Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

I have finished my student teaching experience at Katoh Schools in Numazu, Japan.  It has been a long and fruitful experience, and I cannot believe that I am at the end.  Looking back, this has been a time of growth and change and also served to solidify the concepts and educational theory that I learned back in my Cornell methods courses.  I have grown so much, and now I feel prepared to continue my journey in becoming a teacher.

The sun has set on my fellowship!

Throughout my placement I have been faced with a myriad of challenges and opportunities.  I have lived in a new country, adapted to a different culture, and lived with different Japanese families in their homes.  This has been an excellent experience, culturally, and was at times fascinating and delightful, and at other times challenging and frustrating.  Overall, in my time living with Japanese families I have learned of the power of communication and kindness, and these experiences have instilled a new sense of cultural awareness in me.

At school I have completed student teaching in an Immersion program at a private Japanese school.  I have been surrounded by Japanese and foreign teachers from all around the world.  From both my mentor teachers and the many other amazing educators at this school I have learned techniques, tips, and tricks of the trade that I would never have encountered back home.  It has been incredible getting to know them outside of the school world as well, and I know I have made some great social connections to last.

In the third grade class I have learned the names of 40 Japanese children and gotten to know them.  They have been an inspiration to me, with both their positive and negative behaviors, and we have challenged one another to be better in all we do.  I enjoyed my time on full control of classes, practicing my new skills in a unique setting.  Seeing the techniques I learned at Cornell tie together with new techniques learned here was a rewarding experience.  My biggest challenge and area of growth was certainly classroom management, and this area is now something I would consider second nature to me.

There were often unpredictable and spontaneous events during my journey.  We often had days off from school for various reasons, and throughout this whole term my mantra has been ‘flexibility.’  Participating in different school events, like the bazaar, the staff meetings, professional development workshops, and school parties has been wonderful, and my colleagues certainly made me feel at ease from the beginning.

In my time spent outside of school I was also lucky to be able to visit numerous locations around the Numazu area.  From grape picking in a nearby prefecture, to spending a drizzly Saturday at Tokyo Disneyland, I have seen so much and enjoyed the hospitality of the Japanese people.  It has been wonderful experiencing this new culture, and I believe it is only the beginning of my exploration of other peoples and cultures of the world.  Also, experiencing another culture has given me a newfound perspective upon my own culture, and I will be so excited to be back in the United States with a new viewpoint.

This fellowship has been one amazing opportunity, and I would like to express some final thanks for all the people who made this possible.  Here is a big thank you to R.J. Holmes and the fellowship program, the Mansfield Foundation, and the Cornell Department of Education including Kerry Bostwick, Gayle Luck, Diane Harrington, and all the other people who helped me to experience this placement. 

I will never forget my time here at Katoh Schools, and it has been a wild ride that I have enjoyed immensely.  I feel confident as I move towards beginning my career as a fulltime teacher, wherever I may end up.

Thank you to everyone who followed this Blog, it was a great outlet for me throughout this time, and it was great to know people were following along and able to share my experience!

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

It is week 14 here in Numazu, Japan, and I have officially finished my fulltime teaching.  It was an incredible experience, and I cannot believe the amount of growth and change that has taken place in my life.  In this short time I have had to transition from a college student into a teacher and member of adult society, and I have welcomed the change.  I have only one week left, and I am spending my time assisting in the classroom, observing other classrooms, and wrapping up paperwork for Cornell.  I have a full load of responsibility waiting for me back in the States, and I have some time to reflect upon my teaching before tackling this next challenge.

We have moved on from Magnets to Wind and Elastic Power! Here are the students' wind powered cars.

In the classroom this final week I finished the Triangles and Magnets units in math and science respectively.  The Triangles unit was overall a fun and easy unit to teach, and the students handled the concepts with ease from the beginning.  They did exceedingly well on the unit evaluation, and I know they will carry this knowledge into their future math units and grades.  The Magnets unit was also a fun unit, and the kids were ecstatic when I said they could take their magnet kits home.  They mastered many complicated concepts, and I am so proud of the knowledge they are taking away from this unit about attraction and the properties of magnets.

