Just a lil' bit of nothing

What I wouldn't give for things to get back to normal. After the busy weekend in Tokyo, I got right back to school for the ninensei/sannensei opening ceremony. Then the next day we greeted the new students with THEIR opening ceremony. Two days in a row of suit and tie.

I will say greeting the new students was cool. It was a ceremony almost as big as graduation. Parents lined the back walls, the band played warm-up songs, lots of members of the Board of Education showed up. I was actually given a job to assist... I stood in the hallway and greeted all the old BOE members, motioned to the left, and said, "Toshoshitsu wa kochira desu." (The library is over there.) Of course, I was standing next to a sign with an arrow directing them that way, but YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL! (Especially since a few of the older ones started to aimlessly wander past me, prompting me to proudly repeat my canned phrase.)

When the actual ceremony started, it was almost motion-for-motion the same as graduation. Students stood, teachers read names, students sat, other students stood, students sang... but then we had to sing. All of the teachers filed in a mob to our assigned places in the gym and sang to the new ichinensei. The nearest I could work out the lyrics in the single day that I had to practice is that it was something about giving the students flowers and dandelions or something. Though I suppose with Japanese imagery and metaphor, it probably meant each flower is the gift of knowledge, and each petal of that flower is a page of a textbook, filled with incredible information vital to the growing minds and bodies of the youth of Japan (The bumblebee on the flower represents cotton-candy... still trying to figure that metaphor out... silly Japanese poetry).

Probably the the most interesting moment was when the teachers had to introduce themselves to the crowd. We have a student with a hearing impairment, so to assist, all of the teachers had banners with their names on it. In traditional Japanese, their names, consisting of only two kanji, were all aranged vertically on two sheets of printer paper. When the moment came, we lined up across the front of the gym while the vice principapl read our names and subjects of each teacher. I was very last.

The format was the same, "Matsuzaki Mariko," she'd step forward, "Yorohiku onegaishimasu," bow, and hold up her vertical scroll. "Iida Yuki," she'd step forward, "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu," bow, and hold up her vertical scroll. "Hiraki Kenichiro," he'd step forward, bow, hold up his scroll and say, "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu," just to mix it up. Then it got to me. The vice principal read my name in perfect katakana english, I stepped forward, bowed, said, "Yoroshiku onegaishimasu," and held up my horizontal scroll spelled out in English. 42 vertical scrolls, and finally the tall, lanky American guy holds up this horizontal thing so incredibly different from the others. It got a few chuckles from just about everyone, including myself. :) (Then I cried a little inside. :( (Not really...))

Since then, though, the daily routine has been orientations and introductions for the students. It's been a week, and I still haven't really taught a class yet. I've been bringing my laptop to school to hopefully fill the free time and get some actual work done, but after several hours of that, it's good to break up the monotony with an ebook or something (World War Z! Yay!).

The new English teachers are great, though. The new ninensei teacher has already had me come to a class (not that I did much, but the effort was there!). But I won't really start anything until next week. In the meantime, it's pretty dull. All my extra-curricular stuff is going well (band practice, japanese lessons, even ballroom dance, though it's still freaking hard). Also, I'm getting tons of ideas for lame videos to make, so maybe someday, if I get the drive and if I allow myself to look like more of an idiot, I might make them. :D