company.

^ A flower display set up inside the auditorium. If you look on the bottom left of the image, you can see a sign warning that cameras and cellphones must be turned off. I didn't let that stop me from taking pictures.

^ A fish pond set up inside of the auditorium. The fish swam around very quickly, almost as if they were in a panic from having been moved here from wherever they normally live.

^ Like most events in Nagaoka, the Rose Festival was heavily overstaffed. This image shows two crossing guards for one not-terribly-busy crosswalk. I've found that many public buildings, such as post offices and train stations, are deliberately overstaffed. On the other hand, their rate of unemployment is only around 3.5%...

Aside from the booths that sold flowers, there were also booths selling souvenirs. I was looking through a set of postcards when the proprietress came over to me, pointed at them, nodded, and said "Postcards!" I shook my head at her, pointed at them, and corrected her by saying your Word of the Post, "hagaki", which is Japanese for postcard. She burst out laughing and gave me a free postcard when I purchased the set.

I've noticed this phenomenon several times; if you're trying to communicate with a Japanese person and you use any Japanese at all, even a few horribly mangled words, they will become ecstatically happy. They probably see a gaijin approaching and dread having to mime out words, then become relieved when they learn that the funny-looking foreigner is not clueless. Or, in my case, not completely clueless. ~Oyasumi!