In English I had a several day project where the kids were designing and creating posters.  The posters were all about what makes a good friend.  The students have been a little antsy lately, and I think they are itching for winter break.  This activity was a good reminder of how we should treat one another, and gave the kids food for thought on how to be good friends to one another.

I have enjoyed teaching these students, and have made close connections with them.  As I pull away and am teaching less and less, they are growing aware of my impending departure.  It will be a sad parting, but I we all have grown for the experience, and the kids are very understanding.  I have warded off home-sickness so far, but it is finally hitting me as the holidays draw near.

Thankfully I was able to celebrate an American holiday with the teachers: Thanksgiving!  Dr. Bostwick hosted a party for all the teachers, and even though we had school on that Saturday (making up for our swine flu quarantine) we all made the trek to Yugawara and enjoyed an evening of festivities.  It was a nice experience, and I enjoyed my time with the teachers outside of the school grounds.

My host family placement is still going strong, and I am truly thankful for their hospitality and generosity.  As my time draws to a close, it is nice to have their familiar faces around me, and good to have a family away from home.  The dogs have also grown attached to me like the students, and I may have to steal one of them away in my suitcase!

I will enjoy my remaining time here in Japan, but I have started longing for America again.  It will be great to be with friends and family once more.

Thanks for following my adventures at Katoh Schools,

Stay tuned for my last Blog next week!

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

Another week has passed, and my full time teaching is coming closer to the end.  It is amazing to think I won’t be here to start another unit with the kids.  I have grown attached to them, and it will be a sad day when I leave Katoh School.  For now however, we continue to express joy and frustration with one another, showing me I have formed genuine teacher student relationships.  We have fun classes and we have difficult classes, but all in all it feels good to be a part of the third grade.  I have been working with my mentor teachers to reflect upon my teaching style and one comment that really stood out to me was that Katoh School has done me a lot of good.  That is certainly an understatement!

A nice shot of our Math and Science room, full of the kids' work.

Being a teacher for these students and a colleague with this international faculty has defined my identity as a teacher, and I would even say helped in my development as a young adult finding my place in the working world.  I have made lasting friendships, and will cherish my remaining time left with everyone.  But enough mush!  Let me explain what was on the workload this week.

I have completed my display wall showing our field trip last month to the Hakone Open Air Museum.  It was really fun and challenging to pick the photos and have all the students pictured while showing the range of the museum’s art and the events of our trip.  I chose to do a story-style display that starts at the beginning and follows a dotted line to each picture with its caption.  The captions tell our story through the museum, and it will be a great opportunity for the students to show off their English to their parents during open house.  The kids showed immediate interest in the walls, and the day after I finished it, they were lurking all about in the morning instead of rushing out to play dodge ball and soccer before classes begin.

This is part of the new wall display I made!

English class has been creative lately, and the students have had a lot of opportunities to demonstrate their writing skills.  We even spent a day this week wrapping up our unfinished stories, and I was impressed with their ability to work hard and produce some great English writing.

In math class we have been trucking along in Triangles, and it is a really fun unit with a lot of neat activities.  The kids really understand the concepts, and it is hard for me to stump them.  I know they are ready for the test which is coming soon.  In Science we are about to wrap up our Magnets unit, and it was another fun unit with a lot of hands-on learning.  The students are a little too playful with their magnets though, and some have turned up in other classes…

I had a chance to be especially playful this past week with my host family.  The daughter had a friend over on Saturday, and I enjoyed playing the Nintendo Wii with them, and acting silly like a kid myself.  It has been a great fit with this family, and I feel like the long-lost big brother.  We had no school this past Monday and the family and I all went to a fellow Japanese teacher’s house for a barbecue.  It was a great day with some marvelous views of Mt. Fuji and great grilled meats.  There were more little kids to play with too, and I was tired when I got back home for an evening of finishing up lesson plans.

As I start out a new week, I am finishing up my full-time teaching and still can’t believe where the time has gone.

Don’t get too comfortable America,

I will be back before you know it!

