Where in the world is Keri hints

Hint 2:
This country is home to 1/10 of all animal species, which happens to include one of my favorite animals.

End of fall term and preparations for 冬休み

At the Japanese shrine prayer for nice healthy New Year for everyone.

                                  Probably also praying for it to not be so cold.
                                                       (P.C. Mom)

This past Wednesday I taught my last English class of the fall/winter trimester. In some ways I feel like this trimester has been the most successful yet from my time teaching here. I've been able to implement fun Western/American cultural activities and also participate in Japanese culture activities. Teachers and I are working well together which has me feeling really confident in class. However, I'm also extremely aware that in 3 months the Great Teacher Rotation/Musical Chairs:Teacher Edition will be taking place and therefore can not get too comfortable. The Japanese school system really does likes to keep you on your feet!
One of my favorite class activities that I did this trimester was teaching my students about Halloween and carving a proper American pumpkin in class! It was so cute to see how excited the kids were. They have never carved a pumpkin before let alone actually seen a pumpkin in real life. They were really impressed by the smell of the pumpkin and were in shock when I told them that the pumpkins we were carving would be considered relatively small by American standards of Halloween pumpkins. While we didn't learn/use much English during this class, it was a great way to teach my students a little more about me and to share some of my child hood memories.

The pumpkin that my 1st graders carved.

The pumpkin that my 2nd graders carved.

My most successful English class of this year may have been my last one, this past Wednesday.  In class we were reviewing the names of months and how to say numbers as dates (i.e. first vs. one). In our previous class together we had learned all of the months as well as the dates, and so this class we were just reviewing and applying the vocabulary to class activities to make sure that they retained the information and hopefully have it stored into the student's long-term memory. One of my greatest challenges with teaching this lesson was primarily in the students pronunciation. Many people think that pronunciation is a small/secondary trait in language acquisition. But as I have learned over the past year, if you do not correct them immediately they will continue to pronounce it wrong out of habit until it becomes so ingrained that teaching them the correct pronunciation is almost akin to teaching completely new words. And in some cases, the students cannot recognize the word when it is pronounced properly because they have become accustomed to remembering it with their own pronunciation or the katakana-ized version of English (that damn bastard language that defiles English learning in Japan; more on this in another post).
The problematic words for my students were months ending in ~ber and dates ending in ~th.. Instead of producing the brrrrrr sound my students would respond with a resounding baaaaa (i.e. Novem-ba, Septem-ba). And in the case of the "th" sound initially they would produce a suh sound,. like nineteen-suh and then they moved on to a ts .Nineteen-suh Ninteen-ts. So one of the goals I had set out for this final day of studying dates was to get my students to produce the TH sound. So as we started about with a quick run through of the dates and I made sure to over emphasize the th sound. December nineteenTTTH. To which my students cheerfully responded Decembaa Nineteents. I shake my head and say, listen carefully. NineteenTTTH not Ninteentsss. And I had them try again, to no avail. After a few more failed attempts I decided to switch my tactics and pronunciation a bit to see if it would produce closer results. So instead of emphasizing the (for lack of a better explanation) hissing sort of sound of th I changed it to a TH closer along the lines used when saying, The. And finally my students were able to produce a nineteen-th, twentie-th (they did over emphasize the TH sound, but at least it was a th and not a su or ts., so I can't really complain). Unfortunately, after moving on from review and into classroom application only a few of my students retained the newly learned information of saying TH and not ts or su. Which wasn't helped by the Japanese Homeroom Teacher whispering along fourtien(insert whatever date)-ts whenever the student would give answers during the activities. SMH. I'm still proud of my minor success.

In other news, I am getting ready to go on vacation for my winter break (冬休み）. I thought it might be fun to have a little trivia game for you to guess where I am going (if you don't know already). So throughout my vacation (whenever I have access to a computer or wireless #iphone) I will give you small hints either photos or random clues about my location. If I already told you where I am going don't ruin the fun!



