tissue time: bye bye higashi

Leaving school was like ripping off a bandaid.  I’ve known about my last day for weeks (technically years) and especially since my last round of classes started, it had been hovering over me, and every time I walked through the halls, I thought about how I’d have to walk through them for the last time [...]

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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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the magic word

I haven’t written in what feels like ages.  I have an excuse! My mom is here.  We’ve been out and about, touristing and just taking in small-town life.  It’s been lots of fun and I’ll have more to say once it’s all over, but here’s a short story for you cos I know it hurts [...]

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garlic + teacher = no.

Yesterday I learned a very important lesson.  If you are a teacher, do not eat garlic bread for breakfast.  Don’t do it. There are many reasons for this. The first is, who even eats garlic bread for breakfast?? That is insane.  Have you no sense of appropriate breakfast food items? The second is, you will [...]

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gettin busy, doin stuff

The school year is in full swing and I’ve been teaching a ton, preparing a ton, going to teacher parties and spent the last week with a former JET who came to visit (miss you!).  Needless to say I’ve been terribly busy, cranky, exhausted, sleep-deprived and haven’t gotten to post this entry that I wrote [...]

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love connection!!

My little kids are getting all grown up!  We played a game today where kids are randomly picked to ask each other questions, and so as a joke I put on a few silly ones like “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Where is the toilet?” and “Do you like me?” and they can ask whatever [...]

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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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randomness from elementary

Today one of the teachers I was working with broke out a lesson plan on fruits halfway through the class period, which was something I realized only afterwards had been written in small letters at the bottom of the lesson plan. She has me teach the vocab and starts pulling plastic fruit out of a [...]

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