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Kesa maiasa  Exciting things have been afoot regarding my summer Japanese cultural program. Quite contrary to expectations, it seems we will have enough students for grant funding after all. Here's what happened: A few weeks ago, I had submitted a line item about the program to our school district newsletter, which goes out to all district employees once a week. I had forgotten about doing this, until early this week I started getting parent phone calls and emails again asking if they could still sign their kids up. I said sure! and ended up with a total of 17 kids (counting the ones I had already signed up earlier). One of them can only come for the second of the two weeks, but that is still more than 15 minimum. Two of these kids are even (half?-)Japanese, a brother and a sister whose mom at least has a Japanese first and last name. So having talked with my principal, I guess we are back on board with grant money, such that Julie the English teacher and I may yet get paid for running this two-week session. Then I was thinking about how to divide the work between the two of us, since I don't want to just be the one talking all the time and treat Julie like one of the students - she's studied Japanese before, in college, and I wanted to let her contribute, but how? I decided to be audacious. I will do total immersion. I will only address the students in Japanese (with gestures and drawings and pantomime, oh my) and Julie will address them in English. It's perfect, really, because it's only for two weeks and there is another adult present who will be speaking to them in English. I don't see how the kids could possibly freak out under those circumstances. I have had little success doing total or even partial immersion with Japanese during the school year, just because it's such a non-Western language and has so little in common with English. And I don't flatter myself to think that I could single-handedly re-create the delicate immersion environment that is Concordia Language Villages, where after all the kids sleep, eat, and breathe the language 24 hours a day. This program will be 3 hours a day, and we will just have to see what we can do with it. Julie and I have already mapped out certain activities, like origami and calligraphy and songs and dances and a few movies. The kids will have Japanese names, as they do at Mori no Ike and as they do during my regular (during-the-school-year) Japanese classes too. But I think now that I have finally made the decision, what I'm most excited about is the total immersion concept. I know it's still not "total," because Julie will be their English-speaking security blanket. It will be like the JET program in reverse, where I used to speak all English to the Japanese kids and their native speaking teacher would explain things to them in Japanese. Perhaps it will also be a little like what many people do who are raising children bilingually, where one parent speaks to them in each language. Wish us luck - we start Monday. First order of business: putting chairs and tables back into a room that has been cleared for summer floor waxing. Second order of business: welcome the kids! Current mood:  excited.
Yesterday my principal finally responded to my emailed questions about whether I would still be allowed to run my summer Japanese cultural program even if not enough students had signed up for the grant funding - I would just teach it without pay, the better to keep me occupied for two weeks instead of tearing my hair out with boredom. She said, yes, we can run it for free without grant money. Nine students are signed up, which is definitely not 15 (the minimum for grant money), but it's a good number for a mini-summer-camp sort of thing nonetheless. Classes and "families" at Concordia Language Villages may often have eight or nine kids in them. And my co-instructor (an English teacher who took some Japanese in college) is willing to continue to participate even though she won't get paid either. So as of next Monday, there will be a little more structure in my summer life, and a time by which to be showered, dressed, and out the door again. Yay! And thanks to the ever-wonderful Aya Ibarra at the Japan Society, there will be a guest teacher who will come to the school and teach us bon-odori. Aya found her at the San Diego Japanese Buddhist Temple, which so happens to be having their bon festival right after our two-week session ends, so if any of the students want to go, it would be a good connection for them. (I just can't officially promote it to them because it's in a religious setting, and we are a public school.) I do always like talking to Mexican students about O-Bon, because it has so many similarities with the Mexican Dia de los Muertos, and there is usually an "aha" moment of "oh, those exotic Japanese aren't really so different from us after all." In other non-related news, yesterday amberdisa and eowyns finally got me to visit their tai chi studio, Jing Martial Arts in Mira Mesa. I have been peripherally interested in learning more about tai chi since at least my undergrad years in Madison, but I never did anything about it until now. Learning "how to walk" was a little weird because I had to unlearn some habits from yoga. Specifically, when going forward, you don't raise your back heel off the ground, which I was somehow doing at every step because it reminded me of the position of my back foot in crescent warrior pose.I told the instructors that I had never studied any kind of martial art before, which is true, but that I had done yoga, and they seemed to think that was a good thing. I still feel weird about it being a martial art, because I certainly don't want to fight anybody. But amberdisa says the reason she likes tai chi is because it's meditative, and I'm cool wit dat. In any case, I paid for a week's trial - during which I could theoretically go to the studio every single day, but I won't be doing so because I have evening plans like every day this week. So I'll be going there Friday morning, for the only weekday class that is held during the day.
Current mood: calm.
I am reading an interesting book now (call it Japanese-teacher summer reading) called Dogs and Demons: Tales from the Dark Side of Japan. So far (I'm only in chapter 2), the author, Alex Kerr, has talked a lot about the environment and how little the Japanese national, prefectural, and local government does to protect it. This reminded me of a poem I had written during my year on the JET program, after being upset by seeing so much litter when I was out walking in Chiba City. Here it is: ( Discarded aluminum cans, all colors of the rainbow ) Current mood:  thoughtful.
