One down, 51 to go

I think the mayor got the whole town together before I got here and gave a little speech which went something like "whenever you see the new gaijin, I want you to kind of squint at him, and then stifle any emotional response that comes to mind." It's like no matter what their reaction to seeing me is, they're in the middle of trying to stop doing it. It's hilarious, and oh-my-gosh-so-cute.

Found out some time this week that Kikai was part of America for about 2-3 years, in that shaky post-war "we're going to borrow these, ok?" period of American-Japanese relations. This is also, coincidentally, why Kikai is part of Kagoshima (the prefecture (like a state, but the size of Rhode Island) way down in the south), and not some separate island prefecture. In order to prevent Kikai and Amami (island next door) from declaring independence with US help, Japan made them part of Kagoshima, so that America would be more inclined to return them. Hey, it worked. Returned Amami and Kikai in the 50s, took till the 70s for Okinawa.

Survived my first week of work with varying levels of success. Good point: kind of making friends and fitting in to the office environment! Bad point: So bored. Like I would rather be building dikes in a hurricane, which I suppose I could be doing given that one is kind of going on right now. The common thread throughout my life seems to be "can deal with just about anything, except mindless drudgery. Also natto (look it up)" Because of the way Kikai uses their ALTs, we really can't prepare for any specific topic during our pre-student month. My stated goal is therefore to mass produce warm up activities and games which can be applied to a broad spectrum of topics. This seems like it would be hard, but there are literally billions of such games readily available on the internet, and 90% of them are basically old playground games, or seemingly unrelated activities with English questions or vocab review tacked on somewhere. Kind of like the corn on pizza here. I get it, corn is delicious. But what is it doing in my pizza? So too, with the English games. Lets play backgammon, but whenever someone knocks someone else off they need to ask them what the weather is like. Yep. Internet consensus is that this is pretty much all you need to do to make an ESL game.

So now I'm faced with a bit of an awkward position. I really, honestly, would rather be doing something productive. Almost uniformly would rather be doing something, no matter how potentially unpleasant, than doing nothing. But you can only accumulate so many games before you start to hit that diminishing returns flat zone, where you couldn't play all these games in a year even if you could see the kids every single day. Unless that's literally all they were doing, to the exclusion of, like, learning.

For the time, I've settled on preparing my self-introduction which I'll be teaching for, by my estimate, about 2 months. My last "first day" is about a month in, but it's at the huge Jr. high, so I bet the 2nd day I have there about 2 weeks later will also still have self-intro stuff. After I get done with prepping that, I'm honestly thinking of sitting down with all the boardgames I know and love, and seeing if I can derive ESL games based on them. The basic theory I'm currently operating on, is that the closer the ESL game is to the "game" side of the spectrum as opposed to the "shallow pretext" side of the spectrum, the more kids will want to play it, and thus accidentally learn things which they will never be able to forget no matter how hard they will inevitably try. English Settlers of Catan, anyone? I swear it could be awesome, with the right planning. And I'm going to be the one to do it!

Lord, send me students, before the boredom drives me to insanity, or brilliance. Or both.