Every trip seems to have something unexpected happen and you wish you had packed that special item now necessary for survival. I knew I was going to be teaching middle and high school students today, but I didn't know I was going to be at Mishima Super Global High school (https://www.mishimakita-h.ed.jp/english/) where the entrance to the school is lined with 300 year old cheery trees. So since I was going to be teaching at this school and it's required to have slippers or specific indoor shoes the moment you enter the building, that's the instant I realized I did not pack or bring my size 11 house slippers.
Sensei Kumano handed me a pair of school slippers in "large", which were about size 9 and I spent the next seven hours teaching in slippers two sizes too small and shuffling my weary feet around a packed classroom full of 7-12 grade students, graduate students from Tokoho University, local science & technology teachers plus building & district administrators all wanting to learn about STEM Education; while watching me teach in broken Japanese, limited English and trying not to trip over my own feet!
Even with all this pressure to not trip, embarrass myself in a foreign language plus be at my best teaching everyone there was very helpful and engaged in my lessons and we had a blast! The students learned about scientific observation by studying unusual objects I had been collecting from things I found around Shizuoka and Mishima and then learned how to modify their phones to become digital microscopes. We finished the day with engineering and the students practiced designing, building and modifying Hexbugs to create nanobots that cleaned their lab tables and battled in Hexbug sumo.
Even though it was Sunday a large number of students had signed up to take my special STEM Class and the school was also full of students practicing their research presentations in English! After teaching 5 hours and being interviewed for another hour, we listened to two teams present their research on environmental issues important to the Mishima community. The two studies focused on artificial eutrophication of inland bays (excess fertilizer being dumped into the bay) and the other about the development of Green Infrastructure, such as the promotion of building rain gardens to reduce issues with run off from impervious pavement in the city!
The most exciting part of the day for me happened when I learned that Mishima Super Global High School does not have a partner school in the US and they are interested in setting up a partner school with Owatonna Senor High School! Saito Hiroyuki, Principal at Mishima SGHS, and I will work together to build this partnership and there may be funding from the Japanese government to create a student exchange program between our two schools. Let's keep our fingers crossed that this might work out and our OHS students may have the chance to live and learn in Japan. It was a partly cloudy today, but if you zoom in the photo where a group of us in the room are standing by the window, you can see the outline of Fuji-san in the background. I hope our students from Owatonna will get the chance to study under the watchful eye of the most beautiful mountain in Japan!
Sensei Kumano handed me a pair of school slippers in "large", which were about size 9 and I spent the next seven hours teaching in slippers two sizes too small and shuffling my weary feet around a packed classroom full of 7-12 grade students, graduate students from Tokoho University, local science & technology teachers plus building & district administrators all wanting to learn about STEM Education; while watching me teach in broken Japanese, limited English and trying not to trip over my own feet!
Even with all this pressure to not trip, embarrass myself in a foreign language plus be at my best teaching everyone there was very helpful and engaged in my lessons and we had a blast! The students learned about scientific observation by studying unusual objects I had been collecting from things I found around Shizuoka and Mishima and then learned how to modify their phones to become digital microscopes. We finished the day with engineering and the students practiced designing, building and modifying Hexbugs to create nanobots that cleaned their lab tables and battled in Hexbug sumo.
Even though it was Sunday a large number of students had signed up to take my special STEM Class and the school was also full of students practicing their research presentations in English! After teaching 5 hours and being interviewed for another hour, we listened to two teams present their research on environmental issues important to the Mishima community. The two studies focused on artificial eutrophication of inland bays (excess fertilizer being dumped into the bay) and the other about the development of Green Infrastructure, such as the promotion of building rain gardens to reduce issues with run off from impervious pavement in the city!
The most exciting part of the day for me happened when I learned that Mishima Super Global High School does not have a partner school in the US and they are interested in setting up a partner school with Owatonna Senor High School! Saito Hiroyuki, Principal at Mishima SGHS, and I will work together to build this partnership and there may be funding from the Japanese government to create a student exchange program between our two schools. Let's keep our fingers crossed that this might work out and our OHS students may have the chance to live and learn in Japan. It was a partly cloudy today, but if you zoom in the photo where a group of us in the room are standing by the window, you can see the outline of Fuji-san in the background. I hope our students from Owatonna will get the chance to study under the watchful eye of the most beautiful mountain in Japan!