Farewell Speeches

My time in Komagane is finally coming to an end. Because of this, my caretakers have requested that I prepare farewell speeches to give to both the students and the staff at each school.

My caretaker at Komako told me to write a long speech to the students, explaining where I'm going after leaving, saying thank you and goodbye, and encouraging the students to keep studying English. I wrote it, rehearsed it many times, and managed to say it in intelligible Japanese in front of all the students at an assembly two Fridays ago. Even though I was really, really nervous, hearing my students and fellow teachers laugh during funny parts of my speech helped me get through it. There was a long round of applause after I concluded my speech and exited the gym.

After my speech, there was quite a bit of confusion. This farewell speech was given rather early: I still had two more classes to teach to my 1年生 before I'd officially leave. Many of my students thought that my farewell speech was the last time that they'd see me, so they were really confused when I came back to school the following Monday. ...Happy, but confused! After explaining my situation to the students, they laughed and the mood lightened up, much to my delight.

My farewell speech at Akaho, however, was not as well prepared as the one I gave at Komako. My caretaker had mentioned in passing about a month ago that I should start thinking about writing farewell speeches for both the students and the faculty; the length was to be the opposite of the one at Komako: the shorter the speech, the better. She told me that it could be in English or Japanese, and that the date for the speech to the students had yet to be determined. She said she'd let me know in advance the date and time that I'd give my speech to the students.

I'm not sure if she forgot or what, because, last Friday, when I arrived at school, my caretaker noticed I came in and ran over to me.

Caretaker: You're giving your speech to the students right now!

Me: WHAT?!
Caretaker: Yes, in ten minutes!

Completely mentally-unprepared, I then had to scramble to write up a speech. I'm glad I had already given a speech at Komako, so I hurriedly wrote a shorter summary of what I said during that farewell speech. Thank goodness I had begun to write it in Japanese, because, in the middle of writing it, my caretaker requested that I deliver the speech in Japanese, as she wouldn't be able to translate for me.

Five minutes later, I found myself on stage, flustered, delivering a somewhat meaningful, yet half-assed speech in Japanese to my base school students at the opening ceremony of their school festival.

This...wasn't quite how I imagined that I'd be wrapping things up at my base school, the school that I had visited the most over the course of my year here in Komagane...

To add insult to injury, they made me to go up on stage with the rest of the teachers to sing a song in Japanese in front of all of the students. Normally, this wouldn't have been too bad, but after being stressed out since the morning started, the very last thing I wanted to do was sing. I just wanted to be alone to recompose myself, but I sucked it up and sang. One teacher was kind enough to share her music sheet with me. Thankfully, it was written entirely in hiragana, the simplest Japanese writing system. I was wary at first, but became pleasantly surprised when I realized that I can still read music decently!

Anyways, I guess I'm 1 for 2 in these farewell speeches. I do have a chance to redeem myself, since the next two speeches to the faculties at each school are already planned and the dates are saved in my calendar! I should be able to do just fine in those. Wish me luck! :)

Thanks for reading...next up is about my last class with my 1年生 at Komako!

P.S. Speaking of 1年生, I still have 2 more classes with my 1年生 at Akaho too! I suppose that I'm going to end up with some confused students at school tomorrow... Explaining that I'm not leaving quite yet to 6 different classes again is gonna be fun...