I’m in the News Again!
I made it into the newspaper again. This time, not for an art show, but still I feel a little famous, as sometimes shopkeepers tell me that they saw me in the newspaper. Funny how foreigners really do stand out that much here in Fukui.
Anyway, this article is about a Christmas event I did. I dressed up as Santa for a bunch of latchkey kids (about 60) and explained to them about Santa Claus, taught them to sing Silent Night in English, helped them make Christmas cards, played games, and gave out some American Christmas candy I found on Amazon.com. At first I thought it would an English lesson kind of event, but I found out the week before that I would be doing it all in Japanese… for 2 hours… So I was pretty nervous and had to do a lot of extra preparation. In the end, though, my preparation paid off, and there was no problem at all teaching in Japanese. Mainly because Japanese kids, while still kids, are so much better behaved than American kids of the same age.
That is really neat! You should be proud of this accomplishment. I can’t imagine leading a group that size of any age or nationality!
Well to be fair I had a *lot* of help from the staff there. There’s no way I could have controlled them all by myself. Back when I was teaching English to kids it would get out of hand at around 8 kids… And my Japanese is good enough to chat, but not good enough to properly reprimand bad kids or keep them in order. I’d probably botch things up royally. But it was a very good experience!