Painting, School Rules

Hello!

Just a few items in this week's update.

After traveling last weekend to Tottori, I did not do any traveling this weekend.

An apartment complex painting crew had to stop by on Saturday morning. It seems that the buildings were having all of the common pipes within apartments, doors and balcony railings re-painted white.

They had tried to schedule this painting during the week a few weeks back, but I had to call them and reschedule for it to happen on Saturday morning. The painting did not seem necessary - everything that they painted was already pretty freshly painted (as of about a year ago), but they went ahead and did it anyways.

When they painted the railing on my balcony, the painters first shaved the old paint off. This was interesting because I noticed that they put plastic coverings over the cars below the balcony so as to not get paint shavings on them.

After the painting was done, I took a brief bike ride into the country side. Previously, I had followed bike routes created by other users online - Saturday was the first time I created my own route.

It did not go so well as I ended up going over a lot of hills and busy streets. The area to the north of my building is quite hilly - you have to go farther west and north to get into flatter country side. I made some small adjustments to the route for next time.

At school, one thing I have noticed is that there seems to be several rules that the students follow pretty closely, among others.

One is that the students do not go into other students' classrooms. If you are a student of one classroom, it seems like the students are not allowed to go into any of the other classrooms of that grade, even during break times. You will see students who have friends in other classes only talking in the hallway but never going into their friends' classrooms.

The other is that the kids never go into other kids' desks. In the desk, each student has like a box drawer that they can pull out that contains their school supplies - normally things like notebooks, scissors, a hat, glue stick, pencils, etc. I have gotten the idea that it is strictly forbidden for one student to go into another student's desk.

Even when I have opened a student's desk, the other students will scold me and tell me not to do that.

Also, the kids seem well trained that when the bell rings, they had better be in their seats. The school appears to be making extra effort recently to get the kids back into the school on time from play time. Usually with about 5 minutes left in the break, teachers will start working to call the students back into classes.

Tamborines are used in the school a lot. You will see teachers using this to control the attention of classes, especially during gym class. And when the students are being called back into the classroom from recess, several teachers will use tamborines to signal that break time is ending and that the students should come back.

For rules, the school rules are posted in Japanese here. The ones I mention above are not covered in these rules, but one interesting one that is is #8 which specifies that when bowing, the bow should be held at its lowest point for a count of 3 before finishing.

That is the rule, but what happens in practice varies.

No pictures this week, maybe more next week.

Until next time,

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