Puzzling

One thing that always amazes me about the place I worked yesterday is that the university is right next to that lovely little river, with all those birds and trees, and although it is only a one minute walk out the back gate I never see students down there. My students often tell me how much they enjoy cherry blossoms and autumn leaves and how they love 'nature.' But apparently they'd rather stay on the tiny campus at lunchtime or when they do not have classes than go down to the river, even when the cherry blossoms lining the river are in full bloom in spring, or the leaves are turning in autumn, and the weather is beautiful.

In one of my classes there I have only two students. This is because it is a second year elective class, and since the vast majority of students would rather not be learning English, I always get only a handful of students. (Unfortunately next year I will not have this class, which is one of my favourites.)

Yesterday during that class two cormorants suddenly flew past the window, startling us. We went over to the window to look down at the river, and there we saw another two, fishing busily. The students told me they had never seen a cormorant before and did not know what it was. I did not expect them to know the English name, but what astonished me was that when I told them the Japanese name they'd never heard of that either. This made me think I'd made a mistake, so I looked it up in my dictionary to check I'd got it right. I had. They hadn't even heard of ukai, which I found puzzling. I had heard of fishing using cormorants before I even came to Japan, and thought it was famous.

We could also see an egret from the window. They knew what that was, because I have taken them for a walk along the river twice, once in spring and once in autumn, as a part of a class project. We saw egrets then, and I taught them the name. They had never seen an egret before that, either.

They seemed to enjoy those walks. They had a lot of fun writing about them afterwards, too. I typed up their writing and made little 'books' for them, with photographs I'd taken on the walks. They spent ages rereading their books and poring over the photographs. And they loved feeding the gulls and ducks. They'd never done that before.

But they have never gone back to the river without me, even though it's just a step out the back gate. I know, because I asked today. This has been true for every group I've done this with at that school, in the last four or five years.

I'm not quite sure why I find that so shocking, but I do.