After being so good at the start, I've become a once-a-month blogger! Yikes! I'll try and do better. Really, I will. (^_^)
This week has been a bit of a drag, I'm giving Speaking tests all week. Wherein the students come to me one by one and speak at me for a minute or two, then I ask them a couple of questions, mark their scores and send them on their way. It wouldn't be so bad for a day or two, but I have it all week. All 368 kids. The up side is that I get to know each individual kid a little better. I desperately try to memorize their names since I can't read most of the Kanji (Chinese characters) on their name tags. I made little English name tags for the first/seventh graders, but they lose those pretty quickly. Luckily I've gotten used to Japanese names, and most names are made up of a limited set of parts. I'm sure you're all familiar with the name Yoshi. I think Nintendo or someone had a little, green dinosaur character called Yoshi. Well, there are a couple of variations you can put with that base. Like, Yasuyoshi, or Kazuyoshi. Sometimes it's a last name, like Yoshimura. But even though they often use the same bases to the names, they have like 5 different Kanji for the same sound. So Kanji name tags are no help for me. Now at elementary school, they have the kids names written out in phonetically; that's the way to go. Even the Kanji-impaired can read them. Speaking of the possibly Kanji-impaired, I heard recently that one of the elementary schools that I visit has a 10% population of kids with one or more foreign parent. I was a bit surprised. I wonder what it'll be like in the near future.
Anyway, the picture is one I took from the ridge of Mt Yatsugatake when my coworkers and I went to scout out the mountain for our trip next month with the students.