Yokobori Elementary School and Yuzawa High School

Pictures are here.

Ok, so today I met with Yokobori Elementary school students and Yuzawa High School students. Both meetings were fairly short and both took place on campus.

The first meeting with the elementary school students went, well I met them in the designated place, they got all excited and started shaking hands with me (Being western). Several of them wore New York Yankee sweat shirts, so they got all excited when I said I'm from New York. Afterward, we had a brief English lessen with them. The international students were broken up into pairs and the students were broken up into groups. The international students were moved from group to group of students playing different games with them. My partner was Haishi from Taiwan, our game was pretty much to put a bunch of flags on the ground and all out country names, the kids would then have to pick the correct flag. Note, I know quite a few flags, surprisingly American was not one of them. After the game, we went to lunch with them in the cafeteria, talking a little bit with the teachers.

My second meeting was with High School students and pretty much just involved talking to them in a classroom. There were 4 groups of 4-5 people. 3 groups of girls and 1 group of guys (Maybe its an Akita thing, but seems women greatly outnumber men here). Oh boy, you poor High school students, what did they do to make you so shy? For the first 2 groups I was alone, I did my best to keep the conversation going, but beyond "What's your favorite food?" things did not seem to go too well. I was hoping that the group of boys would be more outgoing...they were probably the shyest. I tried counting and saying the days of the week in different languages, I think they found it interesting but I can't be sure. About half-way through Sarah from England joined me and I was in a pair, she spoke quite a bit of Japanese so she could translate. I did not take a picture of one of the group of girls. The best conversation ended up being with the last group of girls that turned out to be surprisingly outgoing. We asked a variety of questions about which countries they want to visit, what Manga (Japanese comics) they like, what movies they like. They asked me if I have a girlfriend and what kind of girls do I like (yes, I got checked out by Japanese High School girls, I hope some of the older girls share their interest.) At one point, the boys were merged in the hopes that they would talk, no such luck, me and Sarah pretty much continued talking to the "outgoing girls", we tired to include the boys in the conversation but they just remained stone quiet.