Day 5: Children!

In order to make up for my abundant use of photography yesterday, I took no photos today. That was actually because I was at the Matsunami Junior High School in Chigasaki today. As it was a school, we were not allowed to take photos ourselves.

A googled picture of the high school

When we arrived, it was crazy. The students were screaming like we were rock stars. The girls in particular fancied Steve and Josh (who got off the bus with his arms in the air, waving like he was a celebrity which made the girls go wild.) The morning was spent observing classes, in which I got called cute by one Japanese girl. Junior High school is years 7-9 and because I would later be running classes about Australia in Year 7 and Year 9, I decided to watch Year 8 classes. The first class I attended was Chemistry, where they were learning about molecules and their structure. After about half an hour I went and studied English with the Year 8 students in another class instead. Something much easier to follow.

After a short meeting, I then attended a Year 9 science class and participated in their experiments regarding indicators. I had a lot of fun and learnt how to read some Japanese symbols for different colours for the indicators, as well as impressing with my sound knowledge of the indicators (thanks brain for storing old information!) I had a few photos of me taken during the class by the organisers.

Closely supervising

Asking all the right questions

I had lunch with the class and gave a twenty five minute talk about my family. The students were very shy when given the opportunity to ask questions, but loved the hear about all the places I had lived and how different they were. It was very challenging to talk though, as every sentence had to be translated as they had only been learning English for three years. They were very talkative after a while and a number of the girls who had been very quiet had long conversations with me about my family and my thoughts on Japan.

After this I went to a Year 7 class and ran some Australian trivia. I had always imagined Japanese schools to be much stricter and the students better behaved than Australians but this could not be further from the truth. All day students often conversed over their teacher and during the trivia the boys, like typical Year 7 boys, ran wild. The girls just hid at the back. It was a shock to me, certainly not at all what I had expected. Yet they were very nice and enthusiastic to hear about Australia, just hyperactive boys and talkative girls at the same time.

I met up with my host parents after school and went home. They are really lovely, into sports and food and wine. They have two adult children who no longer live at home, however tonight one of the neighbours who is 22 came over to visit and we had a lovely chat about where I am from and what we are both studying at university. My gifts I brought them went down a treat, they loved the place mats to much they don't want to use them, lest they get dirty.They are lovely people and I look forward to spending some time with them over the next few days.