Merry Christmas!

What do the Japanese do to celebrate Christmas? The opposite of what most Westerners do. You know New Years? That's their Christmas. Parties, hanging out with friends, big romantic dates. In Japan, New Years is the big family holiday where they visit shrines or temples. Oh, and apparently chicken is a thing, for Christmas not New Years. Fried chicken. KFC fried chicken to be specific.

He's a plump old man with a white beard and a red suit. That's basically Santa, right?

I forgot to mention the cake. 

Yeah, cookies aren't really Christmas fare here. Cakes are the Japanese Christmas sweet. You literally have to reserve your chicken bucket. That's how popular fried chicken is for Christmas.

So what did I do this Christmas day? Besides finally updating this blog, I watched a bunch of movies, did laundry, and baked cookies! I figured out how to do some baking in my microwave and the cookies came out delicious!

Crunchy on the outside, gooey inside, and chocolate everywhere!

I also found a church in Tokyo that does an English Christmas Eve Candlelight Service. It was a nice service with a bunch of my favorite Christmas songs. And it was in the middle of Harajuku, so the street decorations were gorgeous.

And then there was  a motorcycle gang dressed as Santas.

Because Japan.

And tomorrow I'm Skyping with my family on their Christmas Day! 

Merry Christmas to you all!

Teacher Stuff

It's finally the end of 2nd term. We had our closing ceremony on Monday and tomorrow's my last day of work since I took the 25th and 26th off. Not that I attended the ceremony properly. The 3 1-4 teachers, Jeremy, and I snuck out of the gym and into the athletic teachers' office and managed to have a meeting to discuss the schedule and ALT workbook for the 3rd term.

That's an excellent example of what the past month has been like. Getting ready for exams and evaluating presentations and debates was immediately followed by marking essays, and grading tests, which was in turn followed by figuring out what to do next term. I managed to squeeze teacher's meetings, sending out Christmas presents and cards, and some time for myself somewhere in there.

I'm pretty excited about the 3rd term for our first years. We're doing a unit on Narrative Writing, so I get to teach them about story arcs. Hopefully, we'll be able to encourage their creativity too. One of the 1-4 teachers is pretty disparaging about their imaginations, but their final skits (advertising an amusement park, restaurant, or tourist attraction) including some interesting ideas. Although there were the rather boring Starbucks and McDonalds, one group advertised 'Sakado Land' and another invented an aquarium with over a million visitors a week. They have creative potential; we just need to give them some space to let it out and experiment with it. The second half of next term will be devoted to the basics of speech writing and giving to help prepare them for 2nd year English Exoression, which focuses on debate. It sounds like a return to boring formulas, but we've tweaked the presentation portion for that to make it a bit more interesting. Hopefully, it works out they way we think it will.

So, tomorrow I'm printing out the workbooks and journals and cleaning and reorganizing my desk to get ready for the break and next term. Speaking of break, I'm headed to Thailand for a week! My friend, Victoria, and I are hitting both Chiang Mai and Bangkok. So that'll be another country off my travel bucket list, as well as a week of warmth before the coldest part of Japan's winter.

I'll end this post with some pictures of what teachers do during finals. Hint: it's mostly sitting at desks and looking at piles of papers.

Preparing a quiz game for the Gaigo (foreign language) Open House. 

Me, all dressed up for the Gaigo Open House. I even got a cool neon arm band, identifying  me as a teacher at Sakado High School. Got to impress those junior
high kids and their parents!

3-4 (my third year class) English Expression essays. We don't see this class next term, because they have university exams, so this is their final English writing project. They put a lot of time and effort into these. I'm really proud of the topics the picked and managed to write about. I also have a much more massive appreciation for all my teachers. 

I don't remember which class these tests are from. There might actually be two tests here. One piled in the middle and the other set spread out on top for grading. The clipboard in the middle of the two desks has the answer key as well as example answers/criteria for the writing portions.