Pachinko

I have now been introduced – thanks to my high school principal and vice principal – to the fabulously boring world of silver balls randomly spinning around a gaudy plastic machine…the noise which is generated by a whole room full of these is full swing is quite deafening, you would almost think yourself in some sort of third world sweatshop factory with 200 sewing machines! There is a trick to blocking the knob you use to control the power with which the balls are released – find the good position shove a 50 yen coin in behind it to keep it there and sit back and watch! Once you have had enough you take your plastic container of silver balls, pour them into a counting machine, get a ticket to say how much you have won, take it to the counter and get a token, put the token in another machine and redeem your cash!

Anyway, last week we also had a random couple of activities, none of which (in general) I seem to know about in advance, so it’s always a bit of a surprise…Monday was rice harvest with year 3-6 hehe lots of muddy gumboots…one poor girl the teacher would not help, basically just said ‘good luck with that’ as she continued to sink into the mud…this lasted about ten minutes until he finally helped her out.

Rice

Tuesday was a random meeting after lunch will all teachers – primary school and junior high school combined…which involved watching a demonstration class for years 1-6 and then discussing teaching methods…I of course was actively contributing to the meeting (not!) – fortunately the view of the mountains is lovely from the room where the meeting was being held. Tuesday was also being a softball coach for the primary kids who had a game of Saturday, quite hilarious considering I have not played softball since I was about 16 ! Wednesday at junior high school was spent sitting in the garden of a small local temple with the 35 little year 7 students, drawing/sketching what ever view we liked and then painting it – my pencil version is here, and I have now since coloured mine with colour pencils but have not taken a photo. Thursday afternoon’s event was a singing ‘konkuru’ concours!! Between year 7, 8 and 9. Very serious, even the gym floor had been covered by special mats and there were two local community members acting as judges. Each year sang two songs accompanied on piano by two pianists from that year also and conducted by a student from their year. They were very good, year nine won and I agree they had real feeling and harmony. The amount of time the junior high students spend out of what we would term ‘academic’ or class time is quite high (sports, cleaning, gardening, singing, painting, volunteering in the community, cooking) yet I would suggest that there is a significant amount of merit in forming students who are all rounders and can try their hand at anything (even though at times I know there are some students that do not like or will never be good at drawing for example and it may seem silly to force them to do it, the exposure to the activity whatever it may be is in itself a learning and character building experience upon which they may need to draw on later in life).