Nashi (pears) grown by my students at the farming school

Once a week I’ll be straying from my usual high school to visit English classrooms at Noukou (agricultural high school). I’ve been forewarned, repeatedly, by my co-workers at Nagahama Kita-ko (my main, way more academic high school) that agricultural students are “naughty, violent” students who tell foreign English instructors to fuck off and to go back to their home countries. Mmm. Encouraging, no?

Anyway, I visited Noukou for the first time today. Unfortunately I didn’t bring my camera because the school itself is pretty magical. Surrounded by mountains and forever-stretching rice fields, Noukou is strung together by a series of buildings, greenhouses, and gardens that each lend to a specific aspect of agricultural education. Most of the students at Noukou don’t give a fuck about learning English (their viewpoint is, basically, I’m going to be a farmer so why should I have to learn the English word for ‘hana’ (flower)?). And I can understand where they’re coming from. Luckily they’re incredibly friendly and laid back (probably because they’re not subjected to the heavily weighted college entrance exams that the students at my other school are all freaking out about). Actually, I’m still a little wary of the Japanese education system; I don’t quite understand what decides whether a student will go to an agricultural school over an academic school (and vice-versa). Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear as though the students have any choice - but rather it seems to be a situation of geographical determinance (a factor upon which much of Japanese society is likely based).

Today, at Noukou, I saw as many cows as I saw students (and with my lack of Japanese I was probably able to communicate with the cows on the same level as the students, who basically refuse to speak any English other than, I don’t speak English!). It was nice to be around animals again - cows in Japan are very friendly, as were the goats. As I was leaving Noukou, some of the students were selling fruits they had cultivated on school grounds (see nashi pictured above), so I bought a bag of pears for 500 yen - they didn’t even cut me a deal! (But at least they didn’t tell me to fuck off or go home.)