Where in the World is Keri Going?
Hint 1: 
My travel time from Osaka, Japan to my winter vacation location (like that rhyme?) is a total of about 7 hours (not including the about 3 hour transfer wait time in Vietnam).

Updates and Pre-Christmas Fun

Hi guys! I've done and taken my GRE (Graduate Record Examination for those John Darlington's of the world who do not know what this is) and I said that I would write more often, so I am now attempting to make good on that word. My scores turned out pretty good, I wish I had done a bit better on the quantatative section but considering my track record with math, I am fairly satisfied with my score. Writing was on par, which was a relief since I don't usually do particularly well with writing in a limited time frame. But I am a little bummed with the score I got on the verbal section, not that I didn't score above average (because I did- sorry I have to flaunt it a little, primarily because my math score is so NOT above average) but because I scored 1 point (I emphasize, ONE POINT) below the score that is required (in conjunction with uGPA) to receive a 10,000$/yr academic scholarship from one of my top choice schools. And after a bit of thinking, I decided that 10,000$ is a lot of money so it looks like this kid is going to be attempting the GRE again in a couple months to bump that verbal score at least 1 pt. to score some academic $$$. Fingers are crossed (I'm also secretly hoping to get my quant score up as well, but really my primary focus this time around is going to be on verbal).

Anyway, I assumed that after the GRE my life would become a little more settled and that I could get back into blogging again regularly. However, based on the lack of blog posts I think it is safe to assume that you can tell just how busy I have been.

Last year I thought that signing up for a second year would mean that there would be more down time because i had already prepared so many materials for class lessons that I could essentially recycle them; less work and more free time. WRONG-O! This year I have become more acutely aware of ways that I can improve upon my lessons from last year to a) make them more practical/useful for studying English and b) to make them more fun (my students are really receptive on this point). And so now a lot of my down time at the office is used to pour over my old lessons and see what ways I can make them better. Sometimes it is an easy fix, simplify the grammar and make it more interactive, whereas other times it requires completely stripping down the lesson and starting again from the ground up.. As tiring as it can be sometimes, it is always worth it to see the students enjoy the hardwork I've put in and even more exciting when I can really see how much their English is improving (little by little, but still).

Other reasons why this year has been more taxing on my social and blogging life is because I have become a fixture at a lot of the community events around Oshima that are held outside of school hours. For example, the Halloween festivities that I planned during October, community English classes, occasional pen-pal writing activities, and whatever odd festival/event that is held around here that the organizers figure will be more interesting if the token foreigner was there.

The latest community event that I have been asked to be a participant in was Towa's (the town (village/hamlet/small community I live in) Christmas Event. At this event Crystal (the other English teacher in Towa) and I were asked to prepare some Christmas activities and read a Christmas story.   So in preparation I spent the week leading up to the Christmas party building a large scale Rudolph to play pin the nose on the reindeer (complete with magnetic Rudolph noses) and scoring through the few English Christmas books that Yamaguchi City public library had on reserve (I ended up choosing The Polar Express). And Crsytal led a Jingle Bells sing-a-long complete with improvised dance moves.
After our segment was done we got to listen to some Christmas stories told in Japanese and participate in the main event of the Christmas party, Mochi Pounding!!!!

This was the first time I have ever participated in making mochi from pounded rice, so it was really exciting. And since my students were really eager to do all of the pounding, it wasn't too much effort on my part! ;) I did help smashing the mochi up a bit, but the kids definitely did the brunt of the work. My students also taught me how to make kinako by grinding soy beans with an old Japanese style mortar and pestle. It was really cool to spend time with my students and having them teach me things about their culture and me sharing a bit about mine.

I intended to post a bit more, but if I don't post this now I fear it will never get posted. Nearly a week had already passed since I started this post. I may add photos later if I have time. We'll see.

Until Next Time!
Keri