Random Notes (11/10)

After over two months of working at this middle school, I've finally bothered to ask for class rosters so I can attempt to learn some students' names. It's actually easier to learn names in Japanese middle schools because all the students have them written on their uniforms, but unfortunately they're in moonspeak (i.e. kanji), so I can only understand about one name in a hundred. But I got ahold of every class roster with the names written in the usual kanji and one of the simpler writing systems that I can actually read (hiragana or katakana). I need some seating charts to really make it worth using, but I have so much free time there that making those won't be a problem. One of the 3rd grade teachers already has them for half the 3rd grade classes, so there's 3/16ths of the school right there.

As for why I waited this long before trying to get rosters: I think the current theory is that it was a combination of thinking I could learn students' names just by talking to them (which is retarded in hindsight because how often do people say their own name to you? not to mention the fact that they say them way too fast for me to understand), and feeling like I wasn't going to be there long enough to learn very many names either way, so why bother? Except that's retarded too, because I can already recognize a fair number of the students (out of about 560) and I still have another 4+ months to go.

Oh, and I'm going to be adding a lot of stuff to my pictures website (http://picasaweb.google.com/smoothofhand) soon, such as: a bunch of pictures from my middle school, captions, and pictures from elementary schools that I'll be taking for the next couple of weeks. So be sure to take a few weeks off from work so you can furiously refresh the page waiting for each update as it comes.