1998.06.26 FRI

Funny how my luck works. I just got a good bit of money wired from the States here - they finally got around to depositing it into my account yesterday. Last week, the exchange rate was 145 yen or so for each dollar. I just saw the news a few minutes ago that said there were 142 yen to the dollar. But when did my money get exchanged to yen and deposited? That's right, the yen was 132-137 yen all this week, until this morning. As if I wasn't mad enough that the yen got stronger just before I exchanged, it got weaker right AFTERWARDS...

Anyways, the past few days have been... well, weird. Tuesday there was a conference with some of the teachers from America - a whole room full of American teachers, along with the Japanese exchange students to America, a few Japanese school officials here, Dr. Spence, and a translator. Oh, and me and James too. It was... interesting. The people on either side of me kept leaning over and asking me questions about what the Japanese were doing... it was pretty... well, weird, because I'd been in Japanese culture for such a 'long' time that I'd gotten used to all its little quirks, I hadn't realized that other Americans hadn't.

Another slightly amusing side note was that one of the school officials would often speak WAY too long for the translator to keep up with, so it got to the point where whenever he spoke for maybe two minutes straight, and took a slight pause for breath, the translator tried to cut him off and say what she had written down, in English. But then the Japanese official cut her off by speaking again, because he wasn't finished yet. But after he talked for a bit longer, he had to turn around to ask the school president something, so the translator took her victory and went ahead and said what she had so far. Pretty much everyone in the room had a smile on their face after that incident...

The teachers from America, though, were pretty much all amazed at how 'civil' the classrooms in Japan were, in relation to the States, though. They kept saying how Japanese teaching must be 'like a dream' - in Japan, there is a lot of respect given to the teachers. Usually it's not the same in the States. Even though most of the Japanese attendants had not visited American classrooms, but most of the Americans had just got back from visiting Japanese classrooms, the Americans asked the Japanese what could be done to make the situation better. The only people who had anything to say on that were Dr. Spence, Dr. Yonekawa, James, Mayumi (who had just gotten back to Osaka Kyoiku after a year at ECU), and me. But then one of the Americans asked me, after the conference, why no one said anything when they asked for suggestions. I hadn't thought about it then, but why WOULD anyone have any suggestions if they'd never seen American classrooms?

Other than that conference, not really much else happened since then. Watched a few movies, got a couple new ideas for various projects of mine, but nothing real monumental. Any case, I'd better run - ja!