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

Can you believe it is week number 12 here in Numazu Japan?  It feels like I just stepped off the plane and here I am in my fulltime teaching, actually looking towards the end of my journey.  It has been a wonderful one, and I want to pause and take the opportunity to thank everyone once again who has made this possible.  Thank you Cornell Fellows Program for funding my fellowship, thank you Cornell Education department, Gayle, Kerry, Diane, et al. for your spectacular preparation during methods, and thank you to all those who have supported me and kept me going back in the States and here in Japan!

Can you guess where I went this past weekend?

This past week I completed another whole week of full-time teaching and boy was it exhausting!  I was go, go, go from Monday, and in fact it had been a while since we had a full week due to all the different events in this term.  Add the swine flu quarantine a couple of weeks back and you can imagine we did not have a week longer than three days for about a month.  Now we are back into the swing of things and it is great to settle into being the teacher.  I admit it is not so easy, and I am relying upon my mentors for strength and advice on how to be my best.  The kids have started to test me somewhat, and I am laying down the law!  No more mister nice guy, I have to be their strong leader.

In Math we are about to take our division with large numbers test, and will soon move onto triangles.  It will be a nice change of pace to try something new, and I know that we are all ready to be done with division for a while.  We finished our English reader’s theater unit, and the kids had a blast putting the show on for one another.  They learned a lot and this week we are going to be doing some reflecting upon the experience.  In science we are going ahead with Magnets, but unfortunately this week we have no time for science.  That is because it is parent conference time, and we only have three periods a day.  So much for a full week of school!

This is a time when Ms. Walsh, Mr. Thorpe and our Japanese teaching partner are busy having interviews with parents in the afternoons.  I am getting lots of other work finished like working on a new display wall, organizing some of the science materials, reflecting upon my teaching so far, and even doing a little professional reading.  It is nice to be able to be at school with no kids sometimes, and I get a lot done each day.  I think it will turn out to be an amazingly productive week, and after this it is only two weeks of teaching, and then I will do some more reflecting and head back to the United States.

Along with my teaching this week, I was able to spend a wonderful, albeit rainy, day at the happiest place on Earth.  You guessed it, Tokyo Disneyland!  My host family and I set out bright and early at 5 AM on Saturday to beat the crowds, and drove up to Tokyo.  I slept the way in, and then the fun began at 8:00.  It was great to be a kid again and experience all the same rides I remember from the American parks.  We had lots of junk food, and one fun snack in particular was soy sauce flavored popcorn.  At around 7 in the evening we got in the car where I promptly fell asleep for the whole ride home.

Cinderella's Castle beautiful and majestic!

After the fun Saturday I slept off the stress of a long and fun week and slept in on Sunday.  Refreshed, I have started the next week and am excited to get so much done in these parent conference afternoons.

Look for the next Blog in another week, and I will be that much closer to the end of my amazing journey!

Unbelievable.

Paul Worrell ’10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

It has been another busy week at Katoh Schools, and these past days have been quick, with the third grade catching up for lost time.  We have had a lot of testing, and I am impressed with how well the students handled it.  They do enjoy taking tests here, and they relish the chance to make a perfect score.  In science we have started our new unit: Magnets! and it was fun to start the unit off by giving them magnet kits to explore.  Using their magnets and other tools, the students were able to form hypotheses and test them as they uncovered everything magnetic.  Giving them a chance to play and discover was great, and I hope to give them more opportunities to construct their own knowledge.

In English we are full speed ahead on our reader’s theater, and the students have taken on their animal personae from the story.  We practice every opportunity we get, and have also used the story for our other English activities.  Our spelling this week is all words from the jungle and the story, and their weekend journals were imaginative adventures as if they were their animals.  Our spider wall to go with the main character, Anansi, is complete and it really showcases the students’ creativity.

A section of the classroom, showing our finished spider wall!

Math is where we are really rushing to catch up, and the students have a bit of a heavier workload each night.  At Katoh Schools we always give math homework each night, but it is usually only one sheet.  For this week, most nights have a front and a backside, so I am being careful to remind the students to do BOTH sides.  Our unit is Division with large numbers, and the students are mastering their division skills.  The lessons I have made present different division strategies, while incorporating review topics from other units.  It is fun for both me and the kids to remember what we did in Length and Large Numbers as we tackle division story problems and the like.

