The teacher’s room is pretty quiet these days with the second year teachers gone to Hokkaido on the school trip. All of the second year students are on the trip, the third years are on mandatory vacation, and so it’s just the first year teachers and students running around.
Today was the first day of spring (or so I’m told), and so there are some Japanese customs that were brought to my attention. The first one I found out about when the cafeteria staff gave me a small packet of beans with my lunch. They were packaged like snacks, with the head of a devil on the wrapper.
I took them in to Mr. Hayashi, and he says that the beans are considered good luck to eat. Apparently tradition is to throw the beans (inside the kitchen, I guess). After you throw the beans you collect them and eat them. You are also supposed to eat one bean for each year that you’ve been around. Mr. Hayashi and Mr. Komuri both joked that there weren’t enough beans around to do that one.
Another tradition that Mr. Hayashi mentioned was that you are supposed to eat a sushi roll while facing south. I thought that was an interesting one – so I said that I would stop in for sushi on the way home. I guess the tradition is popular, because two supermarkets I went to were cleaned out of sushi. They had stuff to make sushi, but I bought some Chinese rolls and ate them facing north in my apartment.
After one of my classes today I was reading the journals from the students. One mentioned that he broke his foot over vacation. Later on he mentioned that he went to visit his aunt in the hospital. I marked on his paper that it sounded like he had a rough winter vacation. Two papers later, another student wrote that he broke his foot, and visited his aunt in the hospital. The next paper also said the same thing. Not the smartest thing to write about if you are going to cheat.
I consulted with Mr. Kimura, and he said to give them all zeroes, and so I wrote a note saying that it isn’t nice to copy, and it’s definitely not good to loan out your paper for others to copy. I put the notebooks out to be delivered back to the homerooms, and within an hour I had a pissed off student complaining in Japanese to Mr. Kimura. Apparently he was the one who wrote the story originally, and so he didn’t understand why he got a zero. Mr. Kimura explained the whole situation to him, and said that if he wrote about something else he could turn it in again tomorrow. The other two guys had to eat the zero.
I was kind of surprised that the kid had the nerve to come down and complain about getting a zero. He’s admitting that he lent out his paper for his buddies – and in my book that’s just as bad as copying initially.
Tonight I cooked up kim-chee ramen, and did some audio editing and burning for my next lesson on music. The lesson will either be the coolest lesson I’ve done so far or a spectacular flop. I’m trying to inject some variety into the class, and get the students thinking up spontaneous things in English.
Tomorrow is just two lessons, so I should have plenty of time to dream up lessons for the second year students.
