random thoughts and digesting free willy

Random things i've been meaning to post about:

uniforms: all students wear a t-shirt and shorts as undergarments. they then don't have locker rooms and instead change in the halls / rooms for PE class. in the colder months students also can throw on track-suits.
over that they have tennis shoes that are exactly the same except with a blue stripe for boys and red for girls. the girls wear a navy skirt or pants, white / soft-light blue shirt with red tie, sweater, and jacket (in the cold). boys wear black pants, button shirt and a black jacket that buttons up to the collar. seems like an awful lot of stuff to wear.

i'd say on average once a week a 5th period is substituted for something besides a regular class, examples include: 'new morals' study period where they reflect on how to be a moral person / maintain values or even playing traditional japanese card games.

students get up ridiculously early, some as early as 5 but i'd say most are awake at 6-6:30, have breakfast, and are out the door by 7 for school. Many live one stop away on the train and ride to here. While they aren't here terribly late, it's not uncommon for those that have club activities to have to wait for the 5:07 train to go home since the Iida line through Iijima doesn't come very often. Long days for the kids. Although not as long as the ones in Korea from what I hear.

Driving around Iijima this weekend I got to see just how dramatic the change in elevation can be, it makes for some great views. It's also just plain beautiful here.

Finally, we played a 'typhoon' game today, students draw a card from 3 different decks that correspond to pictures on the board and match up (i.e. ace from the blue deck goes with the picture w/ a 1 in the blue group, etc etc) to form sentences. The variety of pictures I have can make for some great sentences. Today we tried playing with 4 groups. there are points cards as well, with the Queen and King being 'typhoon' cards that allow you to wipe out another teams points if you get it right. playing with 4 teams, this made it awesome. Kasuga's team kept getting typhooned, even when they weren't in the lead. AWESOME. we had a good couple of laughs.

students are already preparing for their high school acceptance test for March 10th. (the 3rd years are i mean) It's a pretty big deal, comparative to the SAT / ACT but you only get to take it once :P

Finally, for lunch today, we had whale.