occupational charades

Taught at the elementary school today. I think they finally figured out that I'm trully not a qualified teacher...I mean, I'm here to be a teaching assistant, not a teacher. I have not taken any classes on teaching, I have no teaching experience or background...I'm just here to speak English. See the thing is, they had me teaching a 5th grade class. Which actually wasn't that hard...however there is the obvious language barrier between me and the students and me and the teachers...I'd say something and get blank stares. I'd come up with a creative idea, and nobody would understand it. I pretty much broke stuff down to the most basic of English, and still no one understood me. I kept telling the teacher, "I'm sorry, I'm trying to learn Japanese, but I wasn't required to know Japanese to do this job." So after about a month of this ridiculous-ness...the teachers realized that the students weren't really getting anything out of the class (duh) and so they decided to combine the 2 5th grade classes, so that the main English teacher will be available to teach. Of course now the classroom size has doubled, and there are almost 70 kids in the class...and that is pretty ridiculous in and of itself...but I am no longer beating my head against the wall because I am feeling like a failure as a teacher.

So I was teaching the 4th graders Occupation vocabulary...you know: teacher, doctor, fisherman,farmer, nurse, pilot...etc etc....And the "fun" game for the day was charades...act out an occupation, the students guess it...rock and roll. Most of the charades were pretty self explanatory and boring...Singer: stand on stage and pretend to sing, etc. But I did notice a common theme in the acting of the kids...whenever one of them acting out Police, they would mimic eating a bowl of udon, put down the bowl and arrest someone (this was done 3 times)...which led me to believe that udon is equal to american donuts where cops are concerned. 2) when acting out farmer they consistantly pretended to have back pain and often fell over backwards from the weight of the axe thing they were using...(i don't pretend to know anything about farming). 3) most disturbingly of all was when the students pretended to be teachers...usually, there was mimicing of hitting, slapping, or beating of another student. I was a little appalled by this, mainly because everyone thought it was funny. And I started watching my classes a little closer and realized the homeroom teachers really don't have a problem being "rough" with the kids. I mean they don't punch the kids or anything, but most of the stuff they do would be considered misconduct in the US.

I don't know about this place...its all pretty wierd.

My car accident saga continues...in 2 weeks I have to go to the police station and meet with the man I hit, to file a police report...I guess this is standard...although why they wouldn't take a statement from me when it happend is beyond my comprehension. Say a little prayer for me that this is the end of the accident situation...I'd like to put it far behind me...and I'm a bit over the whole "beating a dead horse thing"....