As I've mentioned before, I don't do well with a lack of structure and schedule to my life. Sitting here with the weeks and months of summer still looming - knowing that I haven't got a summer job, and my two-week Japanese cultural program may not happen either, due to lack of student interest - I need to break this down for my So let's see, as of today, there are nine weeks left until school starts again. During that time, I have (at least) the following events to look forward to:
Even in addition to these plans, I needn't be completely idle and bored here at home. I finally seem to have gotten the kinks out of my plans to exchange lessons this summer: One of my students is tutoring me in Spanish while I edit his creative writing, and another (now graduated) student has agreed to teach me guitar while I continue teaching him Japanese. (Although this is not enough lessons for me to "keep up with the Joneses": A fellow Japanese teacher in the North County recently told me that this summer, she is taking classes in yoga, golf, tennis, and jazz piano. I do, however, like to think I'm getting the better deal, as my lessons are "free" (or rather, bartered) and from people I already know and like.) Current mood:  bouncy.
My computer has never been much good; it came with Windows Vista installed when I bought it about two years ago. Lately it has gone swiftly downhill, taking forever to do something as simple as open Firefox. It crashes all the time and does weird things like close Firefox windows I didn't tell it to close. I regularly defrag it and run Spybot Search & Destroy (which invariably always comes up with some spyware that is running without my authorization in the background). I desperately need some help. What can I do? Download a patch for Windows Vista, or kill it entirely and find a way to install Windows XP? I don't have a lot of money to spend on software, is the problem. I don't know the first thing about running a machine on Linux, but if that is the best suggestion, I will try to learn. My main concern is to continue to have access to all the Word documents and photos that are saved on my hard drive. Current mood:  irate.
Inspired in part by scout1222, I decided to try my scanner on some of my most treasured old photos. These show my progression from babe-in-arms up through driving my first car. They also include the few, rare photos of my whole family of four (including me, Bryan, and both parents) even despite the divorce.( I hope you are amused by them ) Hmm, I wonder if I can use any of these for the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} photoschallenge this week. The problem is, most of them show places and things back in Germany, and I can't go back there right now to take updated pictures of those places and things as of 2009 ...EDIT: Actually, I see how can make this work for photoschallenge. I just have to put up some pictures of these people (me, Bryan, Mom, Vati, ...) today for comparison, even if they weren't taken in Germany.
Current mood: nostalgic.
I am currently trying very unsuccessfully to add this gadget to a website I'm making for school. At least let's see if it will display here. Current mood: frustrated.
As many of you know, I do NOT do well with having an open, unstructured schedule. Erik says I'm like a deep-sea creature that explodes if brought up out of the depths, because its body is adapted to be under high pressure all the time. Even though I got really exhausted and disgruntled towards the end of my Master's program, what with the working full-time and going to grad school part-time, it jibes with my personality that I was doing that much stuff at one time. So now it's summer vacation, and since my summer teaching plans fell through, I am at home, trying to entertain myself. I have made a gigantic list of interesting and productive things with which to occupy my mind - but the problem, as it always is with summer vacations, is motivating myself to do these things and do them consistently. Last week I was really productive: I spent two days organizing all my classroom materials and putting them away, then ran errands for the rest of the week like requesting my official transcripts from SDSU and getting my car smog-checked and re-registered. But that was last week. Today, I realized another problem I have is social withdrawal. During the school year, in a given day I would see and interact with 70 or so students, not counting coworkers and other adults. Today, I've sat at home and interacted with people only sparsely through email and phone conversations. It really is starting to bother me, particularly because I know I won't get to interact with Erik tonight because it's Monday and he will be at his role-playing game. There are, of course, solutions. I'm exploring my options to join a new yoga studio now that I've chosen to no longer go to the recreation center at SDSU. I have arrangements with not one, but two of my students to have a summer lesson exchange: one will teach me Spanish while I edit his creative writing, and one will teach me guitar while I give him further Japanese lessons. The first was supposed to come over today, but had a family medical emergency, so that is why I haven't actually interacted with anyone in person. All right, enough introspective navel-gazing for now. I'm gonna put on some shoes and go out for a walk. Current mood: determined. This is the newest video of theirs that I've seen: A send-up of all the songs in the world that they hate. Medley from Riki Lindhome on Vimeo. Current mood: amused.
School's out for summer. I have stayed up this late just getting all my grades calculated, finalized, double-checked, and entered. Now I am done. Today my students and I made and ate rice balls at school again. Not a first, but a fun and cozy way to finish out the school year. My favorite student stayed home from his own graduation, disappointing me as well as pissing me off. But he has to stay in touch with me, at least long enough to finish reading the book I lent him and get it back to me. Tomorrow I go back and clean out my classroom for summer vacation. The objective is to leave some of my stuff at school, rather than bring all of it home like in previous years, especially because I'm going to offer a two-week summer Japanese culture program in July. One can only hope next school year will not find me in such a horrid, cramped, hot, windowless basement classroom without enough desks and chairs for everybody. Nothing is finalized yet for next year, so I will have to be patient and wait to find out what the administration is doing about classroom assignments. More people are leaving our school than I thought. Just found out today another one of the English teachers has bailed. Must sleep now. Current mood:  exhausted.
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