Right Hand Drawn by Miki Huynh

Also to update, photos from sumo in Hiroshima are up. Yeah! More available here.

Let’s start with the red carrot. I attempted two shots at two different locations in order to impress upon you the multi-faceted quality of this vegetable.

Discovering the giant red carrot at the grocery store today made me inexplicably happy. It doesn’t look especially special, perhaps, just from the photographs I’ve taken. It doesn’t taste any more unusual than your typical orange variety, to be honest. Yet, I saw it there contrasted against the eggplants, and suddenly I wanted it more than anything else in the store. So, I went ahead and bought what I wanted. What a wonderful feeling.

Earlier on the flipside, English died a little. The students are heading into exams tomorrow and Friday, begging the question, just how many “midterms” are there in a year? Anyway, protocol had me checking grammar drills with the students as they tried to translate Japanese phrases aloud into English, and for one class that was all the teacher had me do. If the students found it too difficult to translate just from reading the Japanese half, they were then allowed to read the English portion to me. However, half of the students couldn’t even read. So, I ended up sticking out my finger and blocking parts of words on the page so that students might try sounding out the parts. My heart broke as I handed out OK’s to kids for being able to pronounce “succeed” and “alive” without having a clue what either word meant or what section of the Japanese phrase it translated. This teacher who would normally glide through the textbook never bothered to check up on their students’ abilities to use basic phonics. Since I’m scheduled at one of my elementary schools tomorrow, I won’t be able to follow up on the issue until next week after tests are over.

That’s the stuff you encounter out here sometimes. Either certain teachers are overly-sensitive about how stressed and pressured their students are by parents and other teachers, which is true, and thus decide to gently and unchallengingly ease the students through the less important subject of English, or the teachers themselves really don’t appear to care about the language. While in the end it may not matter, or really shouldn’t, to my own value as an educator, having been hired strictly to provide input for one sole subject, the self-worth takes a small beating.

So then what? I guess just keep on interjecting ideas half-expecting them to be shot down later, and, with frustration in tow, dive right back in and start swimming against that current. Unlike last year, however, I can take the process in stride (or stroke?), and it does feel like the school is becoming gradually more receptive. Those kids and teachers won’t be let off easy. Right now, I’ve some phonic cheat sheets and a side writing project in the works for the students who might make an effort to learn, and damned if I’ll let others casually if inadvertently ruin the positive mental state I’ve worked so hard to achieve at work.