This is Only a Test

Sorry, folks, no blog to speak of now.  There are plenty of issues going down (nothing quite as substantive as the last few posts), but at the moment we at Gaijin HQ are driving ourselves crazy preparing for the JLPT.  In short, the JLPT is the Japanese Language Proficiency Test.

...In slightly less short: Jenn and I are taking the JLPT Level 3 test for the second time this December.  Basically, this is the test that gets you a piece of paper that says you can speak (and read) Japanese.  While the uses of this piece of paper beyond Japan may be obscure and unforeseen, one of our goals in coming to Japan was to actually learn Japanese, something that goes a bit quicker with some motivation.

For those of you out there who aren't abreast with the minutiae of our language acquisition, our Japanese has finally, after many, many months of study, progressed from "basically nonexistant" to "bad."  We have Japanese friends, we can make some conversation, we can make a few jokes (ask Jenn, hers are pretty awesome), we can order in most restaurants and even order pizza over the phone...but amazing as all that may seem sometimes, my vocabulary is still routinely dwarfed by 4-year-olds.  It's not an easy language, is what I'm trying to say.

To this end, we enrolled to take the JLPT last July to give ourselves a concrete goal and a way of measuring our progress.  After flailing through a smattering of Japanese textbooks, we finally procured the services of a really awesome tutor, whom Jenn sees three times a week and I see once a week (the life of a kindergarten teacher is a busy one).  She's an awesome foreign language teacher, and this is coming from someone who sees a lot of really sucky foreign language teachers, someone who knows that it's considerably harder to teach English than it is to speak English.  After a good hard 5 months of drilling vocabulary and grammar and a million such things, we went in and soundly failed the test.

With another few months' work of preparation behind us, we are going into the test again on December 4th.  Which is why I have so much studying to do, which is why I don't have time to write...a...blog.

Hm.

Well, as long as I'm here, how about a couple pictures?

A sign posted above the toilet in a restaurant/bar that we frequent.  Translated: "Rather than speed, control."  An important message for us all (well, all us men, anyway).

AAAAAAH!  THE DEAD HAVE RISEN!  This is probably one of the more fun crafts we've had in Free School.  Happy Day of the Dead, everyone!  You'll hear from us again sometime after the JLPT, probably!

Hella Ween

I came to Japan for many reasons: adventure, excitement, fabulous prizes. I did not come here to get paid to make children cry -- that has always been, at best, a side benefit. However, for the last week, a large part of my duties has been to devise cost-effective ways to terrify children into screaming puddles of fear. For you see, we have just concluded the most important season of the ESL teacher's calendar, a holiday as long as Lent, as meaningful as Sweetest Day, as not-getting-you-out-of-work as Columbus Day, and as fun as all three put together: Halloween.

I should point out that I have grown to absolutely loathe Halloween over the last few weeks. By my count, I have had to work at least 300,000 Halloween parties in the last week and a half alone. That plus an entire month of Halloween crafts, Halloween games, Halloween vocabulary, Halloween picture books, and Halloween songs is enough to make a hardworking English teacher run screaming for the unemployment line.

Speaking of: one of the biggest Halloween affairs at the kindergarten is converting Ahiru class into an お化け屋敷, a haunted house. As you might imagine, this is a complex transformation, involving many hours of moving furniture as well as liberal application of black felt and crappy, almost certainly toxic faux-spiderwebs.

Also: haunted broccoli!

For the 2- and 3-year-olds, we keep it pretty mild: lights on, no spooky music, no masks, no jumping out from behind lockers. As you might imagine, they took it rather well. A rough transcript of Yamada-sensei taking Donuts class through the haunted house: "Ooh, wow, spidaa! 見て、見て, ske-re-ton! Oh, look, Harry-sensei! Goo mohning!"

