Falling leaves
...written on 10.24.04, @ 8:43 a.m.
Sometimes you feel like writing and sometimes you don't. It's been four months of don't and today I do! Whee!!!
I've been in a slump, a dump, a mump, a rump. My classes have lacked a certain spark. I've overextended myself mostly work wise and a little bit socially by not being able to say the word "no" or by feeling so codependent and arranging my schedule to help everyone do everything. Last night as I was walking home from work, my head was spinning. Who do I have to meet this afternoon? What's on Monday again? Gosh, I can't forget about those two things on Tuesday. Or that special meeting on Wednesday, or yep, there was Thursday. And I wonder if I'll be ambushed again after class on Friday like I was last week and oh no, I don't feel like making spaghetti dinner for five people tonight. I have got to say "NO" sometime, somewhere to somebody!
And I did. I managed it. And the world didn't crumble. We all ate out. We being, Matsumoto, his girlfriend, Kyoko, Koshiro (Min's 16 yr old son), Min and me. Matsumoto is moving into my apartment building on the fourth floor. Jesseca, my cousin by her mother's marriage to my uncle, is in my old apartment, on the third floor, two doors down from me. I invited Jesseca, but she wanted to stay in her "nest" after biking 20 miles that afternoon.
So we went to Shirokiya. It is a chain restaurant that has many menu items on the cheap. Not much on the taste factor, but it filled the holes.
Anyway, I mentioned earlier that my classes have lacked some pizzaz lately. This past week I have stayed until almost midnight on a couple of nights to rectify that situation. I mean, if I'm bored, the kids are, and I wanted to energize both me and my little munchkins.
Fall is in the air, and it just so happens that the textbooks we are using are on weather or other aspects of nature. I went to one of my favorite stores, the Loft, which is an upper class (nothing for a dollar here) variety store, lots of personal and home decorating items, stationery, furniture, etc. and bought seven pairs of postcards with a fall leaf motif. I then laminated them to use for a game of "Concentration". I think the postcards are really stunning and show a few of our vocabulary words "leaf", "rock", "river", etc.
I also went out early one morning to collect some different leaves for a craft project. Alas, 9 am was too late for my mission at Hachiman Shrine. The gardener had already raked the leaves up into a pile and was burning them. I rode over to the city park and again saw little piles being swept up by the park crew. Since they were mostly cleaning the walkways, I went up around the trees and bushes and collected some nice specimens and put them in my plastic bag. I find the Japanese tend to be very meticulous in their gardening/cleaning efforts, but they may be overdoing it sometimes, for one of my favorite memories in New York when I was in the first grade, was kicking up my feet through a dense carpet of leaves on the sidewalk, watching the foliage fly and listening to the crisp crunching under my feet.
Anyway, class time was upon me and I added my little activities to my lesson plan. We play "Concentration" often and I have many themed collections (animals, occupations, quirky pictures, etc.), but when the first child turned over the first card, there was a collective gasp at the black rock bedecked with vibrant red, yellow and orange hued maple leaves in the white crested river .
Later after some book work, I took them over to the table where the leaves were gathered. They tentativley touched them. I had them compare the textures. I even put one up to my nose and took a big whiff, smiled and passed the leaf around. I picked up one leaf and said "one leaf". I put another one together with it and said "two leaves", added another and said "three leaves". I wanted to show them the English system of plurals as the Japanese language doesn't use a plural form.
They explored the leaves a little more and then I had them sit down at the craft table. I picked two students to pass out the paper and the crayons and then I brought the leaves over and told them to pick one, put it under their paper and then rub it gently with a crayon. After doing one, they quickly got up to pick another and then another. They were bubbly and earnest in their crafting and the dialogue, "This is fun!" "Yeah." was easy for them to produce because it was in an appropriate context. They were having fun!
One of the best moments was when little five year old Hirokazu was doing his first leaf rubbing. His eyes widened at the appearance of the leaf on his paper and he said, "Teacher, is this magic?" For me it was.