Doodles and Mouses

How is it possible that EVERY child in Japan is a perfect artist?? Seriously, they can all draw amazing anime characters in mere minutes. I feel like they must all have a gene enabling them to do so. I graded papers today covered in mindless doodles of Disney characters that would have taken me hours to draw even half as well. 

This takes kids in Japan 30 seconds to draw perfectly

Speaking of Disney characters, I love that it is acceptable here for people of ANY age to have cute cartoon characters on EVERYTHING they own. Grown men and women have Winnie the Pooh coffee mugs, Snoopy pencil cases…anything cute is totally fine. I have embraced this wholeheartedly with my Mickey Mouse water bottle and my Moominvalley planner.

This would be totally normal for me to have here, and that is awesome

Speaking of Mickey Mouse, I realized today the ways that English can be befuddling to say the least for those learning it. When my students were writing about a famous cat character named Doraemon today as per my assignment, one girl wrote “Doraemon is a cat. He doesn’t like mouses.” When I explained that the plural for mouse is mice, her mind was instantly blown, her reaction like the one below:

Believe it or not, people ACTUALLY make that sound to express their state of surprise. It is hilarious.

Because they write cute sentences like “Doraemon is a cat. He doesn’t like mouses,” I end up keeping a substantial amount of the assignments I have the students do. For one activity, I made sentences, printed them out and cut them in half, and the students had to match the two halves of the sentences. One of the sentences was: If you get 70,000 yen, you should buy Miss Marisa many presents. Another was: If you are hungry, you should eat Indian curry. One group of students got really creative and wrote: If you get 70,000 yen, you should eat Indian curry. I let that one slide because, let’s be honest, I would DEFINITELY do just that if I got 70,000 yen.