Brian's Japan Adventure

The final day for the Japanese students.

I arrived at school around 8:15 to find two of the students and the advisor eating breakfast in a hurry. They told me they hadn’t finished packing yet. The bus was supposed to leave at 9:00. No hurry! No stress! 45 whole minutes!

I walk over to their apartment, and I’m already halfway melted and sweaty before 9 am. It’s going to be another 90+ day. When I arrive, I see the students are exhausted from all the fun of the previous day:

But the bus is waiting:

This is about the last group shot that I could get before things broke up:

Or maybe I should say “broke down.” The crying began, and the tearful farewells went on a long time.

Here are Ryan and Alex, who have been extremely helpful with the program, taking the spotlight in the last photo of the program.

After much waving and crying, the bus pulled away, taking them to the airport. That was several hours ago, and I haven’t heard anything, so I can only assume they are sleeping away on their return flight.

The last full day for the students was the big “fun day” at King’s Island amusement park. I didn’t take my camera for a couple of reasons; it was 99 degrees and I just didn’t want to lug it around in the huge place.

Let me get right to the point, I don’t like heights, and wouldn’t ride most of the rides. I did go up the Eiffel Tower and rode the Train. Yay! All hail the brave American! And I walked about 300 miles in the 99 dgeree heat (before heat index). The students had a great time, but without pictures you are just going to have to take my word on it.

When we returned at the end of the long hot day, the students were looking forward to going inside and relaxing in their air conditioned apartments. Much to their surprise, the university maintenance crews had changed the lock and they couldn’t get in. This ended up costing us all an extra hour while we waited for someone to fix the problem, and it was the first time I’ve seen any of the Japanese students get cranky. I can’t blame them; I was cranky too by that time.

Today was the last day of class. After an hour or so of review, we had a graduation ceremony for the students.

The first photo is of Catherine, the other teacher involved. She handled most of the planning for the whole trip, as well as the majority of the classroom teaching. She’s great at this, and really got the students excited about pronunciation. Yes, really!

The students got a really nice certificate, and a small gift (a thesaurus and a notebook). They were thrilled:

Here’s one of Catherine with all the students. I’m the one behind the camera

And here are a few of me, just because I like looking at photos of me..

Afterwards, we went to the Outlet Mall in Jeffersonville. They wanted one last chance to shop, and they were able to shop till they literally dropped that day, since it was another scorcher at 96 degrees. Here is one student’s encounter with the local wildlife:

And another thing that involves our trip to the Air Force museum… I thought it was interesting to note what the students did and did not know. As I just said in the earlier post, they knew ALL ABOUT the nuclear bombs, but when we passed the Pearl Harbor exhibit, they didn’t look twice. Most of them knew nothing about it.

When we entered the “Cold War” section of the museum concerning the “conflict” between the US and USSR, they knew nothing about that. One of the American students with us is a Political Science major, and he did an excellent job of explaining it. I don’t they understood it even then. They had never heard of Capitalism or Communism. Maybe it’s just a matter of them having different terms for these ideas in Japan, but I don’t think so. It’s like they had never even heard the ideas before.

Another time, on another day, someone mentioned the Iraq War, and they knew nothing about that either. I guess I can understand that, since Japan isn’t really involved in Iraq very much, but not know about Pearl Harbor or Communism (with China right next door)?

Granted, these are mostly engineering and medical students, but it sounds like they have a fairly low knowledge of history. I’ll leave it to you to speculate on why that might be the case.

It’s amazing how easy it is to let blog postings get behind when you’re busy!

OK, Tuesday was once again my turn to teach in the classroom. We worked on pronunciation for the letters “R” and “L,” two sounds that are notoriously difficult for Asians.

We started off with a “Word Chain Game.” I showed a card to the student at one end of the table, and she whispers the sentence to the person nect to her, and on down the line until they all have a chance to say the sentence. The card with the starting sentence was simple enough “All roads lead to Rome,”  with only a couple of R’s and L’s. When the chain was finished, the sentence had about ten words, and made no sense at all. When I wrote the correct phrase on the board they all had a good laugh. Not even slightly close.

We then went around the room reading “Every week the garbage leaks,” a poem I snagged from Dave’s ESL Cafe. They had fun with that, but they tried to pronounce the words carefully. I then handed out a pretty long list of “minimal pair” words using R and L, such as Light/Right, Laser/Razor, and so on.  After I read them all to the students, we then went around the room, with each student pronouncing the words. Finally, we had a little fun playing “R and L Bingo.” I supplied a blank Bingo card, and they randomly filled in words from the list we used earlier. I then randomly read words from the sheet, usually needing to pronounce the word a couple of times for them to catch the difference. If they had the word on their bingo card, they would cross it off. I gave out a couple of little prizes, and they really liked it.

Toward the end of class, I handed out blank sheets and had them write questions for me on it. Anything: personal about me, about the university, Ohio, USA< or whatever. Then they fold over the sheets and hand them to me, which I then shuffle and read through. We did this last time too, and since they knew how it would work, the questions just keep getting better.  The most interesting (to me) question this time was “What is your blood type?”  Apparently, this is a big deal in Japan, and they try to separate people on their blood types, much like we do with horoscope/zodiac signs. People with type “A” are one personality, “B” is another, and so forth.  Fun stuff!

After lunch we went to the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Museum, which is now names the National Museum of the United States Air Force. They were very interestingall of this, especially since some of them are engineering students.  Even the ones who were not interesting in the planes payed close attention in this area. This is Boxcar, the plane that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.

Here is a replica of the “Little Boy” bomb. There was also one of “Fat Man” but I couldn’t get close enough for a good photo.

Later in the day, we walked through the more modern displays, including these:

And

Notice a pattern here?

Surprisingly, the room with THESE didn’t much attention:

Yes, these are actual nuclear ICBM’s that have been put on display.

My own favorite section was the stuff about the space program. Since this is not a NASA museum, but rather USAF, there really isn’t much. But they did have the original Apollo 15 re-entry vehicle:

And one the way out, we all stopped for some fun with our cameras:

Don’t ask about the sunglases; it’s some kind of “Japanese Thing” right up there with the “V” thing they do with their fingers. No one can explain it.