Higo Blog

If you only glimpsed at the school grounds (not the facilities within the school building), you would be under the impression that this high school is a wonderful place. There are massive gardens, hot houses where flowers, fruit, and produce are cultivated, fields planted with a variety of crops, ponds, landscaping displays, fountains, copses of various trees, groves, hedges, flower beds, a ton of potted plants, and on an equally vast amount of land is where all of the tools and materials necessary to make and maintain these grounds are contained.

In the garden (which could really be called a park, because it isn't really that small), there is a large pond, complete with birds of all kinds, and other wildlife. Every lunch break at this school is spent outdoors, among the nature. It is during this time when I am truly able to relax, and achieve clarity of mind. It is here where I can coalesce my ideas into working lesson plans.

Outdoor lessons sound pretty good to me, but that's because I'm not out in the fields with a hoe, spreading manure around in the hot sun. However, watching the students working towards achieving something tangible- watching them work so hard at clipping hedges, cleaning their tools, using surveying equipment, and working in the fields is making me want to keep them busy in a similar way. I saw no cell phones out, no students applying make up, no one reading manga, and although they were chattering it didn't matter because they could do two things at one time.

For a low-level school, the surrounding school grounds are among the best I've seen at any type of school. It's just the facilities inside of the school building that suck.