12-10-01
A Standard Teachers' Meeting: Leprosy and Land Mines. Sometimes I'm afraid I just don't get the Japanese. At least not Japanese teachers anyway. It's like they don't have meetings because they are a necessary opportunity for people to touch base with each other and coordinate mutual efforts, but rather because they feel obligated to have them... whether they need them or not. Case in point - we recently had a meeting, apparently touching on a rising problem of Leprosy in Japan (wasn't this taken care of this a while back?), how to take steps to prevent infection and how best to advise students to do likewise. WTF?? The very next day we had our weekly 8th Grade Teacher's meeting which covered the pressing issue of land mines left over from various wars in mid-eastern countries. The teacher heading the meeting even gave us handouts detailing various land mine designs, where each model was produced, materials used in their construction, et al. It's hard to consider the time as wasted though, when you consider the intrinsic value of the handout we received listing all the Japanese musical artists that consider themselves 'against' land mines. Honestly, if you don't have anything relevant to cover for the day, cancel the bloody meeting!!
At the same time however, sometimes
the Japanese are so cute that you just want to hug them. Yet another
case in point - the other day I go into the front office to make
some copies and say hi to the nice ladies who work there. One
of the nice ladies in question, Morimoto-sensei is busy filling
out some huge form when she suddenly realizes that she's
made a mistake. Without missing a beat, she grabs her battery-powered
eraser(!!!), which emits an offensive amount 
of noise and proceeds to rub the
offending graphite out of existence, leaving only the smell of
burnt rubber and a debris field of eraser shavings. She quickly
discards the battery-powered eraser and pulls out from God-knows-where,
a tiny broom and dust pan, seemingly created for the sole purpose
of tidying up battery-powered eraser shavings, which she then
uses to tidy up the battery-powered eraser shavings. The only
reason I expect anyone to believe such an absurd story is the
fact that I have pictures from a re-enactment that I forced Morimoto-sensei
to do. She assures me that this is not normal for Japan and that
she's just a freak, but I still get the feeling that I could never
have seen this anywhere else. :D
In other news, class still proves to be a barrel of laughs. Today, Shiraki-sensei and I had the pleasure of teaching all about prepositions (you know: in, on, by, etc) to a group of lively first-year students. Damn, I love these kids. We were drilling them with "Where is blah blah?" questions, such as "Where is the book?" and they would answer "The book is on the table." At least that was the theory. I can only explain what happened next with the aid of photographs:
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I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried, people.
Lastly, here's the photo tour of my daily bike ride to school that I had mentioned way back when. I was originally going to show a town map outlining the journey and also show the alternate route through town that I sometime take, but I ultimately decided against it when I realized it was turning into the most boring update in the world!! So here are just some semi-pretty pics from my ride to school, and a few on the way home, sans any witty repartee on the part of yours truly.
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That's all for this week, gang. I'd tell you what's coming next week, but then I wouldn't be surprised when I made it up the night before. Dig?
