leaving: i’m finally writing about it

Leaving is incredibly difficult.  Not like I’ve never left things before – high school, college, my childhood home – but leaving here is unlike anything I’ve really experienced before.  Every day here has been an adventure, and this foreign land somehow became my home.  But it’s a home that takes upwards of 20 hours to [...]

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wonder kids and …not so much

I had brand new students today – something that hasn’t happened in a long time.   Of course I’ve spent 2 Aprils here, which means two new classes of first graders in elementary after the initial newness of arriving – but they’re pretty predictable, the first graders.  Start from scratch.  But at my one school I [...]

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found an awesome kid + language acquisition happening before my eyes

OMG!!  I had such a wonderful moment today.  I was helping some kids after school who had flunked their final English tests, and since their attention span for English is about 7 and a half minutes long, I’d take little breaks in between and make a joke or do something stupid so that they could [...]

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get it together!!

I know it’s like a cardinal sin of blogging to blog about how much you blog.  Or that you haven’t blogged.  Or that you promise you’re gonna start blogging from now on, like as if anyone’s life would be worse off if they couldn’t read your brain-to-internet dribble on a daily basis.  But let me [...]

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I’m not your mother!!

Just wanted to get this little tidbit down before I forget or it gets lost in a larger, more tedious entry. After class today some first-years wandered into the classroom and one of them was like “Heke!” “…My Heke!” “My Heke!” “My Heke!” “My…….mother!!!” I was like o___O I’m not your mother….:( (pics of me [...]

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heke takes on elementary

Today concludes (..as far as I know?) my two day stint as an elementary school English teacher. A week ago I had a meeting with two people from my one elementary school that lasted about 10 minutes – from that I had to generate six classes (that’s about 5 hours of standing-in-front-of-the-class time) about myself, [...]

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trying to write in this blog is the hardest thing to do

なんでやねん！ I suck at writing in this blog.  It’s one of those things where I want to catch up but it’s so overwhelming that I can’t, then I just get more behind, and more overwhelmed, and I want to make an accurate picture of Japan here which also makes me nervous, but forget that!  I’m [...]

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