Day 8: New Kids Arrive

The first thing on tap for today was, you guessed it, a meeting! This was just a short meeting, though, the kind that I attend. We sometimes have these short meetings in the morning, but more often than not we have them about once a week in the afternoon. They only last about 10 minutes and are mostly for making announcements.  Such meetings probably wouldn't take place in an American school, because in America most announcements are passed on to teachers via internal email. Here, well, where things really aren't as high-tech as you'd expect them to be, there is no internal email, so we get quite a bit of paperwork in our mailboxes every day. When the written notices do not suffice, for whatever reason, we have these short meetings.

A little while later, it was time for an assembly in the gym, so that the returning students could meet the new teachers and staff members. The newbies were given a brief introduction (name, subject, former school), and then the newbies introduced themselves. The students also found out what teachers were assigned to what grade.

Lunch was back to normal today, which meant it wasn't very good. Inevitably, I don't like one of more items that are served and today was no exception (I didn't take any rice, I didn't have my miso soup, and I gave away a big tempura mushroom.)

Immediately after lunch, the new students began to arrive. The new "second-graders" (the second year junior-high students) helped the new "first-graders" (the new students) carry their belongings to their rooms, and about 30 minutes later there was a welcome ceremony in the dorm.


The rest of the day was spent setting up the gym for tomorrow's (school, not dorm) welcome ceremony.