I (finally) start teaching!

After 3 weeks I finally begin teaching, and my first school is tiny. Very tiny. 27 students make up the total school - 12 in the third year, 9 in the second and 6 in the first. It really is a fantastic school - a little out of the way in the mountains, but the drive to work and back home everyday was lovely, going through the mountains. Yoshino JHS is a lovely school, the kids are so friendly, as are the teachers. They made me feel very welcome and it was a great place to start my work as an Assitant Language Teacher, towards the end of the two weeks I got the jist of my job pretty well, and I think the kids liked me - I think its hard to win some of them over after they had such a good JET beforehand (he stayed three years, so the older ones especially would know him pretty well!)There is a fantastic music teacher at the school - and the first Japanese person to know my favourite composer Francis Poulenc, we were both very excited so we did the geeky musical thing of sharing CDs and sheet music to look at and listen to. The magical thing was that whilst neither of us had a very great grasp of each others language, we still managed to communicate well enough and establish a nice friendship.The other amazing thing about the school is that because there are so few pupils, they HAVE to do sports and they HAVE to do music activities too! So on certain days the girls all play Basketball and are very good at what they do, and the boys play Volleyball and have one of the strongest teams in the area. As well as that, they ALL sing! All the girls and all the boys - and they all enjoy it. They do some pretty hard stuff too - and it is so fascinating to listen and learn about Japanese composers that we don’t hear about at all in the UK. The Japanese language lends itself quite well to singing, but because of the different script ひらがな (hiragana) - it makes it a little harder to read and sing. Kanji is the hardest script to learn (thousands and thousands of Chinese characters, but hiragana is syllabic and pretty approachable - it could easily be translated into the roman alphabet and then we could have access to a whole new repetoire of some very interesting western influenced classical compositions!Sorry, I rant a bit….Yoshino was the first place where I had a proper time after school to practise the piano, a Yamaha baby grand - I played for about an hour - it was great but made me miss having easy access to a piano - in the space of about 2 months now, I’ve only been able to play on a piano 3 or 4 times :-S!