#ijhs

Psalm 95:1-3 Link: bible-illustrated.blogspot.com/2019/02/psalm-951-3.html

Oh, sing to the Lord a new song! Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless His name; Proclaim the good news of His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations, His wonders among all peoples.

I planted some seeds a while ago and it seems fitting that I saw the first hint of green today before I left to go to the opening ceremony for IJHS. I hope my lil flower sprouts grow tall and strong just like the kids I met today.

I stumbled out a quick speech introducing myself in English and Japanese after I got the mike to work (they tend to not amplify your voice if they're not turned on, duh Shannon) and sought refuge in the back of the gym afterward with a couple sympathetic teachers while speeches were made about kids who had done especially well in their respective sports, etc over the break. And then they sang the school song and dispersed into classrooms to turn in summer homework and then to go to club activities.

Somehow these kids all look so much younger than I expected. In my brain, I guess I still see junior high kids the way I did when I was also a junior high kid, but man these students seem so tiny now! Walking through the halls, I'm getting a lot of cries of "HELLO!!!" and then explosive giggles when I wave and say hi back. The teachers all went to the BoE for a meeting, but Sempai, the other town ALT, informed me via a line text that we don't do anything at the meetings and asked if I wanted to go get lunch instead. I talked to our head teacher and he gave me the OK to head out - so we went to a cute little hamburg steak restaurant and wandered around looking for Pokemon for a while afterwards in the next town over.

When we came back, I found that the mail had been delivered and realized that I am literally front-page news in this small town - “NEW ALT ARRIVES” was emblazoned on the cover of the town newsletter and my little greeting letter was inside. But the photo of me isn’t bad and I don’t think I screwed up my speech too much, so overall I think it’s going pretty well.

Being that it’s technically summer vacation for the students, my supervisor told me that I didn’t officially need to be at work. This carried a heavy overtone of “you should go to make a good impression,” though, so I trooped off to IJHS, one of two junior highs that I’ll be working at. I start at IJHS “officially” in September, but showing up today at 7:55 got a lot of “so serious!” and “what a good worker!” and “so dedicated!” comments so hopefully I’ve made a decent first impression.  However, I’ve also been told that I need to “take some time to get used to the town,” so I left at about quarter to one.

The tea lady of IJHS and one of the other teachers seem to be sort of taking me under their wing at this particular school. During lunchtime, a bigger number of teachers than I’ve seen in one building so far materialized out of nowhere and all came in to eat in the teacher’s room, and Tea Lady and the other teacher came and plopped themselves down right next to my desk and talked to me. I’d forgotten my lunch at home and had been planning to just leave early anyway, but both of these women pressed bits of fruit on me and were sharing their food, so... it would have been really rude to turn them down. Plus, Tea Lady told me that she practices kimono in her spare time, and invited me to lunch with her sometime (”maybe with my kimono practice group”). I’m going to try to get info about where she does kimono lessons so I can get in on the fun. 

I met all three English teachers at this school today, and since I definitely don’t want to use their names on the internet... I’m going to try to figure out nicknames for people. Anyway, the three of them all stopped by my desk (conveniently labeled “ALT”). The oldest one, who has really good English for a Japanese teacher, spent quite a while talking to me about Seattle, his time traveling the US during his study abroad in Wisconsin, a trip he took to Colorado with his kids recently, and politics. I’m learning more and more that people here want to talk about the election, if only to get some validation about the way Trump vs. Clinton has been presented in Japanese media. 

The other two English teachers said hi to me as they came in to eat their lunch. One of them is an older lady who seems really competent and assured -- obviously a veteran teacher -- and one of them is a slightly younger woman whose voice was so quiet I had to strain to hear her. I’ll see how the next month goes, and then figure out how I work with them in classes’ context, but they both seem nice enough so hopefully we’ll be able to get by. 

I left a little before one, with the excuse that I needed to get home to clean up my apartment a little and fetch photographs to print. I’ll be heading back to this particular school later in the week (going to the two elementary schools in the meantime). IJHS is the closest school to my apartment and I still almost collapsed from the heat before I got home, so for the sake of my dehydrated, non-heat-resistant body, I think I’m going to have to get a car soon. When I got home, I was in the process of changing clothes when the doorbell rang, and I’ve thus discovered that my walls are apparently thick enough to block the sound of me calling “Just a moment, please!” but not thick enough to block the sounds of footsteps or things being dropped upstairs. In any case, I now have a redelivery slip for a magazine and the knowledge that my post slot in the door is apparently too small to fit much more than a little envelope through. Japan doesn’t do “leaving things at the door” (given that my apartment’s front door is five steps from what might be the busiest road in my town, I guess this makes sense) so I had to figure out how to schedule redelivery online. Fingers crossed I got that right.