Crazy cleaning kids

This school certainly loves a meeting. Today we had one in the middle of the day that conveniently ran into lunch time. There were all these items on the agenda such as;
1. Crossing the Road and,
2. Balls for the Kids at Lunchtime.

There is nothing too mundane to bring up in front of the entire staff body it seems. One teacher managed to crap on about helping the kids cross the road for about 10 minutes. He even went so far as to detail what action should be taken during wet and dry weather, in busy and quiet times and this all depended upon how many kids you were dealing with in each situation of course... After hearing him say "sometimes a car will stop and let the kids cross, but a car from behind, an impatient driver, will sometimes pull around to overtake. So please be careful of this situation", I decided to tune out. Sometimes I think the CIR who can't understand Japanese are far better off.

There were actually some kid here today. The grades 5 and 6 came in to help us set up the gym for the opening ceremony on Friday. April is actually the start of the school year here, so it is a pretty big deal. All the grade 1s will be starting school for the first time! The kids today rocked up in shorts and skirts and one of the teachers told me that this is their uniform all year round! Their skin had a slightly purple hue.

They were set to work cleaning everything. They polished the gym floor by pushing flannel clothes up and down, bent over running like bears (noisy blue bears) before heading (with an alarming enthusiasm) off to clean the loos. Weirdos. Granted, they do seem to make it as fun as possible. The things they get away with in front of the teachers I am sure wouldn't swing in a school in Australia. The teachers too, seem to have a complete lack of interest in securing the safety of their students. The kids jump off the top of a massive flight of stairs, push and shove, pull hair, swing spades around, whip each other in the face with wet flannels... exactly the kind of behaviour that would have Aussie teachers freaking out about injury and consequential litigation. But here it is just what kids do. I kind of like it. I can watch them be dicks and hurt themselves and then say, "well, DUH!", and that is fine!