English camp

I meant to write about this and finish my post about Fuji as soon as I came back from English camp, but Cardcaptor Sakura came on TV, and that was followed by two episodes of Ouran High School Host Club and well...

At least I got the laundry done that night, I suppose. That's important, right? Right now, I'm supposed to be packing for my trip and cleaning up my house, lest my house become a cockroach-infested hell hole similar to houses left alone in Animal Crossing for too long. Nobody wants that. Or I could be practicing my presentation for that. That seems like it would be a good idea. Or, rehearsing for this impromptu English lesson I'm doing for 10 JHS students and 2 adults who are visiting Troy, Ohio (how random!). Our former Japanese Prefectural Advisor who moved to Takahashi, asked me to do it. So I'm doing it, cause I'm a nice person. For free. Or well, I'm going to make him buy me a drink (or two) later since technically we're not allowed to have alternate sources of income. Yeah though, a 55 minute English session/lesson on self-intros and shopping phrases. No idea what level their English is at. Never worked with a group this small. I guess worse comes to worse, we can play a game...? But - small rant here - the class goes from 5-6:30, and then, on top of that, I'm going to the Japanese culture class (originally, it was billed to me as a Japanese language class "for beginners" which turned out to be complete BULL) that starts at 7 and goes until 8:30. Then I'm going to watch Harry Potter 7.2 with one of the JETs who's leaving... at the 9:40 showing. Gets out after midnight. Work Friday is in Niimi. No classes, but gotta leave at 7 instead of 8. On top of this, he was saying that, should we need more time for the English stuff, we can just extend the time into the 30 minutes between classes... so I can stay later and answer questions! I might have to put my foot down and say "No, that's the time I was planning to eat dinner," because, well, I was planning on eating dinner since I'm going directly from school to the class, and then from class to class, and then from class to train to movie theater and we all know how expensive movie theater food is. /end rant. Yay for a full day and very little time to pack.

I should also probably be studying Japanese, since I can never do enough of that. ~_~

But instead of doing these more productive things, I choose to work on writing blog posts. Very smart of me, I know. But as long as it gets done in the end... right? Actually. I'll probably write half of this wednesday night, and half thursday while I'm at work (cause lord knows I've got nothing else to do...).

I'm... excited, I suppose you can say, for today.

Last Thursday and Friday, I was at an English camp for a junior high school in Okayama, where one of my friends and fellow JETs is an ALT at. It was a huge English camp - 3 classes of students for a total of around 120 students. Trying to speak only English for two days. 3rd year junior high school, no less. Granted, this was a special junior high school (I keep wanting to say middle school) that they had to test to get into - though, they get automatic acceptance into the high school that's attached. Basically, instead of taking an entrance exam for senior high school, they took it instead for junior high school. Either way. They did superbly, as I almost forgot that I was in Japan! They were all fantastic kids and really enthusiastic and good at speaking English. I had to speak a little bit in teacher English, but I didn't need to modify it nearly as much as I normally do. It makes me feel like a bad parent. I wanted to steal these kids and make them my students lol. My students are lovely, don't get me wrong, but their English level is just... wow.

I'm sure though, it'd be a completely different experience. Oh city kids. :)

One of my teachers at school is wearing sandals WITHOUT SOCKS. I applaud his fashion choice, since I feel less bad about not wearing tights or socks with my own shoes and occasionally taking my shoes off. Seriously though, he's the first person I've seen do that in all 4.5 of my schools.

Anyways.

Since the English camp was for an Okayama JHS, I got the pleasure of (leisurely) taking the train in to Okayama, and then caught a bus that drove for 40 minutes to a place that was probably between 10-20 minutes from where I live. Yay lots of traveling. Amusingly enough, both of the guys I was walking to the bus station with (one I randomly bumped into at the station) had both forgotten that we were supposed to bring our own lunch, which resulted in both of them scrambling to buy food for lunch before we walked to the bus station. Which almost made us late. It's a good thing the bus came later too! It gave us time to cool down and question if we had come to the right bus stop, which involved several people pulling out the directions and double/triple checking - and we were at the right place, they just probably told us to get there early so they wouldn't have to worry about late people.

