Day One

DAY ONE (06/08/08)

My journey to Japan has finally begun! I’m on the plane, headed to San Francisco to meet 159 teachers from across the U.S. for a one-day orientation before heading off to Tokyo together! The reality of this trip is finally setting in!

Looked at another way though, you could say that my journey to Japan actually began about seven months ago when I first heard about the Japan Fulbright Memorial Fund Teacher Program and decided to apply. An alumna from the Master in Arts and Teaching Program I completed at Brown went to Japan this past October with the JFMF program and sent an email to the MAT alumni listserv describing her wonderful time there. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of traveling to the far east, being immersed in a culture so different from my own, having the chance to meet 159 other teachers from all over the US, and exploring the Japanese education system together as we also learned about the similarities and differences between our own teaching experiences across America’s vast landscape.

As part of my application into the program, I put a lot of thought into how I could enhance my own classes with the knowledge I’d garner in Japan and how I could best share my experience with my students, colleagues, friends, family, and wider community. I hope to set up some kind of internet collaboration between my classes and a Japanese middle school class. I also want to learn as much as I can about Japanese poetry, theater, and visual art forms such as the sumi-e form of ink painting, something that I have incorporated into a haiku scroll project with my seventh graders.

On the side, I have also been reading several books such as Confucius Lives Next Door, The Japanese Education Challenge, Shogun, and Dave Barry Does Japan. I’ve been watching Japanese movies or movies set in Japan such as Spirited Away, Seven Samurai, Lost in Translation, and Kill Bill. My increased curiosity about Japan has found me surfing the web for info on the places I will visit and buying Japanese dictionaries and CD sets so that I will know at least a dozen useful phrases such as konnichiwa (hello), domo arigato (thank you), sumimasen (I’m sorry), and sayonara (goodbye). Now I think I will try to doze off for a while.