The Eye of Patrick

So I mentioned in my previous post that I would talk about why I went to Fukagawa, Hokkaido on Thursday and I will also talk about my adult English class welcome party.

Let’s go back to Wednesday where I was at my job for the whole day (8:30-4:15.) But after work I had to go to the high school and help some of my students train for the speech contest the next day in Fukagawa. I had a 1^st year and a 2^nd year going to participate in the speech contest.

One of the ways that we made the review easier was for me to record the speech on tape and then they could listen to it again and again. When I recorded it, I did it 3 times; 1 word by word, 2 sentence by sentence and repeating each sentence twice and finally the whole speech. This was a great idea as it gives them the ability to hear native level speech without having to be with the native speaker.

The speech contest would be the reciting an already written speech. This made helping them in some ways easier as we didn’t have to spend time on writing the speech and could work more on the memorization and delivery of the speech. But it was also still a challenge as for the most part they did not fully understand the speech they were required to speak and so did not know where to stress and where to rest.

So we spent Wednesday going over the speech and seeing if they could remember it. This was exciting because we had been practicing for so long so to finally be able to see the results of our work was great. They were able to remember the majority of the speech and only had a few problems. With each time they did it the quality improved and improved. I think we worked on it for 2 hours before we had to call it quits as they were getting tired and no more practice would make it much better. Plus they needed their sleep. So I said good bye to them and left work to my next activity.

After the school I met up with my Eikaiwa class (English conversation class) and we had decided to go to an okonomiyaki restaurant and have some drinks and food for the evening. This would also be my enkai welcome party, as it is the custom to usually have a welcome party for the new member of the group (that being me). They knew I had lived in Osaka for a year and thought it would be nice to have some okonomiyaki.

So we met up at the board of education, which is the place I go every day for my work. The reason was that even though my town is small, 4000 people and I had been here for 2 months I still did not really know where all the restaurants where and I didn’t want to get lost.

Plus the fact was that we were going to drink beer and in Japan you can’t drink and drive (0.0 blood alcohol limit) and so usually everyone goes in one car and they drop everyone off at the restaurant and goes back to their home and walks back, so that everyone can enjoy the drinking. This is one thing I like about Japan, because in Canada you can have a blood alcohol level of 0.08 and this raises a lot of questions of known when you have reached the level.

My Eikaiwa group is made up of 4 regular members and then has a few that float in and out of the classes. So on the day of my enkai there were 6 people including me and one of the local town’s people decided to join. He was a funny guy who was I think late in his 20s or early 30s and had been to my home province of Alberta.

The rest of the evening was the eating and cooking of okonomiyaki and monjayaki. We talked and laughed and told stories. I told them that Hokkaido is very like Canada, except that there are more Japanese people. They laughed at that.

As the evening progressed further and it seemed like we were running out of things to say I felt blue because I thought we had only been there a short time and we had already ran out of things to say. But then it turns out we had been there for 2 hours and it was the end of my allocated Eikaiwa class. So I felt happy to meet these people that were so interested in learning English, as usually my students do not have a keen interest in learning English. But these students have a genuine interesting in talking English and explaining Japanese culture to me. When I am with them I feel that I am truly experiencing internationalization.

One of the members ordered a taxi and we drove home and I went to bed as my next day was going to be busy.

My next post will be about my experience at my first speech contest. I will have some photos to share also from it.

With regards to my blog I will try to keep my posts to a limit of 1000 words and try to post every day to 2^nd day.

Please give me your suggestions for improving my blog and how I can improve my writing style.

Patrick