I feel bad now.

I called home last night and had a chat with Steph, who was the only one home. She mentioned (more than once...) that I need to write more. She also said that Mum checks my blog every morning and every evening. So, that made me feel a little bad, and now I'm going to take a little time out of my busy schedule to write something.

I don't write much at the moment because all my writing effort is going into my uni work. When I have some spare time and I'm presented with the choice of a) uni work or b) blogging, then uni work is going to win. I'm working hard now because I've only got about a month left to go then it's all finished. Woo hoo! Kind of. I actually really enjoy what I'm studying. It's a real mix of stuff that's interesting and useful, stuff that's interesting but not useful, and a little bit of stuff that is neither interesting nor useful. For example, ask someone how many vowels their are in the English language and they'll probably say 5. Ask me and I'll tell you that there are over 20 (we only represent 5 of them in our alphabet), depending on which dialect of English you are speaking. How many consonants are there? Well, that also depends on what dialect you're speaking, but you'll certainly be surprised by the number of tricky ones there are. Consider the two words "this" and "think". You might be surprised to learn that the "th" in these two words is actually considered one consonant, not "t" and "h". You might also be surprised to learn that the "th" in "this" and the "th" in "think" are two completely different consonants. Why? Try saying these two words while touching your throat. The first "th" is voiced, which means the vocal folds are vibrating, while the second "th" in unvoiced. Ergo, two different consonants. How about this little bit of trivia. The most number of consecutive occurrences of the same word in a grammatical English sentence is 11. Here it is - "Tom, while Harry had had 'had', had had 'had had'; 'had had' had had the approval of the teacher". Interesting?

Anyway, even without studying my life is pretty busy at the moment. The annual basketball tournament is on at the start of next month, so we have training three nights a week. Last month was the junior-high school festival. The festival is basically a whole day of music, plays, skits, games and a bazaar. This is usually one of the highlights of the school year. Students will prepare weeks in advance, rehearsing every day before and after school. In most schools, students will be involved in a couple of the events. However, at the school in my town there are only about 20 students, so everyone pretty much has to be in everything. They might have a traditional drum performance, followed by a brass band performance, followed by a play, followed by... well, you get the idea. It's pretty tough on the students, so the teachers are encouraged to do something too. I mentioned that I might be open to the idea of doing something, and a few days later I was informed that I would be the frontman for a brand new band called "Jet Arrow". At that time, the band consisted of me and the school groundskeeper. I was supposed to play guitar and sing and he would play drums. Someone (not me) decided that the band was called Jet Arrow becuase my name started with J and the drummer's name started with A (Azuma). J.A. = Jet Arrow. I kicked up a bit of a fuss because I didn't want to sing (I can play guitar fine, but I'm a complete retard at playing and trying to hold a note at the same time). But, by now another member had been recruited (the P.E. teacher playing bass), the name had been changed to JRA (to include the R from the P.E. teacher's name) and someone (not me) had decided the song we would play ("Surrender", by Cheap Trick). I'd never heard the song (I was born in the 80's...), but I downloa... uh... legally purchased it and listened to it. It was actually quite easy to sing and play, so i gave it a thumbs up. We practiced for about a week, and had the song down perfectly. On the day of the performance, the other two were nervous. I wasn't so nervous because I'd seen what acts had come before us (umm... basically what you'd expect from a tiny country town). Our time came and we played ... a very average performance. Actually, it might have been good, I don't really know. Someone had been fiddling with our gear so my guitar was a little too loud and my vocal monitor was so low that I couldn't hear a thing. It's really hard to sing when you can't hear your own voice. Anyway, we tried, and that's what counts.

The only other big news around here is that it snowed last night. I wasn't really surprised, seeing as the weather has suddenly become very cold. In the space of a few days, it literally dropped from night time averages of around 12 or 13 degrees to averages of about 0. A few weeks ago, I mentioned to my class of first grade high schoolers (year 10) that the weather was getting cooler. One of the girls said "Oh, I can't wait for winter to come!". "Why? Do you like skiing?", I asked her. "No, I just think that winter is really romantic!", she said. About half the class agreed with her. "Oh yeah! It's so beautiful and romantic!". "I love winter". "Snow is great!".

Before I get to my response to her comment, let me explain something about the students at this school. Almost all the students are not from my town (in the year 10 class, none of the students are from my town). They are from other towns and cities around Hokkaido, and there's even one student from the main island, Honshu. Almost all the students that come to this school have either learning disabilities, social disabilities, or a lovely combination of both. Basically, they come here so that they can have one final chance at a semi-normal school life. They all live together in the school dormitory, which means that they are around each other 24-7. This forces them to build social skills. At school, the emphasis is taken off academics and put on learning useful stuff like gardening, farming, cooking etc. Grades are not so important, which is lucky for some. When the year 10 students arrived back in April, they were given the national standardised tests to judge their academic level. The average mark in English was about 6 or 7 (out of 60) and the average mark in math was about 3 (also out of sixty). The funny thing about this situation is that it actually seems to work. From a class of about 24, 2 or 3 students have dropped out. In six months, the rest of the students have gone from being a group of wild delinquents to a class of decent, friendly, mostly happy kids. I really enjoy teaching them, even though our English is class is usually about 10% English, 60% Japanese and 30% some strange English/Japanese hybrid. For example, take the simple question "How are you today?". I'll get a few normal English responses (I'm fine, I'm sleepy, I'm hungry etc.), some Japanese responses, and a whole bunch of weird responses (I'm juicy, I'm sexy, I'm ocean pacific peace (WTF??)). Anyway, the whole point of this paragraph is to highlight the fact that every single student in this class is from out of town, so they have never experienced winter here.

So, back to the comment - "I just think that winter is romantic!". When this one came out, the Japanese teacher and I looked at each other... (five second pause)... then pissed ourselves laughing. Oh man, I hadn't laughed that hard in quite a while. The students were all surprised. "Why are you laughing?", they asked us. "You'll find out in a month or two".

Let me explain. If 'winter = romantic', and 'romantic = a bunch of roses and some expensive champagne', then 'winter in my town = getting run over by a dump truck filled with roses, having the truck dump 10 tonnes of roses on your dying body, and then, while crawling to the hospital, accidentally falling into a swimming pool of Dom Perignon and drowning'. Yes, the appropriate adjective for winter here would probably be 'extreme'.

I'm tired now, so I'll finish by posting some pictures from my summer holidays. I'll try and add comments and continue the story next time.