Dictionary - oh, yeah!
Mood:  happy
I'm in love with my Seiko RM 2000.
Wow, an electronic translator from Japanese to English and English to Japanese. And i can read all the entries in Romaji! It has lots of idioms so i can actually begin practicing some basic sentences. yippeee. It also has sentences translated into kana and kanji so there's some practice in reading the symbols as well. hooorrraaaayyyy.


This is another
Moral Education day. I really enjoy these days and the kids do too. Fifth and 6th period today were for the first graders. I missed the fifth period assembly in the gym. Professionals in many fields presented a little about what their talents were in a group setting. Then, during 6th period, the kids were able to choose sessions to participate in taught by these same professionals. Here's a little of what I saw: There were gardeners teaching the kids how to plant petunias with a wheelbarrow of dirt right in the classroom! Ikebana - flower arrangement was being done in a room. There were a seamstress and tailor discussing their trade in another room. We watched a man show how to set up a piece of granite for inscribing. He painstakingly chipped away on a small bar of granite inscribing the kanji for Masago chugakko. I watched two men demonstrating how to build a traditional wooden window. Another man was lecturing about the art of papering the wonderful paper sliding doors that are still used in Japan.

The most incredible by far was the cooking demonstration. We were all spellbound watching this master chef take a rather large chopping knife and peel a paper thin layer off a daikon radish. Please allow me to try to explain. The daikon was about 6 inches in diameter and he cut off about an 8 inch slice. Then he twirled that daikon around that knife edge and peeled off a perfect sheet of paper-thin radish that was about 3 feet long and 8 inches wide. The daikon is now about 4 inches in diameter and still perfectly round! How does he do that? He cut a tiny slice of butternut squash and made a butterfly, also, a teeny weensy cucumber cricket with tiny legs and antennae made from strands from a bamboo whisk. We had "zenzai" sweet adzuki beans with mochi, yum. Kids got to try their hand at making tamagoyaki, a very delicate sort of omlette dish. How incredible for students to get to spend some time interacting with professionals who truly love their careers.