In general at school we are really having fun, and it feels very natural to be the lead teacher for all of these different subjects.  I have had about a week of full-time teaching, and it will continue all this month.  It feels great to be in charge, and I really feel like a part of the school.  This is paralleled in my host family, and I feel I have fit into the home nicely.

This last host family has perhaps the least amount of English of all my homes, but this has been great as I continue to learn some Japanese.  We often speak in a mixed bi-lingual way, and we even have some fun jokes going.  The many dogs at the house are a constant cause for fun, silliness, and sometimes messes.  But they are quite loveable, and I enjoy spending time with them.  The daughter and I are having fun playing together, and we have a lot of common interests.  She has perhaps the best English of all the students I have lived with, so she acts as translator a lot.

At the Hakone-en aquarium were many beautiful animals, like this lovely duck.

Last weekend, we all went to Hakone, a mountainous region a 30 minute to an hour trip away from Numazu.  We spent the day taking in the views, and going to an Aquarium and shopping complex.  The animals were delightful, and to get around this area we had to take a ferry.  I took some great pictures from the ferry, and this time of year the leaves are amazing in Japan.  Along with the pretty leaves, however, the temperature finally dropped, and it has been cooler recently.  I have appreciated the change, as summer seemed to carry on quite long enough for me.

A Japanese Maple, showing its Autumn leaves.

As this week continues I will keep teaching full-time, and surely have more fun with my host family.  Keep reading to learn what I will experience next!

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

This past week at Katoh Schools has been about new experiences and beginnings.  I have taken over the classroom as the head teacher, experienced H1N1 Influenza quarantine, and moved to my third and final host family.  It has been a long and exciting week, and it feels like forever since my trip to the Safari just one week ago with my last family.  I really enjoyed my time with them, and it was a sad parting after only two weeks.  As with all the special people I have met here in Japan, I plan to visit them before I return to the United States.  In fact it is only about a month and a week until that sad day, and I plan to continue to enjoy my time teaching here in Japan to the fullest.

From my new host family's home you can see Mt Fuji so well!

Teaching full time has been satisfying already, although it is a lot of work preparing all the lessons!  The school is set up so that the units are already in place, but the teachers must adapt and create their own lessons to suit these themes.  In English, however, it is not so strict and merely includes language functions to be covered while the context is completely up to the teacher.  Because of this I was able to do whatever unit I wanted.  Mr. Thorpe suggested turning one of the stories in the textbook into a reader’s theater and I loved the idea.  I have been enjoying the process of developing the overall unit, and starting this week the students will get their roles and start practicing.  Through this unit I will cover several English topics and my hope is the story will tie everything together, encouraging motivation and enthusiasm.  In Math I am teaching a unit about division with large numbers, and in science I am starting a new unit about magnets soon.

My takeover in the classroom has already had some obstacles however.  Last Wednesday there was an alarming amount of children gone from our grade (around five or six suddenly).  We learned that several of them had been diagnosed with the H1N1 influenza, and at Katoh if six students have it in one grade, that grade is closed for several school days.  Needless to say, after another day we were officially closed in third grade.  I had from Friday until Tuesday off, so quite the long weekend!  With this time I got ahead in my lesson planning, but not too far ahead as this closing put us behind anyway.  Also, during this time I transitioned to my newest host family.

My new family is wonderful, and right away it was clear that I was in for new experiences.  They live closer to downtown Numazu in a high rise building that the family owns.  After getting out of the car, all one has to do is take the elevator up the fifth floor where the front door is.  We live in a spectacular multi-level, spacious apartment with many balconies overflowing with flowers and plants.  There is even access to the roof, and the views of Numazu are amazing including an amazing view of Mt. Fuji on clear days!

These are some of the mosaic tiles the children made.

