Fall Comes To Kanazawa

Just a bit of blabbing to start it off today, then a lot of pictures.  This past Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous, and I spent most of it riding around, eating and then taking a nap by the river, meeting up with friends, and playing with some random kids at a park (the part where me and my friend Martine would have been arrested if we had been doing the same thing in the States...).

I've also started leading/tutoring an "eikaiwa", or English club.  I'm taking over for another JET, and in fact the founding members started the club more than a decade ago.  It's two times a month on Saturday mornings, and don't tell anyone, because I'm getting paid a bit for it which is another technically fireable offense.

I am incredibly impressed with the group and had a really enlightening morning.  It's mostly middle-aged women who are homemakers and looking to branch out and one older retired man who learned English so he could read news from other viewpoints and to prevent senility.  They are extremely open and culturally interested, which means I don't have to do much work to get them talking and learning.  This is a refreshing change from my often recalcitrant students.  It also helps me believe I am perhaps planting seeds at school that I will never see sprout but may do so nonetheless.

Before I left America, I often made the point that I wasn't going to get my students to any particularly proficient level of English in my limited time with them, but that more importantly I could maybe get them excited about learning the language and exploring other cultures.  None of these kids are ever going to really learn English if they aren't excited about it, no matter how many textbooks are shoved in front of them.  In the daily grind of school, however, it can be easy to forget that and get bogged down with frustrations over students constantly forgetting to pluralize or conjugate properly.  Again, it was nice to see another side of the teaching gig.

Enough blabbing!  On to the pretty pictures!

 Spent some time in the samurai district to start with.

 

 

 

 

 

Right after a brilliant nap in the sun.

 

 

 

 

 

All of the best trees in the city are bound up like this now to guard against the heavy, wet winter snows.

  

 

 

Bonus for those who made it to the bottom: today in class we were trying to get the third years to debate various topics, one being snacks in school.  In arguing against them, one group wrote "If students eat snacks there will be many rappers in the school."  Full marks.