Typhoon Wipha

As some of you may have seen in the news, Japan was hit by Typhoon Wipha last week. This was purportedly one of the strongest typhoons to hit Japan in years.
There actually were a few typhoon related deaths on an island off the coast of Tokyo. Luckily, there weren’t any deaths in Saitama.

On the day of the typhoon, I woke up to rain pounding outside, and a heavy wind battering my apartment building. I got a phone call from my advisor at 6 am, telling me that the teachers should still try to go in to school at the normal time but that the classes would start late for students.
 Later, I received texts and emails from the other ALTs, who had received calls and emails from their advisors telling them not to come in until 10 am. I called my advisor to double check with her, and she later confirmed that since classes were not going to start until 11, it was okay if I waited until 10 to come to school.

I’m glad I waited to come into work. The worst of the storm hit the Saitama/Tokyo area between 6 and 9 am. Actually, the wind blew off some branches from some nearby trees and hit my window! I was afraid my window was going to break, but luckily everything was fine. If I was outside, the wind probably would’ve knocked me over, or I would’ve hit my head. 
We still had a full school day starting at 11am, but it was shortened to 40 minute periods. I only had to teach one class, because they decided to just completely cancel all of the Junior high school classes.

Overall, Japan just has a serious ganbatte attitude towards these typhoons. If there was a storm back home only a quarter as bad as this typhoon was, school would’ve been canceled for the whole day. 
I know many other ALTs around Saitama were told that if they decided to come in late, or to not come in at all, then they would have to take nenkyu or paid vacation time. It’s definitely a big case of frustrating culture shock for some of us westerners working here.

However, I am safe, and there was no structural damage done to my home, or school. Even my bike got out relatively unscathed, as it’s still functioning. The typhoon did turn the Inagakuen parking lot into a lake though.

 

Inagakuen parking lot, post typhoon.

Inagakuen’s 30th Anniversary

This year is Inagakuen’s 30th anniversary. In order to celebrate 30 years of Inagakuen being a high level high school, there was a ceremony in Saitama Sonic City in Omiya.

The ceremony wasn’t bad, but I did expect it to be more exciting. Everyone was required to be there, both staff and students. I don’t have any pictures of the ceremony, because they made a big deal that that was a big “no-no” during the ceremony.

All of the teachers and ALTs were required to arrive at Sonic City for the teachers meeting at 11am. The meeting lasted all of 15 minutes, and then we were free to go to lunch. The students didn’t start arriving to the venue until noon, and the ceremony didn’t start until 1pm.

The ceremony started with officials from the Board of Education sitting in an orderly fashion on stage, while different men made different speeches about the legacy of Inagakuen. I didn’t understand the majority of what they were saying, but they did have the staff and students bow a lot between speakers.  This portion of the ceremony was about an hour long, and there was a 10 minute bathroom break before starting the next part.

I am still not sure what the second part of the ceremony had to do with Inagakuen’s 30th anniversary. Most of the seats onstage were cleared, and a man from a University gave a lecture that was over an hour long. He had a photo slideshow to go with his lecture. His lecture went all over the place. He started talking about the scientific reason the sky is blue, and about prisms, then lightning, then cicadas, and then finished his lecture with something about these chemical compound structures that are used to make cars.

It was actually very hard to stay awake during that lecture. I tried to keep myself interested by looking up the various kanji and Japanese words I could read on the slides, and translate them using the imi wa? app on my iPhone. I’m pretty sure I heard a teacher snoring during the lecture, and at one point, seven students in the row in front of me were all asleep.

After he finished his speech, two students came onstage to hand him a huge, and I mean huge bouquet of flowers, (the bigger they are, the more important the person is) to thank him for coming.

