A trip to Gotemba

On the second day of school, I came to go on a trip to Gotemba. It’s an area that I’ve been to before with 9th graders, but this time I was going with my 11th graders. Today I really started to fee like a full-time teacher. I had to get up around 4:30am to be able to get to school on time. I took the bus instead of walking since I didn’t want to carry all my crap while I was walking to the train station. It’s so hard to do all that in a suit when it’s very hot out. I was fortunate that I arrived to school on time and I almost arrived late. I really didn’t get much of a chance to relax when I got there because I had to get the students ready to leave. I had to help a student who had injured her leg playing basketball. So I helped her with her luggage at first and we took off to meet at Meguro Dori.

That’s where all the buses were waiting for us. There were 4 buses for our classes, and I was riding in the first one with the VP. It wasn’t so bad because everyone was a bit sleepy so no one really talked to me, although they did talk to me a little in Japanese. It’s also a tough situation since I pretend that I don’t understand Japanese so that the students would speak English to me, but I know that when you lie, it’ll always come back to haunt you. So my boss always talks to me in Japanese, mainly because she can’t speak English, so I really can’t do anything about that. But the rest of the bus ride there was pretty good. It was really windy and rainy in the area because of the 14th typhoon of the season.

The wind was blowing very hard and the rain was falling down very hard too. It was probably the hardest that I’ve seen rain fall. We were stuck in the auditorium for a little while as we were briefed on the days’ activities and for the trip itself. They had some rules to go over with the students and then we went to our rooms when we found a chance to go. There was like a 10 minute gap of light rain that all the students just took off running to get to their dorm rooms. The teachers, meanwhile, had to get to the cabin and unload a lot of the stuff in the van so we could get ready for the events during the trip. At this time of course, it started raining a little bit harder. I’m glad that I bought new pants for the trip because they repelled water better and I wasn’t too soaked, although my shoes didn’t handle it as well. We were pretty lucky because we had an hour to get ready and just relax for a little bit as the rain was falling. It messed up the schedule for a little bit and we didn’t have an orientation, so the male teachers just watched a little bit of Fuji TV.

The next thing was lunch at the cafeteria. It’s always difficult at this point because the teachers eat last and must finish relatively first. We need to be finished before a majority of the students finish so we could rush them and to tell them what’s next on the agenda. Since the schedule changed so much already, and even though we just arrived, the students didn’t know what was going on, but me either. The next thing was a practice of their Sports Festival dance in the Gym. It was supposed to be on the grassy area next to the tennis courts but because it was raining very hard, we went into the gym. It was pretty interesting how they are taught their dance. I saw it last year and it was pretty impressive. But to watch it being taught to all 144 students at the same time is more interesting. I always imagined that it would be pretty difficult to teach that many students at the same time.

This took a few hours and then it was my turn. I was going to teach all of the students for an English class. I had many ideas that were turned down and I wanted to do something that was pretty impressive for the students and the teachers. I had designed it so many times and to test out how it would work out best.

So I decided to play the game where the students would have to make up clues and the other students needed to listen to the clues and write down the answer. I had a list of the answers for them and the topic was landmarks around the world. It was probably very difficult for them since I don’t think that their geography is up to par. But as I found out, they were pretty good and knew their stuff. They all made their clues very clear. The tricky part about it was that they needed to make clues using vocabulary that I had in a list of 150 words. The point was to get them to think of how to use certain vocabulary to express a certain point. I think that I achieved that, but it wasn’t as exciting as the trip I took with the 9th grade, but I did fulfill all the requirements for the 11th grade. They needed something challenging that got them to think and something to prepare them for the entrance exam, without being a game. After that we had to clean up the facilities a bit more since the typhoon finished during this long process. It ate up into the time for the next activity because we couldn’t do the outside activity due to rain.

The next item of the agenda was to get ready for dinner. After dinner would be a forum and a debate. The debate was on a few topics and different groups would have to argue something and how they thought stem cells and something else. I don’t remember now. Then the students took their time to take a shower. It had to be quick since there were so many of them and the other teachers got ready for the meeting at night. It ended pretty early and I took a shower first. Then the male teachers stayed up later to watch some TV and talk.