Finishing teaching, off on my trip

Once again, I’ve been too busy to update. During the last 5 days I:
-had my Demachiya English class’s final presentation (by the way, they ended up paying me the full ¥50,000, not just the ¥25,000 I had feared. They’ve also offered to have me back next semester, and I think it will be a good addition to whatever more Japanese-involving job I get. One hour of teaching that earns me about as much as 6 or 7 hours of working some random minimum-wage job!)
-went out for dinner with my students
-got to spend just a couple of hours with Sawa’s mum while she was here in between all these things, where the two Matsueda women helped me pick out some new clothes, spurred by the fact that I was planning to make it through the summer with my one pair of shorts, which incidentally has a giant hole in the right pocket. I think if it weren’t for them or my own parents I would never buy any new clothes.
-went on a daytrip to a campground in Kuta with a another 8 or 9 Full House residents
-had my final basketball practice
-chatted with my Dad and three old Zumbyes on Skype
-finally decided to cancel me and Mike Kohl’s plan to tour Japan
-booked our trip to Mt. Fuji for next Tuesday
-had a shamisen lesson
-graded all my students’ final projects and handed back their final grades and comments
-called the NZ embassy and figured out the steps we need to take to sort out Sawa’s visa.
-wrote letters of recommendation for two students applying for the Nijima Scholarship (after Morita-sensei and I convinced Doshisha to advertise again for submissions while more clearly explaining the English test requirements).
-packed for the upcoming trip to: see my brother in Wakayama, go to Hakone with my mum and Sawa’s family, climb Mt. Fuji with my mum, my brother and Oli, hang out in Yokohama with Sawa’s family and then go to the Nebuta Matsuri way up in the north of Honshu.

As seems to always be the case, I am now catching up on all of this on the train, this one to Wakayama to hang out with my brother.

There’s been too much happening to recap everything, so I’ll just put up some cool photos and talk about a couple of cool/interesting things (to me anyway).

At this point, I’ve essentially just finished all of my formal obligations as the Fellow. I feel pretty good about the way I taught the class this time, and I feel like they started to get the idea of participating and in some of their final projects they actually did a really good job of writing interesting essays with good thesis statements and good use of specific examples to back up their argument. Of course, many of them still sucked, but I feel that even if just a few students get it, that’s a good thing. One student wrote this heartwarming little note at the end of her project:

Of course, she was probably just trying to grease me up for good grades, but it still made me feel great!

Incidentally, I largely followed up on my threat to fail students who didn’t start participating more in class. I ended up failing I think 9 students out of the 33. This semester writing down my policy at first and giving them especially harsh mid-term grades made me feel fine about following up with failures, and I think that’s an important lesson I’ll need to remember for future classes.

One thing I think I should have focused on more is pronunciation. I tried to work on it in our little games and told them to practice it for their final presentation, but I obviously needed to have a more explicit system of testing and grading their pronunciation, because no one really seemed to practice or improve much. For example, instead of telling them to memorize and practice the pronunciation of their final pronunciation (which made the few who actually put in preparation focus solely on memorization), I could have had a separate time where I gave them all a few sample sentences with difficult pronunciation, had them practice it and graded them all on their ability to pronounce them.

Also, in my English class, a similar thing focusing on them one by one might be good. Also, in the final class I had them play 20 questions and Celebrity, and those were great fun and good for them practicing English. Especially since I never know who will turn up on a given week, next semester I think it would be better to just play different games using English and not try to build much from lesson to lesson.

The dorm trip on Sunday was really a lot of fun.

We just happened to time it on the hottest day of the summer so far, so instead of roasting in Kyoto, we were up in the gorgeous mountains, jumping off of rocks and rope swings into the cool river, enjoying the non-humid but hot mountain air and hanging out in the shade at the campground while we had our lunch. It was a real blast, and much more the kind of trip that I liked than many other trips I’ve been on in Japan. It seems to me that when Japanese go on trips, they focus on seeing THE sights of a place and doing THE things you’re supposed to do there, which is great and all, but I prefer the idea of just going somewhere cool and kind of hanging around, goofing off and enjoying the situation, rather than feeling pressured to tick off all the sights to be seen and getting the obligatory pictures at each one.

Unfortunately, although I got heaps of photos of us jumping off rocks, they were all in multi-burst mode and I can’t figure out how to upload them properly, so this will have to suffice for now:

At the end of the trip, we had a ridiculous mad 25-minute dash with all this heavy equipment across this narrow mountain road to catch the bus, which we only just caught because Hayao had run on ahead and just barely managed to hold it for the last minute as we panted up the hill. This was also the last bus of the day. I still can’t believe we made it. I really enjoy those kinds of experiences though, they’re always so much more fun in retrospect than just a smooth trip that goes without a hitch.

One thing that I’m very glad to have decided on firmly now is to put me and Mike Kohl’s Japan trip idea on hold. I kept on vacillating back and forth on it for weeks, and I still feel really bad that I couldn’t commit to making it happen, but I think that realistically, trying to do it would put too much stress on me and Sawa’s final time in Japan and compromise my ability to complete a couple of things that are very important to me: ensuring me and Sawa get things set up for going to New Zealand, that we make the most of the time with her family before we go, and that I am able to use the last few months in Japan to really focus on my Japanese and pass this Japanese Proficiency Test. I really regret not being able to do the trip with Mike, but I think I would regret it more if I tried to push it, and I also want to make sure we do something along the same lines together in the future, whether in Japan or California or New Zealand or wherever.

Also, lately you might have noticed I haven’t been rambling on as much about my ideas about music and grad school in Canada. Partly it’s because I haven’t had any time to think or research about that, but also I’ve been thinking more and more about another possibility involving studying Japanese music at the graduate school of the Tokyo University of the Arts. Essentially, there’s a little bit of a trade-off between my work and family, but in the future rather than the present. What I am most excited about for my own career – this idea of studying music comparatively – and what would be the best for my future family – having some kind of professional specialty in Japan to allow me to potentially work in and out of Japan (not to mention forcing me to get my Japanese to the level where I could do academic work in Japan). It would be a shame to miss out on the opportunity to do the research with the Canadian guy, but I think in the long term it might be more important to have this Japan connection. Hopefully maybe after that’s done a spot in this guy’s lab might open up, or whatever. There are many different possibilities for the future. But anyway, I’m starting to lean towards this idea. If I can get it, the Japanese Ministry of Education offers scholarships for foreign students to come study there, which would be a really sweet deal. Maybe if I did that, me and Mike Kohl might get another chance to retry our Japan tour idea, and that time I’d have all the connections involved with going to the top music school in Japan!

OK, so that’s some of the most important happenings of late. To finish, I wanted to put in some of Sawa’s photos from the Gion Matsuri and from last month when we celebrated me and Jiiko’s birthday in the usual way – smearing cake all over each other’s faces. However, I don’t have time to upload any photos right now, so I’m just going to upload the text only and try to update the photos next chance I get.