There was another ten minute break, and then the third and final part of the ceremony began. This part was actually exciting. The Inagakuen cheerleaders performed two different routines, then the choir came out and performed. This was followed by the brass band performance. the brass band was really into it. Some of the performers came out into the audience, and the girls who play triangle or tambourine had a dance routine going on, where they were spinning in time to the music. The choir came out to perform one more song with the brass band. Some of the members held up signs as instructions so that the audience would know when to perform certain hand movements together with the choir. With this final performance, the ceremony actually ended a half hour ahead of schedule, and everyone was free to go.

It wasn’t a bad ceremony, but I was expecting something more along the lines of a photo slideshow showing the history of Inagakuen, and having past students coming in and talking about how going to Inagakuen helped them in their education. I was also expecting more student performances. Basically, I was expecting anything that was not the long science lecture that came in the middle. Oh well, I’ve been here long enough to know that I shouldn’t expect Japanese school ceremonies to be like the ones in America.

September Round up

So the month of September has come and gone. I’m surprised at how fast it went, although there were some days that seemed excruciatingly slow. I guess it all comes with the changes that came with the start of the new term!

Of course, we have two new ALTs at Inagakuen. Salimah, the new English ALT, is from Washington DC. She used to work at the Department of Education, but decided to come to Japan for a change of pace. She’s very nice, but since she is replacing Michelle, she just teaches all of Michelle’s old classes. There was no switching around the schedules. I didn’t teach any classes with Michelle last term, so I’m not teaching any classes with Salimah.

We also have a new German ALT, named Julia.  She is replacing Olga, and she now sits next to me in the House 2 office. Julia is also really nice, and she also speaks really good English. Julia is a lot more talkative and open than Olga was, she has meshed into the group with all of the other English ALTs at Inagakuen.

We kicked off the first week of school with the annual cultural festival, known as Inahosai, here in town. Cultural festivals are called bunkasai here in Japan. The bunka stands for culture, so of course they came up with the name mixing bunkasai and Inagakuen.

In some ways, it was just as impressive as the past two years, and in some ways, not as impressive. Maybe I’m already spoiled by having been here for so long, or could be that some of the houses themes were not as exciting. The Junior High school’s theme was Jurassic Park. House 2’s theme was the time period in Japan between the Meiji period and the 1920’s. It wasn’t bad, but kind of plain compared to what they did for the past two years.

House 2 center decorations

House 3’s theme was “Inagaku Rangers.” Basically, it had the basic anime, super-sentai, Power Rangers like theme. House 4’s theme was “Westernization,” so they made it look like the wild west. House 5’s theme was “Wedding” they made the inside of their house center look like a white chapel, with pews, and a huge fake cake at the front. They would also perform fake wedding ceremonies at least once every two hours.

The house I liked the best was House 6, because they had a Harry Potter theme. They really went all out.

Here we have Aragog.

This year, they decided  to not give out prizes for best house decorations. I was a little disappointed, because I wanted to see who would win. (I think house 6 would’ve of course!) However, homeroom 4D won best homeroom attraction. They made their own homemade spinning teacup ride in their classroom! Somehow the students designed a simple metal frame mechanism that could spin around, and then made wooden box “teacups” to spin around in. Honestly, it was the most creative and innovative thing I’ve seen at a cultural festival to date.

After Inahosai I became busy with a lot of work, such as correcting multiple show and tell scripts for all of my English one classes, and of course, finishing up all of the work for my online TEFL course. My deadline to finish everything was September 11th, and I finished everything 3 days before it was due. I passed my course! In fact, my certificate just arrived in the mail today! I am now officially a certified TEFL teacher.

Now that I am finished with that course, I would love to go back to spending more of my time studying Japanese, but as of right now, most of my time has been taking up correcting essays, speech scripts, and helping the students prepare for English Drama and English debate.

The English Drama group this year is going to perform Charlotte’s Web. Everyone is really excited about this play, because it’s very cute, and actually quite different from the plays Inagakuen has performed before. Anyway, it seems like my work routine is falling into place, and I should be able to find more time to update this blog more often.

We’ll see what excitement happens in October!