Today we had lots of hushed whispers around the office, culminating in a mandatory meeting in between classes – something usually reserved for natural disasters and typhoons.
The gist, which I only understood through other teachers later was that there was a chance that some of our teachers were planning a strike tomorrow, and that we were all required to be at school from 8 a.m. until 9:30 a.m., without exception. No ducking out to the convienence store, no runs to the bank. The striking teachers are supposed to skip the first period only to show their power. Apparently the union is somehow strongly influenced by the Communist party in Japan, which is more powerful and less evil than you might expect.
Anyway, I know a couple of teachers that are in a union, although apparently there is more than one. I’m not sure exactly what will happen tomorrow, but everyone was jumpy today about it.
I had a great class with Maeda sensei today. Last week I had tasked the students with developing a TV commercial to perform in front of the class and video cameras today. I was a little worried about it, I had said that they could use both Japanese and English, and I was afraid that all the commercials would end up being in Japanese mainly. As it turned out, there was very little Japanese.
The first group came up with the cameras rolling, and they put on a great 1 minute commercial. Everybody else in the class was a little shocked – I don’t think that they had expected anything quite so good. From there on it just kept getting better. The students that didn’t really practice or study turned out to be a minority – just two groups. They crashed and burned, and since I had all the students evaluating each other it was nice to see the students noticed who studied and who didn’t.
I couldn’t be happier with how the commericals went, and if I can figure out how to get the commericals from the video camera onto a computer, I’ll try to post some of the good ones here. For a two class project it turned out really well, and it makes me want to try more elaborate stuff in the future.
After school today I had the third year students come over to our house for a conversation lesson. We sat and talked about the upcoming Valentine’s Day, about Hokkaido, and about what they did last month. It was fun to chat with them. During the lesson the doorbell rang, and an ex-co-worker of Kuniko’s dropped off a wedding present for us – some artwork by a local artist. He didn’t stick around, though, and it was probably good since I had at least one of his students sitting in the living room.
Kuniko showed up soon after just as we finished the lesson, and once we ushered the girls out the door she cooked up a big stir-fry dinner. We did some shopping at Ito Yokado afterwards, and now I’m headed to bed. Tomorrow will be either a very interesting morning, or completely normal.
