Everything Old Is New Again – Part 3

What a difference a Southward move made. It’s like there is something different in the water the farther you get away from Nara and the closer you get to Wakayama. If the first few months of teaching here would have been like it has been this week I am sure I might have signed on for another. The kids were great, the classrooms were organized and, get this, the parents actually smiled! And the commute, let me tell you about the commute. Gone is the two train hour long packed car to Nara and in its place has come a five minute brisk ride on the rails to Takada. The station is only two stops away which means I can board a train an hour before class and still make it on time. There is a bit of a walk to this classroom (about ten minutes) but I’ve already discovered some short cuts while starting to explore the area. Trains run at regular intervals here and the return home is just as quick as the ride there. Like Kashihara, Takada is a small city with all the modern luxuries. There is a shopping mall, a rather large one at that with an outside walkway through the center which takes you through a garden. There is, of course, a Mr. Donut and two McDonald’s within sight of each other and there are more vending machines then Toronto street corner newspaper stands. However, like the city I have called home now for going on eight months, once you step outside the core of the city you can find the remnants of old Japan in the temples and statues you can discover. When I started exploring Nara and Tenri back in March I had maps. I even have an English map for Kashihara. I was not able to find an equivalent for Takada and so I sort of just wandered around a little more each day taking different turns and heading towards anything that looked old. I didn’t find anything as interesting as a big rock with a perfect square hole cut into it but I did find some nice temples and a few cemeteries that had some old markers chipped and crumbling. Finding headless Buddhas in graveyards should have some poor fortune connotations associated with it. The people here were more receptive of my presence then some of the other school I’ve taught at. I wonder why that is? Hard to explain, really. People here were just…different. More genuine in their sentiments!

Now you can take all the temples and smiling grocery store clerks you want, if I were saddled with a week of bad kids I was going to hate this place. The classroom smelled clean when I first walked in and showed no signs of that musty smell that latches itself onto unkempt classes. Everything was neatly organized in multiples for easier access. Picture cards, for example, were in excess and I have choices of the piles by the board, the boxes on the shelves, boxes by the table or boxes in the backroom organized by color. This was a good beginning. There was a nice note in the communication book from the Japanese teacher welcoming me to the school and she had even organized all the students name badges for the first lesson on the floor for me. Another good sign here. But the real test were the kids. Above all, they were excellent. Some of the best I’ve taught since coming here. There were a few snobby girls and one little brat but they were outweighed by just how well behaved and attentive the other kids were. They were receptive and were able to grasp lesson concepts better then some of my older students. I found myself writing the words “fun group” a lot in my lesson reports. Many times in this role you fid yourself just going through the motions and waiting for the end of the hour but with the lot of these kids it wasn’t like that. I found myself having just as much fun with these kids as they were tossing around a dice while I acted like a gorilla. I remember going with my daughter to an oversized gym in Ottawa called Cosmic Adventures. I believe I mentioned this recently as a lesson in how out of shape I was (more then likely still am) but it was also a return to being a kid through my daughters enjoyment of being chased around this place. In a way, I became eight years old again and this job every so often offers you a gleam of that long departed life. I can get my pants dirty, roll around and act like a basket case and it is a blast…a blast that I, the adult me, gets paid for.

Why were these kids so amazing where others were demons? The answer could found in the homework. All but three kids in the entire week of teaching had completed their homework. I have come to be able to tell when a kid isn’t going to gel for one reason or another, if they are going to be board, uninterested or a disruptive brat by looking at homework. If I see the homework chart has never been checked, all pages are colored on and not done properly I can see that this kid has a parent who isn’t working with them and honestly if the parent doesn’t the care why should the kid? This was reflected in parents who wouldn’t great their kids at the door or express interest in what they had done. No smiles or warm greetings and unfortunately that was a lot of them in the old batch of schools I taught it. This week not only was the homework done but the parents waited at the door with open arms for their kids. I like practicing lesson objectives in front of parents with the students to show that their money isn’t being misspent and this was not received well or could not be done at my old block of schools. This week the parents egged the kids on to the correct reply and their thanks to me, I could tell, was genuine. Instead of feeling I had done something wrong or made one of those cultural faux pas I felt good when I closed the door after the last car had left. Last night while walking back to the train station that little voice in the back of my head started to whisper. The last time I had heard him was a year ago and the whisper that soon grew louder eventually would bring me here. It was saying: “You’re not finished”. A door opened and, for the moment, I walked away. The first isn’t loud enough yet and I’m not quite ready to see what’s on the other side of that door.

Some photos from the Takada walks: