The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

I'm teaching at Fujigaoka Elementary right now, the elementary I'm most familiar with and fond of. The other day I taught my second graders to sing Old MacDonald had a Farm. It was pretty popular for the E-I-E-I-O bit; the kids loved the song, but mostly I wound up with "Oh macdahdah hah.. fah, EIEIO!" still, they had fun and got some english vocab and pronunciation practice. As is traditional, there were a very wide variety of animals on the farm: cheetah was exceptionally popular, for some reason. Rabbit was as well. What sound does a rabbit make? I went with "boing-boing".

I learned some odd things. It doesn't appear that Japanese people recognise a cat's purr as a distinct sound. I can't really imagine that, because Japanese people are onomatopoeia-crazy, but nobody in the entire class could describe "the other sound that cats make, when you pet them and they are happy". They just made a really happy sounding meow... even the teacher didn't know.

Jen's got a new hairdo. She decided yesterday to go through with something she's wanted to do for a long time, and shear off her locks to donate to cancer wigmaking. In order to get enough hair (20cm) to donate, we had to take off most of her 'do! She's got much shorter hair than I do now. Here's my perspective of the story... on her blog there ought to be her own take soon.

I was doing so well there with the updates for a while, and then I got distracted this month.

On the last day of January, a new Wii game - Smash Brothers Brawl - was released. It's probably the most anticipated game for the Wii so far, and we're having a hoot with it. It is one of those consummate LAN party games, supporting up to 4 players and getting into the action right away. Andy, the high school ALT that lives in Natori, has been over playing it quite a lot, and we can play online with Ewan. It's really an awesome game; when it comes out in North America everyone should get a Wii so they can play online with us.

Looking back through the gate we found that leads into the secret area behind the Kumano shrine.

You can see all the pics I uploaded today by following this link.

I like to make my students' day a little more weird. Today I did so by walking around during clean up time and taking the broom away from one student, giving to a second student, and giving the second student's broom to the first.