I'm busy for once

Today I was requested to make a whole array of English stuff so I have actually been doing something! The grade 5 teacher has decided to just throw the June and July curriculum out the window (the one that the previous CIRs spent months making according to instructions from this very school) and instead of doing clothing we are doing cleaning materials. So lucky me gets to make a whole new set of flashcards and game cards accordingly. I have been searching the internet for pictures of mops and vacuum cleaners and so on. By the way, nobody should ever look up "dustbin" using the Japanese yahoo image search while there is a chance someone could see what comes up on the resulting page. Ick.

I noticed today that the kids don't speak to the teachers the way I expected them to. In case you aren't aware I will just say that in Japanese there are several different levels of politeness one can use when speaking, which changes depending on whether the person you address is your senior or junior. Clearly a teacher is always your senior and so you should speak to them in keigo (polite form) which is why it surprises me that the kids here speak to the teachers in the same fashion that they would each other. At first I thought it was just the little kids who were doing it, but even the grade 6s only use keigo when addressing the teachers en masse in the staffroom or when the principal is present. I'm going to ask someone about this and tell you why in a few days because I don't get it, except that maybe it is the symptoms of an ever-increasingly rude and "western" Japan.