Eduventure: The AR Edition - School Chat

I would frankly not be surprised if there were shady ways to get a license in Japan. It's such a damned pain in the butt and I'm glad that two years of a Japanese license qualifies me to swap it over, no problems, for a New Zealand license if/when I move back home.

Also I made that initial post after a really tense meeting with the vice principal at my school re: a truly awful teacher who transferred into the English department, who I sometimes vent about on IRC after an (invariably) crappy class with her where I mostly feel bad for the students afterward.

That's a downer, though, so! Let me tell everyone instead that my kids are great; they're more relaxed around me and will even humour me when I try and get them to think through English questions.

Japanese, like English, has loan words from a bunch of different countries and cultures; unlike English, it's got a separate alphabet for loan words (katakana). This is especially the case in cuisine, as Japan traded with a bunch of different countries before English-speaking colonies made contact.

When I asked some of my first years during cleaning time (who answered "how are you" with "very very hungry") what they had for lunch, they declared "pan". Once I explained that in English, that meant "frying pan" ("furaipan") and we had a different word in English for bread, they spent some time puzzling it through (I gave them hints). It wasn't "bake", and it wasn't "breakfast", but they got there eventually!

Basically my kids are great and I'm glad that, for now, I don't have to worry about how they score on tests or exams or what the fuck ever.