it's nalin

Oh, Special Education helper teacher, how I'll miss you. First, you made the effort to talk to me and say hi, and invited me (though possibly tokenly, I'm still unsure) to use your house in Okayama if I ever went there. And on top of that, you actually helped me when I was "teaching" the Special Education class, as opposed to the Special Education homeroom teacher, who would normally sit behind his desk and be oblivious to the fact that all 3 boys with behavioural disorders would be screaming, shouting, breaking things, and throwing things at me.

And you invited me to your house to meet your family, and prepared a huge feast. You even told your husband that I was Australian and my parents were Thai, so he could buy Fosters and Singha for me while I ate your really awesome sukiyaki.

And, to top it all off, you made me this really cool keychain as a farewell present:



And although you did me ask me afterwards if my name was spelt right, and I lied and said that it was, I really appreciate the gift. I just didn't have the heart to tell you that it's not with an 'L', and hoped that you leaving the school would mean you wouldn't have to notice this mistake. I really hope you know how much I like the keystrap. And, that you never stumble upon this blog either.

What type of poo are did you do today?

Aaah, preschools. Is there any better cure for Mondayitis than playing with little kids for a day and getting paid for it?

My last visit to this preschool for this year was a lot less emotional and sentimental than I thought it would be. I guess I was spoilt last year, when the kids who were 'graduating' preschool did a dance for me on my last visit. But this year, it went by without much fuss, which was probably a good thing.

But anyways, while it is fun playing with kids, I think the other half of the enjoyment I get from visiting schools is seeing the different things and ways kids are taught here compared to back home. There's the uber-adorable kyushoku song, which is the song they sing before they eat so kids can practice saying the set expression before eating, and there's also the way in which the 5-year-olds were taught how to remember  what they were playing in the mini-drum band. Rather than having music sheets, the kids read off an illustrated poster, which had faces of  anpanman, fruits, and other random objects. When students played the drums, they memorised the order of all the random objects, and hit the drums in accordance to however many syllables there were for each picture (strawberry, or ichigo, had 3 syllables, so they had to hit the drums for 3 beats and rest on the 4th beat).

But my favourite educational tool seen so far is this board game, that depicts the digestive system, and tracks how food starts off as food, and ends up in poo. And, being Japan, it involves illustrations of happy poo characters. I'm getting a feeling that Japan has a strange obsession with cute faecal matter...