Well, despite the fact that the Japanese most definitely do not celebrate Halloween, I'd be damned if I wasn't going to hook it up for the kiddies over here.
I figured my greatest Halloween victory would occur at the Elementary School. They're usually the ones who have the least structure, meaning I have the most freedom of what particular Englishism I want to impart to the littleuns. I envisioned an all-day Halloweenfest, with the kiddies showing up in whatever costumes they could smack together. I didn't expect much since, as I already mentioned, the Japanese don't celebrate Halloween. And apparently my coordinator at the elementary thought the same for the same reason. She told me that there was no way we could have a Halloween extravaganza on the Friday before Halloween because A) all the students would be far too busy diligently preparing for their school festival on Sunday November 1st and B) there was no way any of them would have any costumes to wear to school.
I tried to negotiate a visit to all of the grades, rather than just the grade 5 and 6 visits I had scheduled for the day. I figured It'd be a pretty easy negotiation that would go something like this:
Me - "I want to teach every period of the day next friday, taking over each of the grades for a period and giving each of their homeroom teachers a break."
My Coordinator - "You want to work your ass off and you're not making any more work for any of the teachers? Sold. Go for it. Job's a good one."
Unfortunately, I'd clearly underestimated the importance of this ruddy festival, and the best I got out of her between bouts of teeth sucking (a patented Japanese form of "well...I don't know...") was something along the lines of an "I'll ask the other teachers, but they're all pretty busy...and the grade 5s and 6s have an established curriculum, so we can't deviate from it for something like a Halloween lesson."
So I went to my other schools from Monday to Thursday, expecting little form the Elementary on Friday. I wore my cowboy outfit to the High School on Monday as a bit of a dry run since my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) at the High School is chill and is amenable to the bouts of English mayhem I try to create. The students at the High School are this wonderfully chill brand of kids. I mean, their English ain't so hot since their school isn't all that academic, but I swear the worst these kids could ever throw at me would be a half-hearted sneer. They seemed to rather enjoy my outfit.
For the Junior High School on Thursday, I dressed up like a matrix reject. Very shortly after I started at the Jr. High back in August, some of my third year students had told me that, if I slicked my hair back and wore my sunglasses, I would look like this character named Albert Wesker from the the Resident Evil/Biohazard series of survival horror games. Well, I say they told me that, but when you factor in their broken English and my rudimentary Nihongo, it was more like they were communicating by smoke signals, and I was responding in semaphore, but somewhere in the middle I got "Hair. All back. Uesuka!" from them. I googled the guy, and when I saw his picture I thought "well. That's easy."
Some black clothes and some bicycle gloves later, I had all the students who had played Biohazard thinking I was a cool dude, and all the rest of them thought I was some freak who liked the Terminator movies an awful lot. (In Japan, if you're a white male wearing sunglasses, and you're a bit brawnier than the standard Japanese build, everyone tells you that you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger) Either one was fine by me.
Then I headed to the Elementary this morning, expecting little of the day but planning for the worst. I figured that since I had offered to teach all the grades about Halloween I should at least be ready to do so if my coordinator had managed to swing it. Plus, I'd had previous experience with her telling me something might change, only to inform me that it had, infact changed ten to fifteen minutes before I needed to have a completely new lesson ready for a completely different class.
And today was no different. I rolled in this morning, and she informed me that I would be visiting all six grades today. Surprisingly, all of the homeroom teachers had happily agreed to let me take over each of their classes for a period, saving them the lesson planning and teaching time.
Imagine that.
So I was able to bring a bit of Halloween to all of the classes today, doing things like drawing paper pumpkins, teaching them to Trick or Treat, and showing them pictures of all my mad costumes over the years, and all the mad costumes my friends had donned. The following picture of Alex was a real hit with the kids. I don't think you can say you've lived properly until you've seen a first grader imitate that rocker face.
I also told a ghost story to the older grades. Despite having to tell it through a translator, the kids were genuinely freaked out, so I don't think it lost any of its creepiness. What's more, I got them going and they told some ghost stories of their own.
But, what made the whole day was the one particular class where, without any prompting from me, the teacher had helped the students to build makeshift costumes. When I showed up to their class, they were sitting orderly in their seats, and every last one of them was wearing a costume.
Shit, man.
When Halloween means as much to you as it does to me, and it seems you have to fight tooth and nail to convince some of your friends/coworkers that there's a unique joy in throwing on a costume, to show up in a classroom in a country that doesn't celebrate Halloween and to find every last one of your students wearing a costume that they made from scratch specifically for your 45-minute visit...
James Donald Jones captured it best when he said "well. That just makes me feel about ten feet tall."
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