Day 5: Intro to School Lunch

Today, the teachers had some more meetings to attend, which once again meant that I was free.

Any time there are meetings, I am presented with a Catch-22 of sorts: I can go to the meetings and be bored to death, since I probably won't understand much, or I can skip the meetings and alienate myself from the group to some degree. I always choose the latter.

As far as I can tell, I'm not even expected or supposed to attend meetings, because the junior high vice principal always even goes so far as to ask me to stay in the teachers' office when the other teachers go upstairs to the conference room. To stay within the loop, however, I at least do my best to read through the handouts from the meetings. (Sometimes, whoever passes them out neglects to put a copy of them in my mailbox, but I have my ways of getting my hands on them.)

Besides going to the meetings, most of the teachers spent some more time organizing their "work stations." Space is really limited, so the teachers have to get fairly creative to find room for all of their stuff. Some of them have so much stuff stacked on, under, and next to their desks, that they barely have room for their laptops. The luckier teachers, like me (I suppose), are in the back (or the front) of the office. Since there is no one sitting behind us, we tend to place things along the wall behind us, even though that means we are blocking access to the mostly unused storage spaces there. Despite the semi-cramped quarters, no one seems to complain.

About the only other newsworthy event of the day was lunch. Lunch usually pretty much sucks, but eating in the school cafeteria at least gives me a chance to hang out with some students and either teach them some English or practice my Japanese.

Today's lunch was special, however, because it was the first lunch of the school year, which meant it was the first lunch for the new faculty members. I guess the meal is sort of like a "Welcome to The Cafeteria" meal, which is a good thing, but whenever we have it, I actually feel sorry for the new teachers. You see, the food that the cafeteria staff serve for this special meal tends to be much, much, much better than normal (with regards to both flavor and eye appeal!), so these poor souls probably think they're going to get similar food every time they have lunch in the cafeteria. Little do they know that, in fact, the food won't be that good probably until the same time next year. (I'm telling you, even the tofu, which I'm normally not really a fan of, tasted really good.)