The Whole Erk Catalogue Tales of a Geek Abroad

I'm teaching at Fujigaoka Elementary right now, the elementary I'm most familiar with and fond of. The other day I taught my second graders to sing Old MacDonald had a Farm. It was pretty popular for the E-I-E-I-O bit; the kids loved the song, but mostly I wound up with "Oh macdahdah hah.. fah, EIEIO!" still, they had fun and got some english vocab and pronunciation practice. As is traditional, there were a very wide variety of animals on the farm: cheetah was exceptionally popular, for some reason. Rabbit was as well. What sound does a rabbit make? I went with "boing-boing".

I learned some odd things. It doesn't appear that Japanese people recognise a cat's purr as a distinct sound. I can't really imagine that, because Japanese people are onomatopoeia-crazy, but nobody in the entire class could describe "the other sound that cats make, when you pet them and they are happy". They just made a really happy sounding meow... even the teacher didn't know.

Anyway, my all-time favourite was suggested by a lad in the last 2nd year class: zombie. I am not exaggerating! I had an entire 2nd grade Japanese elementary school class singing "On that farm he had a zombie" "With a 'brains, brains' here and a 'brains, brains' there"

I only regret I did not video tape it. We would have won every prize YouTube has to offer.