First Visit of the New Year

Today I visited one of my special needs schools for the first time this term. Though I knew and was prepared for teacher changes at my base school, it still surprises me when visit schools have changed.

My old supervisor has been promoted to some kind of dean position, so I have a new supervisor who seems nice enough. But I got to school and my old supervisor said "Ah! I will introduce you to your new supervisor!" And I said "WHAT?! You're not my supervisor anymore?!"

See, Japan sucks at giving any kind of notice that your life will abruptly change.

Though I only teach at this school twice a month, I consider Old Supervisor to be one of my best friends here. I arrive each time around 9 AM and don't have class until 10:50, but each time we've just talked to fill the 2-hour gap. He's one of my favorite people. Now he sits only 3 seats away, but he's much busier. So I am sad.

At this school, I usually help teach a two senior high school classes of 3-5 students each in the morning before lunch. Then I eat lunch with a random class of kids who don't normally have English with me. They're always super excited to ask me questions about myself and about America, and they always prepare really hard before I come so that they can tell me their name in English

. It's adorable. After lunch, I teach a junior high school class of around 35 students who are amazing and adorable. Whenever they see me in the hallway they fight to be the first to run over and say "HELLO! How are you!" Even when they haven't seen me in a month and a half, they remember me. :) After that, I have class with one student, whose nickname is Kattan. I believe he has cerebal palsy, and he can neither move his body (minus his head) nor speak, but me and the JTE (and his personal aide, who is another awesome teacher) show him pictures and tell him about America.

I tell you all this to tell you that the English teacher I teach Kattan with was transferred to another school. So I am extra sad about that. One time, she gave me four People Magazine issues - in ENGLISH. English magazines are completely non-existent in Yamaguchi-ken, so this was awesome. Also, we both ag

ree that Robert Downey Jr. is the hottest man on Earth. So you can see why I am distraught about her departure.

But today was not all sad! We had a big opening ceremony where the first years great the older students. This was followed by a gym-wide game of True or False.

The last question was "Although we have many new teachers this year, one of them is a karate world champion. True or False?!"

After the votes were tallied, the announcing students said "(name)-sensei, please come out!"

And this world champion karate artist came out in full karate uniform and perfomed a karate routine to the wild cheers of the kids. Yamaguchi is sponsoring the national sports event in 2011 - of which Choruru (green haired dude on the left) is the mascot. So this karate champion is spending a year teaching karate at a Yamaguchi special needs school possibly because of the 2011 sports thing.

A note on Choruru: His name comes from the Yamaguchi dialect of Japanese. In standard Japanese, verb endings change to te-iru to indicate an ongoing action or state. Yamaguchians change te-iru to choru. So "doing" is normally Shi-te-iru. In Yamaguchi, it's Shi-choru. Thus, the mascot of Yamaguchi is Choruru. I think Yamaguchi dialect is freaking awesome, by the way. I choru as much as I can. :)