The First Week Is Over....

and it wasn't that bad.
Let's go over the bad points first.
Now, I know we all live on an island over here, but that's no reason to treat school like a personal Club Med. My boy students frequently run around shirt- and shoe-less. All the kids think it's ok to sleep (and I mean SLEEP: they're sprawled out on the floor, mouth open wide), text on their cellphones, and listen to music (most of the cells are music players). Since I was the new girl, most of the time they were pretty alert. They talked a lot, but I found out they were talking about what I was presenting, which I guess is okay. I also heard many statements like, "I like marijuana," or "My name crazy." That's great, but if you're gonna say shit like that, you better be prepared to tell me the name of your dealer.
After class, I thought I would be able to hide from the hooligans in the staff room. Wrong. The kids run the school and take the liberty of going into any room they like when they want to. So while I'm at my desk trying to study Japanese, they'll point to my grade school hiragana writing exercise (with little bunnies on the border) and laugh or call me 'baka'. I don't know if it means idiot or stupid, but it definitely doesn't add to my cool factor.
But when I had my smaller elective classes, teaching was more fun. And I don't know if you call what I do 'teaching'. I just make nifty posters and try to involve them in my presentations, and trying to trick them into speaking English. When they're in smaller groups, they're a bit more eager. Sometimes I get a sea of blank looks, but that comes from not knowing what the hell I'm talking about.
As I was talking about being an actor, one of the students asked me what I was doing here if I had a career to get to back home (she said this in Japanese, of course). I had to stop and think and smile, because it's a question I had to ask myself before I made the decision to come here. I told her that while I would always be an actor, coming to Japan and being in Kozu was a once in a lifetime chance. She smiled and seemed pleased with the answer.
Don't get me wrong. The kids are really nice and I think they're pretty interested in me. Really, these are just lessons in patience, keeping my cool, and remembering what it was like to be a teenager. And while it is tiring trying to keep these kids interested, it's fun trying to think up neat lessons for them. It's all trial and error here. We'll see how it goes.
I didn't get an pics of my classes, but here's some from a cooking class I dropped in on:


These are the 2nd year students in their Kozu culture class.








The only time they didn't flip the peace sign is when I caught them off-guard.














They were making a typical Kozu meal of sweet potato cakes, rice with nori and soy sauce, and some sort of saba (mackerel) soup. It was fucking delicious.





Some of the students made me my own special cakes. They can be so goddman sweet, the lil bastards.









and my enemy, the cell phone. They have so much shit dangling from those things.









Next up: Wasted at the PTA meeting!