My new family is that of a fifth grade immersion student.  She and I have a lot of fun, and we aren’t alone.  The student lives with her mother and grandmother, and they all have five dogs and a cat!  The dogs are just so cute and playful, and it is wonderful to have pets around once more.  With the family I have been exposed to more of Numazu, and even went to a convention of sorts for children doing crafts and the like.  I was able to make a mosaic picture, and the daughter of the host family even entered hers in a competition.  Also, I ran into some of my students competing in a robot soccer tournament.  It was a great day of fun, and I expect more fun experiences will happen with this family.

I found some of my students competing in a robot competion.

After this quarantine clears, I can only hope that the school days will become more regular, but regardless I will continue to cope with any obstacles.  Keep on following the Blog to see what happens to me next!

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers, 

Another week has passed for my fellowship at Katoh Schools here in Numazu, Japan.  It is unbelievable how the time passes, while I still experience so much in only one week.  This has been another week of transitions and big events, so there is a lot for me to tell you!  Not only have a moved to a new host family, but we have had a major event at school, and have finished our big portfolio projects in all classes.  With my new family, I have had some amazing experiences simply being in Japan as well, so overall it was a great week full of excitement.

The leaves are changing, and fall is surely here in Japan.

At the beginning of this week I went to my next home stay, this time with a regular side family, which means the student attends Katoh, but is in a normal Japanese room, not an immersion setting.  She still takes English, though and we can converse with the two of us using the skills we have acquired in each other’s language.  She has a younger sister who is in Kindergarten, and I enjoy playing with her a lot.  Each family has its own personality, and it has been a unique and fun aspect of my fellowship to get to know each different family.  I have been with two families so far, and after this coming week I will change to my final host family.  At my current home I am once again biking to school, and it is nice to have the daily exercise again.  The route to school is safer than my previous one as well, and it is not as harrowing as many routes can be here in Japan.

At Katoh Schools we have accomplished much in the past week, which was in fact an extra long week.  We started on Monday and went all the way through Sunday.  Saturday and Sunday were only half days, but it was still an exhausting and interesting experience.  The reason for these two days was school bazaar which is a big event where the students and parents alike create shops and sell wares as well as go around and make purchases.  For the students in the fourth through sixth grades, it was a week of designing and building games, and crafting home-made wares to sell to their younger classmates.  The parents also crafted goods, and bought many things as well, to sell to each other in a parents’ bazaar.  The whole purpose of this activity is to raise money for the school, and while this year’s bazaar was markedly reduced to precaution against the swine flu (a good precaution, as just this week the second grade was closed due to students ill with the flu!) we still made over one million yen!  That comes to around ten thousand dollars.

For our third grade, we did not prepare our own shops, instead we visited the fifth grade’s shops, and all of the students enjoyed it immensely.  I even played a few games and picked up some cute Japanese trinkets.  Instead this week we finished up our portfolio work in all classes, and in English I kept the students working to finish a neat spider display wall, including paper spiders and spider acrostic poems.  It was a rather light week for me teaching-wise, but that will all change when I start this next week, because now I am on full-control of the classrooms.  I have been busy over the last several days developing lessons, and it is going to be an exciting ride from here on out.

I even got to feed lions from the safari bus!

Speaking of exciting rides, I was able to experience an African Safari right here in Japan, at the base of Mt. Fuji of all places!  My host family took me on Tuesday (part of our pseudo-weekend following bazaar) and we had a great day exploring the safari both in our own car, and on a neat bus.  It was a lovely time, and I have enjoyed my time with this family.  The day before we had gone out to an Onsen, a traditional hot-spring bath, and we all played in the pool.  It was great to swim away the stress after that super long work week.

This was our safari bus! Maybe American schools should use buses like these.

I am feeling refreshed and ready to begin my full-time teaching tomorrow, and with the continued support of my mentor teachers and everyone I have met here in Japan, I know it will go well.

Wish me luck!

