Teaching & Learning.

Last week, after trimming the few pots I was allowed time to throw the week before, Mary and I stood around a sturdy wooden table (the same light, glowing color as the rest of the studio), loaded down with large, plastic covered logs of soft red clay, trying to communicate with the guys that hang out at the studio with us. Well, someone needs to supervise the Americans and they had about five hundred tiny vessels to throw before the end of the month and we're strange if not entertaining. Shouhei made iced Jasmine tea and brought over some little snacks in a bowl his father threw or his mother painted or someone related to him processed in some way. The flavor of the dark colored, airy cookies reminded me of hotcakes and then maple syrup and then trees and mud and boots and those parts of woods in Minnesota I came to know over years of sloshing around with fifteen to thirty sap fingered seven year olds waddling behind and around me. But this was brown sugar and sugar cane, Masashi indicated with his just-short-of-comprehensive and well-paced English. While communicating, we used our hands a lot (which I might do anyway) and Shouhei has kindly learned to supply me with paper and pen to take notes of Japanese words I would otherwise forget the moment they're spoken. Over the last few weeks Shouhei's English has improved immensely (from nothing our first visit to broken but understandable exchanges yesterday). Mary and I, however, have remained relatively stagnant with our choice phrases and confused faces. After our first cookie and before our second, Mary “let it slip” that I studied Japanese for more years than I care to mention here (mostly because all evening I had been subtly goading her to reveal her crush on a certain handsome twentysomething Japanese man sooner than later). I studied the language slowly in high school, but the program died by my senior year. A few rickety semesters at the beginning of my college career were as quickly forgotten as those of secondary school. The boys found this news both fascinating and hilarious, seeing as I had up till now said as much in Japanese, if not less, than my blond haired American friend, who had only studied for four months while abroad in Tokyo. But after discussing my reasons for long ago unusual studies and current country visits deeper than before, they lightened my embarrassment with one fact that held more meaning than intended: “It's okay. You know, we all have to study it for six years before we graduate high school and many of us as adults don't know any English.”



I'm doing my best to learn Japanese. The Vice President's wife has recently offered a weekly tutoring session that will certainly aid the process I had otherwise decided would happen through personal study and experience.

I'm doing my best to teach English, which has more to do with conveying the joys of crazy people (like me and my love of pockets and trees, which everyone learns during introductions), understanding the difficulties of teenagedom, correcting insightful extra-curricular essays, discussing cultural differences, pronouncing sentences translated into English from Japanese (which always retain a few beautifully foreign sentiments) slowly and carefully, and being the non-boring/friendly moment of the day (I'm not great at this yet, but I'm working on making the fool in me as public in school as it is outside of school. For example, they got a kick out of my ninja moves last Wednesday. One student helped complete my Halloween outfit with a throwing star (shuriken=“hand hidden blade”) origamied out of his homework paper, for which I repaid him (and the rest of the class) with a glimpse of my quick and stealthy/probably shameful skills.). Many of these kids work really hard. Many don't. Some of them will use English later on, but for those whose lives it trickles away from, as Japanese did from mine until now, I want to make sure they get something out of my part in their day.

Teaching and learning is about communicating, however it's accomplished. Especially for those new to the field(s).

A little boy and his mother stood beside me while we waited for our turn at the crosswalk as I was riding my bike through the city the other night. The boy liked the flashing light attached to my handlebars. A smile from me spurred his mother's inquiry. Between our broken uses of each-other's languages, it was made known that one could buy it at a bike shop and it is slightly expensive.

I met a junior high student named Hallelujah at the English Society Halloween party last week. He is very sociable and speaks better English than I do with a better American accent. His face is round and kind. Halloween is not a big deal around here, but it is a bit of American culture some people like learning about.

I visited a renovated Ryukyu Kingdom castle on Saturday (please see 'my photos' in the links section for visuals), located in Shurijo Castle Park. It is within biking distance, at the top of a hill, looking down at Naha City. On my way there I was stopped by a colorful parade. After making my way to the castle and walking around the complex (it was the royal and administrative center for many hundred years—starting around the fourteenth century—then it was nearly decimated during the second world war, and finally, reconstruction began exactly fifteen years prior to the day of my visit) for a few hours, I hopped back on my bike, excited for the smooth ride down the long hill. There was still music and dancing in the streets. I recognized a teacher from school, but I couldn't quite place him as I guided my bike around the crowd, so he initiated a wave and we smiled and continued on our separate but intersecting journeys. (We gave each other nods of acknowledgment at this morning's teacher's meeting. It was him afterall.) On the way home, I stopped by the Tsuboya district where they were celebrating a few hundred years of pottery business on the same cobbled street. There was also traditional music and dancing there and I exchanged some busied salutations with friends. Later that night, I could see fireworks emerging from behind some faraway tall concrete buildings out my apartment window. There was more drumming the following morning.





It's been great to hear from ya'll. Please keep me updated on your one wild and precious life.