Introductions and a school trip:
Nanae High School events:
Questions for the Sci-Fi Club:
Video Exchange #1 (CCHS to Nanae)
A project we are working on right now between the CCHS Sci-Fi Club and the Nanae High School English Club is creating an ongoing video exchange. Ideally, this will be a way for the club members to become familiar with each other and interact. Below is the Sci-Fi Club’s first video, which David Nurenberg created with the members. For the second round of videos, each club will likely discuss questions that the other club asks. This is the first step in trying to use the videos to create dialogue between the members.
-Nick
The Mochi Guide
Last month, I attended two mochi-making events at nursery schools. Mochi is rice-paste made from pounding sticky rice with a wooden sledgehammer (kine). The rice is hammered in something that looks like a partially hollowed tree trunk (usu). Usually, several people take turns hammering with a continuous rhythm, while one person quickly readjusts the paste-ball between each drop of the hammer. Once the rice is all homogenized into one uniform ball, it’s divided into bite-sized mochi-balls. Via chopsticks, they are dunked into Continue reading “The Mochi Guide”
License to Terrify
One of the nursery schools invited me to participate in a special event last week called Setsubun. It’s a cultural event celebrated all over Japan. To celebrate, some people dress up as demons, and others throw beans at the demons. The point of throwing the beans at the demons is to make them run away so they can’t scare people – the whole event symbolizes warding away evil each year. I participated in the demon class. This class has the oldest kids in the school. We spent a week making paper-mache masks. I was meticulous with mine. The morning of the event, one of the teachers told me if the younger kids were crying, I did my job right. I was supposed to actually terrify them. The purpose of the event is to teach the kids to confront real fear and overcome it over the course of several years’ events. I liked the idea – teaching kids to deal with powerful emotions like that through actual experience seemed like a valuable lesson to me. All of the kids were showered in candy to reward them for their bravery at the end of the event. We (the demons) were given tinfoil machetes to top it all off – I thought it was a nice touch. Some kids responded better than others (see Emi’s nephew in the blue coat).
-Nick
