First Elementary School Day

   I was a bit nervous today because it was my first day at the new school. I woke up around 8, which was fine, since my elementary days start at 10 for some strange reason. It means I miss the first two class periods of the day, which is inconvenient since it makes my schedule less flexible -- there are only six periods in a day and I'm only there for four of them.

   Since I have five classes to teach, that means that one class gets left out and the schedule gets lopsided as I skip between the two.

   Not much I can do about it, though.

   I left the apartment at 9:30 since I didn't know how long it would take me to get to the school. Since it wasn't cloudy, aside from some general light cover, I took my camera with me to get some pictures on the way down the mountainside. Yes, pictures for you, faithful reader.

   On the way down the mountain, I realized that I hadn't actually taken any pictures looking back up, other than the one from the bus stop. This one is a bit past the bus stop, looking back toward the 7&i. I was going down the side of the road without a "sidewalk" since the sidewalk actually vanishes very quickly. The gutter covers are usually just as good, since the asphalt on the sidewalk is cracked and lumpy in places.

   You can see all of the electrical and telephone lines that I never noticed until Don pointed them out. All of the telephone poles here are concrete, presumably with a steel core -- I don't know if it's for longevity, earthquake safety, or the simple fact that trees are rarer here... or a combination of all three.



   The major problem with the gutters is that they're not level with each other or the rest of the ground, so if I'm speeding down the side of the road, there's a chance that my wheel could slip to either side, causing me to lose my balance. It's only happened a few times, but it's sudden and scary... and not something I want to happen on a steep slope with fast traffic next to me.

   It took me a while to get used to biking with traffic passing by only a foot or two away.

   I love these covered gutters, by the way. They make a pleasant clunking noise when I ride my bike over them, so it's something I've come to associate with going places in Japan.



   Fields like this line the road. I've seen cabbage and spinach, as well as some fields that don't have anything in them yet. Other roads are surrounded by rice fields. Gunma, like Pennsylvania, is more of an agricultural/industrial center than anything, and it really shows up here.



   Some fields aren't actually flat or even angled. While rarer, terraced fields like this one do exist. I'm not sure why, since it looks to be a major pain in the ass for equipment... but then again, it's not unusual to see old men and women working in the fields by hand, even down near the city. When I was moving, I saw an old woman with a coolie hat and a bundle of vegetables on her back walking up the mountainside -- it was incredible, like a scene from a movie.

   Even taking pictures, it took me less than ten minutes to get to the elementary school, thanks to the wonders of gravity and the inclined plane. I knew looking back that it would take me a lot more time to go home, though, with the uphill bit.



   The school itself isn't all that impressive; it's a medium-sized school with a strangely green paint job. Most schools are tan, either by weathering or a new coat of paint. It also looks like most schools in Japan; apparently some architect was commissioned to design a school after World War II and his design just took off, which means that every school looks virtually the same.

   Something like that happened in America, or at least in Pennsylvania, but on a much smaller scale...

   I got to school around 9:40 and classes didn't start until 10:40, so I had time to get acquainted with the school and figure out my schedule for the day. For the last three years, I've taught all six grades at elementary school, but this school has a different system: I only teach the fifth- and sixth-grade kids. I don't really agree with it, but okay.

   It threw me for a bit of a loop, though, since I'm used to fifth graders knowing something, since we covered colors, numbers, and basic sentences at my previous elementary schools. Here, it's mostly a blank slate, with the kids not even understanding "I like."

   My lesson today was a self-introduction -- I used pictures to talk about myself and introduce some vocabulary, which we used to play bingo at the end of class. The kids seem to like me, and they're all very friendly, but I still miss the kids at my old elementary school. I'm glad to see that my teaching wasn't predicated on the bond I had with them, though; my humor and techniques worked well with these kids, even though they haven't met me before.

   I don't know how much Japanese the previous guy knew, but the teachers seemed kind of conflicted about how to talk to me, with some trying to use English (and not succeeding) and others just using normal Japanese, which is fine. It really gets on my nerves when people use Japanese, but then use English words for random, simple Japanese phrases, like saying "friend" instead of "tomodachi." I know they're trying to be nice and help, but it really doesn't help...

   After my classes ended, I headed back to the staff room and checked my e-mail, which is when I got the frustrating news that I wrote about earlier.

   I decided to go for a walk around the school to cool off and saw two pictures in the hall I thought would be neat to post here. Schools here get aerial pictures on a regular basis and hang them on the wall in the hallway; it's neat because you can look at the school and the neighborhood and see how they've changed over the years.



   They also use the kids to write things on the ground... something that people do with Google Maps, too. I'd imagine that this is a lot easier to coordinate, though.

   The big mass of dirt behind (below) the school is the playground; it took some getting used to, but ALL school playgrounds here are just huge dirt fields. The elementary ones have some swings and monkey bars on the periphery, but the dirt field is the playground. No grass, just dirt.

   Kids play soccer, dodgeball, kickball, baseball, tag... and anything that needs lines, they draw with their toes. For gym class, teachers use chalk dust to lay down lines, so I guess it works out nicely. There are also ropes set into the ground for tracks for races and the like.

   I guess with the kind of use the field gets, grass wouldn't last long.



   This is the neighborhood. The area covered by this particular elementary school is pretty huge, actually. This whole town used to be a "village" before getting absorbed into the city as a "town." Even as a village, though, it's really a bunch of clumps of houses connected by roads -- or separated by fields, depending on how you look at it.

   Look at all those fields...



   This hall of the school is more colorful than some of the other schools I've been in, since the teachers take the initiative to put out decorations and stuff. Usually the walls are just used for students' worksheets or calligraphy, which go into plastic files that hang from the wall.

   The green sign on the ceiling says "hasami," which is Japanese for "scissors." There's something called "the scissors promise," which is basically a promise to not run around while holding scissors -- there are tons of signs and notices all over the school, which makes me wonder if something happened in the past... it's not something I've seen before.



   Like all of the other schools, this one has an entrance for staff with shoe boxes... unlike the other ones, this one gets a lot of sunlight, so it has a lot of plants. Thanks, allergies.

   Since I'd stayed around an hour later than I'd had to so I could talk to the teachers about plans for the semester, and in particular, next week, the sun was starting to set when I left. One of the nice things about living up here is that sunsets are gorgeous as long as the sky isn't completely cloudy. That, combined with the cherry trees in the parking lot made me want to take a picture.



   It feels pretty Japanese, between the cherry blossoms, the roof, and the wires all over the place.

   As I was going back up the mountain (which was, in fact, much slower and hotter than going down), I saw a gorgeous sunset behind clouds. I wish the mountains had shown up better in the picture, but they didn't. I actually tried to get a number of shots for an HDR picture, but that didn't work out so well since the sun was too bright... some other day.



   I actually took a billion pictures in the morning at this same spot for a panorama. Since I was using my prime, there was a lot of bokeh (intense focus on a single plane, with everything else being blurry and out of focus), so the panorama turned out a bit less spectacular than I was hoping... In particular, the field on the left has an annoyingly blurry spot.

   One problem with it is that it's so wide! The proportions are just terrible for a thumbnail.



   I also uploaded a larger version of the panorama, which is over 3 MB and 8000 pixels wide. The original was three times as wide...