Paul

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings Fellows fans and Blog watchers,

I have finished another week back in Japan since my whirlwind world trip, and it was quick but full of more experiences.  I spent a day sleeping off my jet-lag, but then I went to school from Wednesday through Friday.  During this time it was great to get to see the students again and spending time with them reminded why I am here.  It is important to get reminders of why teaching is important and fulfilling.  Seeing their smiling faces and chatting idly with them was a nice reminder at this half-way point.  In reality, it was only two school days because on Friday we had an exciting field trip to an art museum.

At Katoh Schools, the entrance exams for incoming first graders this next year have just finished.  I had a chance to speak to several of the faculty and it seems it was another successful year and many of the students were excellent candidates for the program.  As always there was much discussion over the students and their families, but it seems that the overall opinion was that this was a fine batch of students.  I was sad that I could not be a part of this process, and hopefully I will have more opportunities in the future to see the inner workings of the school beyond my classroom duties.

In my classroom we have made some excellent progress however on our portfolio work this term.  Portfolios are written pieces that show the students’ current capability to write in English in different subjects.  I assisted Ms. Walsh as the students worked on their science portfolios a few weeks ago, and I personally led their portfolios for English class.  We wrote all about spiders in factual stories.  It was fun introducing this topic and helping the students work through the writing process.  In addition to fulfilling the necessary portfolio requirements, I used several of the students’ stories for an assignment for my own student teaching.  It was great to analyze their work and reflect upon my teaching.

However, the highlight of the week was certainly the field trip to the Hakone Open Air Museum.  This art museum is definitely unconventional and is almost completely outdoors.  It has statues strewn throughout the grounds, as well as several large pieces that double as playgrounds for the children.  Ms. Walsh, Mr. Thorpe, our Japanese teaching partner Yanase Sensei and I each took a small group of students to explore the museum.  Being in a small group was great and the students and I enjoyed exploring and playing throughout the open air museum.

The museum staff also hosted an art workshop for the students and we all got to recreate a Pablo Picasso style piece with foam clay.  It involved mixing primary colors of the foam clay to create numerous other colors, and the students spent a good hour and a half creating unique scenes, faces, or whatever they could imagine!  The whole day was great and the students really seemed to enjoy the artwork as well as the fun playgrounds.  There was even a Pablo Picasso exhibit that many students thought was the best part of the whole day.  I was impressed with their maturity but there were of course some giggles.  It was nice to know that no matter where you are in the world or what school it is, kids will be kids!

This past week was another quick and busy one, and I again enjoyed the hospitality of Dr. Bostwick and his wife.  Starting from now, though, I am heading back into home stays.  My first one will be two weeks with a family of a regular side student.  That means that there will be less English but I know I will get by.  After that I will spend six weeks with a final host family.

I truly appreciate these families’ hospitality and the experience would not be the same without this key cultural aspect.

Thanks again everyone for your support and stay tuned for more news from Japan!

Paul

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Greetings from around the world!

This past week has been seven hectic and exciting days.  I have been staying with Dr. Bostwick and his wife in the town of Yugawara again, and they have been most welcoming and warm.  During the first few days of the week I have been teaching more, and it has been great working on longer-term projects like the portfolios.  I can really see how an assignment like that can go from start to finish over several lessons, and the students continue to amaze me with their abilities to write effectively.  I will be using several of the students’ completed portfolios for one of my student teaching assignments this week, and I am looking forward to analyzing their work and writing about the overall experience.

Another interesting aspect of these school days was that I have now had the experience of leading the classroom without my mentor teachers present.  There was of course a licensed teacher with me at all times, but both Mr. Thorpe and Ms. Walsh have been gone for a day.  During these days I simply teach all of his or her classes, and what has been great is that I do not notice significant behavior issues with the students and their motivation remains high.  This gives me confidence that the transition between my mentor teachers leading to my upcoming full-time leading will be smooth and easy.  It feels good to know that the students respect me and do not try to take advantage when their normal teacher is away.

This past school week has also been special because the whole faculty has been preparing for the entrance exam day.  This day is for families and their children who hope to come into the immersion program at first grade.  The teachers were separated into groups of about three, and in those groups they were assigned different parts of a morning lesson.  One teacher had a short morning meeting type activity, another had a reading lesson, and the other had a play-time activity.  Together, and with the help of the Japanese teachers assigned to the group, the teachers prepare their activities and then on the exam day they observe and take note of all the students’ abilities and rate them on how prepared or suitable they are for immersion education.  It was very interesting to be a part of these preparations, but unfortunately I was out of the country during the actual exam day.

