Cooking with Kids
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Here’s a video of me cooking with some students at Oshima High School. Oshima is my smallest school this year, consisting entirely of only 12 third year students. It will close in spring of 2009. It’s sad, really. (But Iwagi High School had only 6 students, and closed this spring. It used to be my smallest school.) Anyway, time is precious here. Everybody is crazy friendly at this school - and they’re all really relaxed. We try our best in English classes, but I find myself doing things unrelated to English more often than not here, be it volleyball, mask making, or cooking. This video shows us making fried rice, lettuce soup, and kashiwa mochi (glutinous rice cakes filled with sweet red bean paste, wrapped in oak leaves). You can hear the kids cheering and jeering one another, see them hamming it up for the camera, and of course, practicing English. Took us about 2 hours to make and eat all the food. Good times.
In fact, if you listen carefully between 00:43 and 0:52, you hear a fascinating exchange. One girl yells “I love you Deas!” and the other one begins saying “Poo. Poopu. Poop. What was it again?” to which the first girl replies “Poop in Mr. Kenya’s pants!” Ha ha ha ha. Awesome. Mr. Kenya is their English teacher and a godsend of a JTE. But I don’t think he poops his pants. 