P.E. in Japan is awesome!

I just watched a 研究授業 (kenkyuu jugyou), a special observation lesson where a teacher-in-training taught a class.  It was a P.E. class, and it was so cool!  I had never in my two years here actually watched an entire P.E. class, and now I have an example of great physical education.  I wish my gym classes had been like the ones they have here in Japan.

Okay, lemme 'splain.

First, a little context.  As I've seen, gym classes are generally split up by gender so only girls have classes with girls and boys with boys.  Also, P.E. is a serious class here treated like any other class, and P.E. teachers get a lot of respect.  Often, P.E. teachers are the ones who are given the role of disciplinarian and are seen as moral role models for all the students.  They usually are super involved in students' lives and scold them when they act out whether or not it's during their class and praise them for the good they do, again, whether or not it's during their class.  It's really nice.  And, I feel like students here are very well-rounded since they are educated in the basic subjects, a foreign language, physical education, music and art, and morality.  Very "Renaissance Man" or polymath.  I think it's an ideal we humans should really all strive for.

Anyways, so the lesson I went to.

I went to book club

This past weekend I attended a book club meeting for which we had to read N.P. by Banana Yoshimoto.  It was a'ight.  I don't know if this was the best book to read from Banana, and I felt like people had more complaints than anything.  They especially didn't like that there wasn't really an ending or resolution.  The book just ends, which doesn't surprise me but that's only because I've read quite a few books by Japanese authors on my own and via university classes.

The book club has a history of reading strange and unsatisfying books by Japanese authors, (wow that sound terrible... I don't mean that all books by Japanese authors are terrible!  They just happen to choose not so great ones...) which is one of the reasons I haven't gone since the first time I went after reading Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.  So, I'm actually really surprised that members were still shocked and annoyed by the lack of a traditional resolution seen in Western stories.  The thing is, Japanese stories don't usually follow the Western tradition that has a beginning, climax, and resolution...you know, that triangle.

Here's that triangle for clarification:

Music for the kiddies

Every month now I put up a handful of song recommendations on the English board in the English classroom at my work.  Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, One Direction, Carly Rae Jepson, and a few others are quite popular among my middle schoolers, but I really want to try to expose them to more music than just that.  I also want to try Kpop with them, ha ha, but that's probably an already hard-to-justify endeavor.

Anyways, I spend some of my down time at work browsing the UK's and US's top 40's charts and other music sites to keep up with what's popular and screen options for my recommendations.  There's a lot of music that becomes popular with the kiddies, but omg, some of that music is soooo inappropro for young teeny boppers.