The bus ride over was fun; we sat in the middle seats (they fold out) and we chatted with the kids - most of my conversation was dominated by music and manga (specifically One Piece). We did however, exchange jokes and tongue twisters with some of the students. I found that it was incredibly... hard, to come up with jokes that weren't slightly racist, appropriate, blonde jokes, or dead baby jokes.

I think we managed to come up with two or three knock knock jokes, and the chi-chi-chi-chichi monkey joke. That was it though. I later recreated this conversation with a couple of other ALTs (1 other californian and 3 brits) and we managed to come up with awful yo' momma jokes and blonde jokes and I figured out that I'm really really BAD at telling jokes. I think I botched the interrupting cow joke... three times. The first time I forgot to say it. The second time I said it too late. There was no actual third time. But we also started talking about awful pick up lines... and well, that's a story for another day.

It was silly though, because I wrote a paper about this exact topic - (appropriate) jokes, more specifically, puns - in one of my college classes. You'd think I'd remember at least one!

So... in the staff room is a very bad place to look for amazing puns, as I have just found out.

I like this site for
This body doesn't dance. Not well anyways. And not without copious amounts of alcohol. Then maybe. But I'm a very not-well-coordinated person, and their ALT happened to be a particularly good dancer.

So yeaaahhh. It was almost alright. They were doing Poker Face. I haven't even seen the video for that and I was like... wat. Actually, I would have been slightly more willing to make a fool of myself (more than I had anyways) had I known that there was little chance of seeing anyone in that room ever again. I mean, realistically, the one person in the room whom I knew (a fellow JET) was going to be leaving for the US and not doing a second year, but he's also one of the ALTs whom I counted as a friend (albeit however infrequently we saw each other) and one of the nicest guys in the prefecture. Not bad looking either, everyone agreed. So having to dance like Lady Gaga in front of him of all people was like auuuuuuuuugh. Slow painful death. Dancing in front of anyone I knew, really, would have been a slow and painful death.

In the end, I put on my pair of huge sunglasses (they lended well to the costume aka, the bright "wig" of multicolored paper strips I wore) which made it much harder to see, and kind of tried to forget where I was and just... danced. Probably awfully.

To make matters even more embarrassing, when I went to sit down afterwards, I actually missed my chair completely and sat down hard on the floor. Like you know when people pull out the chair from underneath you? It was like that. Except nobody pulled out the chair (I think). SO EMBARRASSING.

I felt like such a bad supervisor, because while I did want my group to do well and win... winning meant that we'd have to do it again. In front of EVERYONE. So part of me really didn't want to win. I'm a bad supervisor. ._.;

The rest of the skits were really amazing though. Everyone worked really hard on their skits, and the content of all of them were amazing. AND they memorized their whole skit! Can you say wow?

The second day, they had to give a presentation on something from Japanese culture, and again, I was highly impressed. One kid brought her koto and played for us (twice, since she ended up going twice). It was absolutely beautiful. The kids in my group did different things, from yukata to Japanese new years, to that top spinny toy and sushi and washoku. It was fun; I got to pick the brains of the washoku kid after, and it's one topic I love asking them about.

Speaking of food, this was the best camp food I've had. It was "viking style" which is essentially buffet - you can take what and however much you want. One meal we had pineapple slices and one kid - no joke - took 20 slices of pineapple. The boys could eat an amazing amount. I could only sit there in awe as I at my green veggies probably soaked in butter and stir fried. But seriously, the food there is really really good.

Parting was sad, in the end. Even though this was a short camp, the kids were all super friendly and nice, and eager (generally) to speak English. It also made me wonder if I'll actually have students recognizing me when I go in to Okayama now! I only see my students there sometimes (for which I'm kind of grateful, since it avoids the whole BOYFRIEND?!?!?!? question).

But yeah. Despite having to miss a couple classes at my schools and it being at an inconvenient time, I had a lot of fun. Hopefully next year I'll be able to go again!