April 9th-My Second Day
Today was my second day at of school at Miyasho (short for Miyazaki Shougyou Koukou). The day started out pretty much the way it had the previous day except this morning I had real breakfast foods instead of dinner from the previous night. So, my stomach was a little less angry at me at the start of the day. You know that feeling you get when you’re just about to start sweating?…that feeling of an uncomfortable itchiness when those first beads of sweat are trying to squeeze their way through your pores and out onto your skin? That’s the feeling I got on my way to school this morning. I don’t think it was quite as warm in the morning as it had been the previous day, but I felt really stuffy inside my uniform and I wanted to take the coat off and let the breeze ruffle through my shirt, but of course I couldn’t do that. I must say though that both going to school and returning from school have their merits and drawbacks. The trip to school is easy (downhill) and it’s fast so you don’t tire yourself out and get drenched in sweat before you even start the day. The drawback is that it’s cooler in the morning so you kind of waste the cool air on an easy ride. Returning from school is a much harder ride because you’re going uphill and my bike has 1 gear and it’s warmer and you’re more tired. But there’s also no rush, so you can get off the bike and just walk it if you like.
Once I got
to school and the day began, we started off by taking two tests. The first was one was kokugo (国語) [country language i.e. Japanese]. As I’m sure you can imagine, the fact that
this was a test of Japanese FOR Japanese people worried me. When I got the test I actually understood
the first set of directions! The
problem was that I couldn’t answer any of the questions. I decided that I would be satisfied if I
could answer 1 question. I was
unsuccessful. So I wrote my name and an
apology on my paper. The next test we
took was a math test. That went MUCH
better. For the most part it was just
simple algebra, graphing, quadratic equations, and some trigonometry and
SOHCAHTOA. I was able to do most of the
questions even though I couldn’t read the directions I just kind of guess at
what they were trying to get us to do.
So I guess I have to wait and see how I did on that…it should be
interesting. A lot of the kids were
very surprised when I told them that I was able to do a lot of the math despite
the fact that I couldn’t read the questions.
Well…we’ll see if I actually was able to do it. Anyway, after the tests and some more
organizing and homeroom activities, we had lunch. Everyone eats lunch of the classrooms and some kids move to other
rooms to eat with their friends. The
teachers leave and leave the students to their own devices. Speaking of devices, during lunch, all the
cell phones come out (forbidden when teachers are present). Everyone chats it up and eats their obento
(homemade lunch in a box with things like chicken, fish, rice balls, and vegetables
in it) and drinks tea. After lunch some
more stuff happened that was probably boring or I didn’t understand it because
I can’t remember exactly what it was.
The next big exciting
thing was souji. This is a big
deal and another crazy interesting difference between American schools and Japanese
schools. In Japanese schools, the
students clean their own school! There
are no custodians mopping up after messes that kids make. A few times a year there’s a major cleaning
effort. This (since it was the
beginning of the session) was one of those efforts. Everyone first changed into their school athletic uniforms so
their regular uniforms wouldn’t get dirty.
We spent…gosh…probably about an hour and a half to two hours cleaning
the entire school. Well, each homeroom
worked on their own room and the area around it. So, cumulatively the entire school was cleaned inside and
out. We scrubbed the floors, swept,
washed the windows, weeded the garden, collected and sorted trash, raked the
rocks in the rock garden, cleaned the clock, scraped rust away, and moved furniture
around to get at extra-grubby places.
The students clean the school every day. On a daily basis though, the cleanup lasts anywhere from just 20
to 30 minutes. Still, it was
interesting and they even played music over the P.A. system at times during the
cleaning.
After school, instead of
going home with Eri, I went to Hidaka sensei’s office and talked to him for a
while about how I could join a school club (either cultural or athletic) and
about other things that I was kind of confused on. I often wonder why they put
him in charge of helping me out. This
is his first year here and although he obviously knows more about what’s going
on than I do, he still seems just as confused as me at times. He’s a nice guy though so I won’t be too
hard on him. After I spoke with him, I
was trying to figure out what I was going to do next when I walked past a room
with a bunch of students in it just kind of sitting around talking. They all came out of the room to say hi to
me and we all ended up talking for a long time. We talked about all kinds of things from prom in America to
Miyazaki dialect. It turned out that
three of them actually live in my neighborhood so we ended up riding home
together and talking the whole way. So,
on my second day at school I already made a bunch of friends. I was happy about that and my host mother
was happy about that too. I think she’s
very supportive of me doing what I can to have fun here and if there’s
something I want to do, she encourages it and she expresses that she’s proud of
me when I do something good like make friends or something like that. Of my three new family members (not
including the dog, Atom), I’d say mom is my favorite. She’s just very easy to get along with, always seems to be happy,
and understands me very easily and is very helpful. Well, I’ve said enough. I’ve
already lived more in two days than I have in months during certain parts of my
lifetime…excellent….
-Maikeru