Tiger!

Taiga

As a continuation of Danielle’s post on japanese kids still being kids. I have this little number from one of my students. This year I have started using namecards for all of the students to place on their desks during my class. This way I am able to call on students by name and hopefully this year I can actually remember more than a handful of students names. Already a few have lodged themselves in my brain. One of the first was this student.

The first day of class I walked around to all of the students to introduce myself one on one with them and hear their names. His introduction went like this. “Hello! My name is Taiga, but call me Tiger!” As a point of note these two words sound identical when pronounced by a japanese. The second was accented by his pointing to his name card, which said in large letters “Tiger”.

I then later saw him working on this signature inside of his name card. And here is the thing. This student is a jock. Popular, on the baseball team, self assured, jock. Yet in japan, in our school, sitting and practicing his signature, punctuated by a little hearts at the end, and over the “i”, is not something I could have imagined a similar student in the US doing. Here it is perfectly fine, in fact “cool” to be doing something so cutesy. The borders here are different they they are in the US. And most of the time I think this is a good thing… right up until the cross dressing starts in preparation for the cultural festival.

Posted on Sunday, May 25th, 2008 at 11:51 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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