For the oldest kids, however, we pulled out all the stops short of buying more materials. Scary music and sound effects, dropping or throwing dummy vampire bats, a clip from "The Ring" on a loop, the whole 8.229 meters. Having been volunteered for haunted house detail (rather than the just-as-frantic Pumpkin UFO Toss, Mystery Box, or Bat Fishing), I opted to reprise my role from last year as Hand Grabbing At You From Under A Table. I'd like to think that I gave a decent performance--I did the whole bit, knocking on the table, shaking it, growling, etc. etc. Really a classic interpretation of GRR I AM A MONSTER AND I WANT TO EAT YOU.

By and large, I was met with three reactions from the children. The first and most common was a kid being taken aback, then laughing and saying something along the lines of "Oh, it's Harry-sensei. Hallo!" (This is what's known as the correct reaction). The second was, predictably, wailing, tears, screaming. No peeing, thankfully--I've learned that children seem to pee in response to boredom, not fear.

The third and most immediately distasteful reaction was kicking. A lot of the older kids, especially the boys, have had their natural fear responses (and common sense, and social skills) replaced with an all-purpose urge to bellow, "Orra! Monster! I will fight you!" and unleash their 3 feet of fury on the presumed Bad Guy. The more well-mannered ones restrained themselves and just spent the whole trip through the haunted house proclaiming, "全然怖くない！", or, "I'm not scared at all!" These boys accounted for 30% of the kicks that I got from under the table--the other 70% were performed by a single boy who went through the haunted house at least three times for the single purpose of wreaking furious vengeance upon any animate or inanimate object that happened into his field of vision. He punched every prop and every teacher at least once. These are the children they get to star in condom commercials in other countries.

No known photo exists of this kid, as he moves far too fast to be captured on film. Please enjoy this visual approximation.

At one point, Ahiru room's glass door was broken, a spiderweb of glass far scarier than the fake ones within the room. It has not yet been determined if it was broken by the 2nd category of children in panic or the 3rd in rage. This did illustrate for me the important role that a haunted house plays from an educational standpoint, however. I'm not one to enjoy the screams of children (except for a couple of children in particular); one of the 6-year-old girls would only go through the haunted house bawling, clinging to a teacher's torso like a terrified koala, and screaming how terrified she was. My soft side (admittedly, my largest side) felt for her...after all, I hate scary movies, I never went to a haunted house, I ran screaming out of movie theaters during the scary parts of "Temple of Doom" and "Independence Day." Why should we make kids go through such an unpleasant experience? Just for yuks?

No, I think I've just finally reached that stage of adulthood where I understand the meaning of Luke Skywalker's trial at the tree on Dagobah: as humans, we need to know how we respond to fear, and we need to practice being afraid so we can deal with it throughout our lives. The Harumidai haunted house is an extremely safe environment for children to experience a fear response -- when it was finished, some kids flat-out denied having been afraid, some realized with relief that it was just the teachers in masks, but the kids I respected the most were the ones who admitted that they had cried but now had clearly calmed down. If nothing else, the smarter kids learned that the things they saw couldn't actually hurt them, and that ghosts, mummies, and disembodied werewolf hands aren't things to really be feared.

After I finished the school's final party last Saturday (a multi-stage affair that ran from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.), I was far too full of Halloween spirit to do anything but go home and collapse; there were parties aplenty on the town that night, but I couldn't take so much as one more "Boo." Wake me when it's Guy Fawkes Day.

But first, for your viewing enjoyment, a selection of adorable pictures of children in Halloween costumes. Enjoy!

Awww, right? Brief tangent about Halloween costumes: I'd imagine the most popular costumes here are pretty similar to the most popular ones in the states. Lots of Transformers, lots of princesses, a smattering of Spider-men (Spiders-man?). Probably #1 for the girls was Fresh Pretty Cure (basically Sailor Moon), and #1 for the boys would be Goseija (the show Power Rangers was stolen from...yep, it's still running). The only real cultural difference here would be that a lot of boys were dressed as witches, too, with the hat and everything. Seems "witch" isn't quite as gendered in Japan as it is in the States. Go fig. Anyway, back to it:

And here's what I looked like while taking all of these pictures. Even when my last reserves of enthusiasm for Halloween have run dry (which takes about 20 minutes), my enthusiasm for pirates is boundless.