Elementary Afternoons

Here's another reason why I think everyone should spend their Fridays at an elementary school.

When I'm at my elementary school, the most randomness seems to transpire on Friday afternoons in the fifth and sixth periods when I'm not usually booked to teach class.

Today was no different. Just after lunch, the first grade teacher rolled in and asked me if I wanted to participate in some kind of outdoor activity with the first graders. As my Japanese ability is currently resting somewhere around that of a three-year-old, I had no idea what she was asking me to do. However, the first graders are, pretty much, cuteness distilled into a substance so pure that it could probably fuel jet fighters—a substance so intoxicating and contagious that it has even rubbed off on their teacher, making her the cutest thing going in the staff room.

So, when she asked me to spend a period with her and her class, I didn't particularly care what we were doing. She could have been asking me to watch grass grow with her class for the period, and it still would have been the cutest 45 minutes I spent all day.

As she escorted me outside, the English equivalent finally occured to her, and she errupted victoriously with "BUTTERFLY!" "CATCH!". And, sure enough, when I got outside, I was greeted by a whole bunch of midgets, wearing their standard reversible red/white hats, armed with bug nets on poles twice their height. Most of them also had bug cages hanging around their necks, and these whipped around violently as the first of them caught sight of me and errupted in cries of "NIKORASU SENSEI!"

( I don't think I'll ever get tired of that. )

With an ichi-nensei holding each of my hands, and one latched somewhere on my shirt, we wandered around the back of the school and up the old concrete steps to the playing field. This wide staircase was once made of concrete, but it has since fallen into a kind of decrepit equilibrium that makes you wonder if it hadn't been swiped from some south american temple.

Its broad sweep is surrounded by forest, punctuated by plants, and it is pretty much my favourite part of the school yard. The playing fields that the staircase leads up to are in no better shape. What was once an impressive set of tennis courts has been blanketed in creeping vines that make the courts look more like something abandonned by the Dharma Initiative, and what was once a baseball field has had its fences reclaimed by those same vines and its infield grow long with grasses and weeds.

Though this overgrowth makes the fields fairly useless for their intended purposes, it also makes them the perfect place for tracking and trapping all manner of winged bug. In the light of the westerning sun and the shadows of the long grasses, I watched the ichi-nensei scatter, taking off after anything that shot by on the wing in a riot of gleeful giggles. I was dragged to and frow with cries of "SENSEI!" as the task of transfering bugs from net to cage without mashing them had fallen to my careful hands.

And the intrepid little hunters nabbed some real monsters. Aforementioned cute teacher netted one of the biggest grasshoppers I've ever seen, and one of her students managed to get four dragonflies into an impossibly small bug box without any help from me. Every successful catch seemed to egg them on all the more, and it wasn't long before the little bug boxes were abuzz with the sounds of dragonflies that had been forced to share quarters with butterflies and grasshoppers.

So this is where I spent my Friday afternoon: terrorizing bugs in Japanese with a band of first graders.

I still can't come up with something that could have been a more productive use for the time.