Dazaifu, Day 4 - My first class time

Tuesday, and I will finally get a chance to be with some students. The morning is free time for me, which gives me a chance to work on a journal entry and answer some e-mails.

Sasaki-sensei comes over and tells me that I am to join her and the other English teachers (including the American ALT, also named Rebecca!) in an afternoon English lesson. She asks if I have any suggestions for a song with English lyrics that the students might be able to learn. After a little discussion, I decide on the Disney song, “It’s a Small World”. I find the lyrics without any problems and write them in a Word document, which I then copy to my trusty flash drive and pass along to Sasaki.

(By the way, this is much easier than trying to set up a printer directly on my machine; there are both network issues and enough differences between the American and Japanese versions of XP, that setting up certain hardware drivers can be problematic. As long as we are both using the same word processing programs [MS Word, in our case], we don’t have any problems with just transferring documents from one machine to another, and XP handles USB flash drives quite easily.)

Lunch is with Sasaki-san’s class – I sit at an empty desk and look at what people have for lunch. Unlike the elementary school, lunch here is an individual affair (but still eaten in individual classrooms); milk is provided to all students, but most bring lunches or buy breads from the school store/snack bar. Some pay for box lunches that are brought in (these are pre-ordered, apparently). I’ve got yogurt and a small sandwich to eat, so I am fine.

After lunch, we all gather in the room usually assigned for kendo practice – there are three English classes sharing this time today. Rebecca-sensei (the ALT) and I are both in front, with the three Japanese teachers spaced throughout the group. The lyrics have been turned into a worksheet; specific words have been replaced by a blank, and a word bank has all of the possible answers. Rebecca-ALT asks who has been to Tokyo Disneyland, and a sizeable group of students raise their hands; then she asks who has been to the one in California (she and I and a couple of others). Finally she asks who has been to Paris Disneyland (only her - that girl has traveled!), and then she indicates that this song is well known at all of those places.

We both sing the song a few times, then ask students to listen for the missing words and fill in the blanks as we sing it again, line by line. Then we have the students say the words, and finally sing them, in small groups and together. By the time class is over, we have succeeded in getting most of them to sing most of the lyrics correctly, and nearly all of the students seem to have written the correct words on their worksheets. I think my first class was reasonably successful.

Home to my apartment, where I make an early night of it – I am still feeling the effects of the heat and some lingering jet lag.