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It’s the afternoon after teaching four elementary school classes and I’m sitting at my desk with a two-dimensional snow leopard and its conspicuous expression staring back at me.  This cat, snow expectedly decorating its hide, is very sad inside, actually, because it lacks an Internet connection.

This is one of those schools where I only get to teach the fifth and sixth grades, because there are two sections of each so with my schedule it’s not practical to visit the other years.  However, I often have lunch with the lower grades and sometimes play with them during recess, and today was definitely one of those days.

At the tail end of lunch with one of the second grade classes, they swarmed me first asking to read all the English words and romanised Japanese on their shirts and school supplies, and then dragged me in a big mob to the front of the classroom so the friendly teacher could take a few photos.  At the beginning she had me sing “Happy Birthday” to the boy whose birthday it happened to be, and at the end I was lifting whole kids with all four appendages and giving some involuntary and voluntary rides across classrooms and hallways.  Then they all asked me to sign my name on various things, from notebooks to scraps of paper, to pieces of origami.

At recess it took the surprisingly ceremonious second grade organisers a long while to set up a game of dodgeball, and though I had opted to play soccer with the other masses they wouldn’t take no for an answer.  Most of the time was actually spent spinning the little fanboys and fangirls and giving them piggy-back rides.

It was all pretty tiring, but I wish they’d warmed up to me like this way earlier in my stay here!

The fifth and sixth grades respectively reached a new English study unit this week.  The fifth grade is studying rock-paper-scissors in English, Korean, and Chinese and counting from one to ten in six languages including the previous three plus Spanish, French, and Japanese for international perspective.  The sixth grade classes are studying months of the year and how to say when their birthday occurs.

Some classes are more enthused than others, and one teacher that I’ve worked with since last April really has the best control of his students. At first I didn’t think he really liked me, and the same goes for his wife at another school, but he’s actually a pretty nice guy who seems actually interested in making English work in his classroom.

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