My brother and his new wife are quite fun-loving, so this exciting picture neatly sums up the overall weekend.

I was out of the country because I was heading back to the United States for my oldest brother’s wedding.  It was a whirlwind weekend of fun and airplanes and I quite enjoyed it.  We did have some unfortunate weather here in Japan, however, and I had to take a train up the night before my flight day to avoid a Typhoon!  The winds and rain caused all of the trains heading through the country to shut down, so if I hadn’t gone up that day early I would not have made it to the United States and the wedding.  Overall everything turned out perfectly, and I was able to see family and friends and celebrate my brother’s marriage.

I am now beginning the second half of my student teaching experience here at Katoh Schools, and after this week I will be in charge of practically everything, leading up to a full takeover by the end of the month.  I am planning a long-term English Unit all about Anansi the spider stories, culminating in a reader’s theater.  It is going to be lots of hard work, but also tons of fun and learning for the students and myself.  Also after this week I will head to my next host family.

Thanks for following along, and stay tuned for the next update!

Paul

Paul Worrell ‘10, Mansfield Foundation International Fellow in Elementary English Immersion Education

Hello again from Numazu, Blog watchers and fellows fans,

I have had another great week here in Japan, and have had a lot of teaching experiences this week.  In fact, I was practically teaching fulltime.  Because of this, I have been keeping busy writing and developing lesson plans, and working with my mentor teachers both before and after lessons to reflect upon my work.  They are a great help in my developing teacher abilities.  But don’t think that it is all work and not play at Katoh Schools.  Our lessons are sure to include lots of fun hands-on experiences, and I have enjoyed using humor and playfulness to keep the students motivated.

Our semester is progressing quickly, and it is portfolio time at school for the students.  They are working on showing how well they can write in various subjects.  In Science we are pretending to be scientists and it is amazing to see all that the students can write about our latest unit, light.  Also, I developed the English lessons this week so we chose to write our English portfolios all about spiders.  The students enjoyed comparing and discussing different spiders and sharing all that they knew or thought about them.

Overall it was a rewarding and fun week of teaching, and also a great time for me to make more connections with my students.  It was a rainy week, so we had indoor recess for many days.  During this time I have been enjoying the opportunity to play with the students!  We play a lot of card games, like Speed and even some Poker (don’t worry there is no betting), and I even introduced them to Hangman.  They have accepted me as their teacher and Ms. Walsh and I even described the switch over to my teaching as seamless.

Aside from teaching, I have had more wonderful experiences simply being in Japan and exploring with my host family.  They took me out to a neighboring prefecture this past weekend to go grape picking.  We had so much fun at the local vineyards and enjoyed our time in the sunshine choosing the freshest bunches.  It was also an amazing car ride over to this prefecture, Yamanashi prefecture, because it goes right past Mount Fuji and its surrounding lakes.  Unfortunately it was another cloudy day so I do not have any clear photos of the mountain.

After grape picking we went to a local winery for a wine tour and tasting, and it was very fun and educational to see the process.  In fact, the winery we visited is one of the largest in Japan and has Japan’s largest wine cellar.  After the tour we sampled the different varieties, and they were of course quite fresh and fruity from the local grapes.  It is experiences like this that remind me that despite the many differences between the cultures of many countries, there are also so many commonalities.  Wine-making is a tradition throughout the world, and it was pleasing to know how it is done in Japan.

This has been my last week with this first host family, and I have now left their home to stay again with Dr. Bostwick.  I am so appreciative for my time with this family, and they have shared so much with me, more than just the trips and such, but the experience.  My fellowship would not be the same without this aspect of the experience, so thank you to everyone who made this possible.

I will be jet-setting back to the United States for my brother’s wedding this coming weekend, so expect another fun-filled and exciting Blog next week, albeit a little late.

Thanks for following along!

Paul