Summer Seminar

Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday I helped out at Ishikawa Prefecture's English Summer Seminar. It's been going on for 32 years now, and took place in a camp in the Noto Peninsula. We could see the sea from the cafeteria.

Students came from high schools all over the prefecture. They were split off into randomized groups and encouraged by a profusion of ALTs and English teachers to speak only in English as often as they could. We kept them occupied with hours of conversation practice games and a full day to prepare a skit in English based on randomly assigned genres, props, and characters.

My group of eight students (which I shared with three ALTs and two senseis) had the following draw: romance, a lei and an oven mitt, Hillary Clinton, and the proverb "there's no smoke without fire." The ALTs left the students to brainstorm ideas on their own, and while I was sitting with other ALTs chatting, a sensei came out to ask me a question.

It went something like this: "Ehto, Lauren-sensei, the students have a question about the Clintons. They heard that Bill Clinton had some sort of scandal. Could you explain it to us, please?"

So, using very simple English, I had to explain the Monica Lewinsky debacle to a room full of 15 year old Japanese girls. Another sensei helped by drawing a diagram.

The resulting skit involved Hillary Clinton catching Bill and Monica in Hawaii, fighting Monica, dragging Bill back to America, poisoning him, and running off with the cook. This was all their idea. We won funniest skit.

Over the course of the other games, I made friends with the students. They were shy about speaking English at first, but the games really helped. My personal favorite was a game where the students had to describe a trend, movie, art form, or food of Japan in English to the ALT, who then had to describe it to a Japanese teacher who left the room. The Japanese teacher then had to guess the original object. Explaining unaju when you don't know how to say "eel" in English is apparently difficult ("it is like a fish...but not a fish--it's like a snake?") and also apparently hilarious when the ALT pretends she has absolutely no idea what you're talking about.

I was kind of sad to go, honestly, because it was so much fun and I got to know both my seminar students and the members of my school's English club pretty well. I won't see the club until after the prefectural debate on the 23rd (of which I am a judge!) but I promised them a party with American snacks and a movie as a celebration of being done with said debate. I keep hearing it's stressing them out, and I feel so bad for not being able to help out with prep. But the party idea made them all really excited, so yay for that.

Well, off to go grocery shopping so I can bring a lunch with me tomorrow to Prefectural Orientation. More on that can of worms later--for now I can just say that my time would be better spent at my school even though I officially have nothing to do there but check on the English club and study Japanese.