So yesterday was my first official school visit and we visited the local middle school. It's near the main guest house where I would practice my poi outside when kids were walking to or from school and the majority of the people walking past were middle schoolers and the majority of the people who said hi to me were middle schoolers. They seem like a fun crowd.
So we were each given name tags with our names, country of origin, and a little bit about us on them. This is the little intro on my card says "I keep many animals such as cattle, goats,sheep, etc in my garden. I am studying biology at university." When you think about it it's a little odd to walk around with such information on a note card hanging around your neck but I don't know a lot of Japanese so it's useful I guess. Anyway, when we walked up to the school there were some kids sticking their heads out the window and waving at us so I waved back since that's fun. Once we got into the building a boy stuck his head out his classroom door and waved at us again so I waved back at him. In general a lot of kids looked at us and waved. We were given a tour around the school a bit then divided into groups and picked classrooms. I was paired with Lion boy, an 18 year old from the UK who speaks pretty good Japanese. We were in class 2A and the lessons we were there for were English and Japanese.
The first class was English and they had a quiz on proper use of must and must not so me and Lion boy just sat in the back and waited for them to finish. After that they played some weird board game where they would have to make sentences and it was confusing to Lion boy and I and English is our first language. Anyway, we each got assigned a group and Lion boy would do his sentences in Japanese but I just did mine in English and helped the kids with words and said random stuff in Japanese. In all honesty the teacher spoke more Japanese to me than she did to the kids and I get the feeling her Japanese is worse than mine.
Anyway, the break was the fun part. Random kids from other classes came to say hi to us and the kids ran around and were otherwise entertaining. Four boys came up to us and the one with the best English said "we're bros" in his cute Japanese accent. I've actually seen this guy before and he was the only kid to say something to me besides good morning or hello to me when I was practicing poi. My Japanese is limited so I couldn't really talk to them but Lion boy could. At some point one of the boys pointed at us and asked "couple?" and once we realized what he was asking both of us told him no ("iie! iie! iie!"). However, two other boys also asked, one even going so far as to ask us individually. I wanted to say I've only known Lion boy for four days but I don't have the language skills for that, so then I tried to say we are from different countries, and after failing at that I just held up my note card for them to read and Lion boy did the same.
Japanese lesson was poetry so they did some poetry reading and then had to write a tanka, which is five syllables, then seven, then five, then two lines of seven. I don't have the language skills to write something on a topic like summer, but Lion boy wrote a simple poem that was pretty good in my opinion. The teacher actually read it to the class and everyone clapped and cheered. It was really cool but made me sad that I couldn't interact with the kids very well. Now I'm even more motivated to learn how to speak Japanese.
So that was my first experience visiting a school! We will visit more schools throughout the week so I'll have more experiences to write about soon.
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