Catch-up
There’s a rice field just outside of my apartment, and when I last posted the plants just barely peaked out of the pool of water, so little that you could still see the clouds and surrounding buildings reflected in the fields. The rice is knee-high now, which means the summer has passed without writing about it. My apologies to those still reading, all five of you. To get caught up, here’s a clusterblog to explain my hiatus.
I did a fair share of traveling in May in June,
first to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing for Golden Week (the Japanese Spring Break). This was a whirlwind tour of China, not for the weak-minded, requiring minimal sleep, counting in two new languages, and using every available form of transportation at our discretion (bikes in Shanghai, a mountain ascending tram in Hong Kong, an overnight train to Beijing, and a sled down the Great Wall). It wasn’t made any easier with the beginning of the swine flu media scare right as we left.
This was the last big trip for Tara and I, my fellow English teacher and all-time best traveling companion. It took us both two weeks to recover from the lack of sleep and some ill-fortuned gyouza (and we laughed when pork was being recalled after the swine flu panic).
Meanwhile in the schools, teachers were hosting Dr. Constance Kamii from UAB for a month of professional development. Each school studied children playing the games Guess Who, Blink, and Mancala to look at the development of logical reasoning in children. There were also several outdoor activities while the weather was still nice.At one school, we took a bus to the Fukuyama zoo. At another, we spent the day at the park and had a picnic. In May, we planted rice in mud fields, and lots of flowers to keep around the school.
Then in June, I came back to America to visit friends, family, and a couple conferences in Long Island, Princeton, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Columbia. Highlights include a day trip to Philadelphia (pictured), going to the zoo with my niece and sister, 4th of July barbecue with the family, disco party in Birmingham with friends, and getting to share our eye-movement study with other researchers.
At the WLU conference, 5 former and current English teachers and 5 Japanese principals reunited for the week, including a presentation of our eye movement research with nursery school students. We also relived our infamous night of salsa dancing in Brisbane last year (where we first discovered that our Japanese colleagues, serious principals by day, turned into “dancing machines” at the sound of a conga) in the one salsa club in Columbia, South Carolina. There’s something in the rhythm, I guess, that allows for a year’s worth of repressed emotion to erupt on a dance floor, so much that the owner of the club pointed out one of our most spirited principals and said, “Now this one here knows how to have fun!”
And back in Japan, I’ve returned to the things I remember from when I first came: children catching cicadas, fireworks festivals, and practicing the stilts for this year’s sports festival. This time around, though, I can understand more of what the children are saying to me and others, filling some large gaps of understanding I had the last year. I hope that this year will be spent getting to know the children and teachers better, studying more Japanese and seeing more of the country, and getting more of it written down. Here’s to the new school year!
