One of my favourite teachers, Mitsumoto-sensei, came past my desk this morning in his little hayfever mask and stopped to see what I was doing. He hasn't been very busy recently now that the san-nensei have finished, so I stopped writing in my journal to have a chat to him. He saw my journal up on the screen - big paragraphs of English in a small font in Notepad - and seemed very impressed, hehe. He always cracks me up regardless of what he's doing, but this was extra funny - I swear that some of my teachers are still surprised that I can write in English :P

Anyway, we got talking about various things and the topic eventually moved to the coming end of the school year. The Japanese, or at least the Hyogo High School, education system requires that teachers move schools every few years. So this is the time of year when the principal is interviewing all the teachers and working out who he's going to send on to another school. It's a pretty relaxed time of year now that all the tests are over and classes are winding down, so the staff room is pretty relaxed and there is lots of gossip going on. I can't understand much of it, but Mitsumoto-sensei was kind enough to fill me in on all the latest mutterings. For some reason, Japanese staffroom 'gossip' is much more interesting to me than work gossip was back in Australia, haha. Yay Japan.

Anyway, the long and short of it pretty much comes down to who is leaving, who is coming to and who is moving around in the school. Very exciting :D It's all set to be announced to individuals next Thursday or Friday, and to everyone on the following Monday. So far, bets are on Yamamoto-sensei (the judo teacher), Inoube-sensei and Hashimoto-sensei (one of my favourite English team-teachers) to leave, at least two new teachers to come (one of whom is a young English teacher who just passed their teacher test) and Mitsumoto-sensei to teach ni-nensei instead of ichi-nensei.

I was also able to give Mitsumoto-sensei a few pieces of information in return, which was nice. The first was thanks to Louise letting me know that a teacher at a school in Awaji that one of her ALT friends teaches at is apparently coming to Ako SHS, and the second was that my apartment is going to be used by a teacher after I move out. As there is one empty apartment right now and if Hashimoto-sensei moves there'll be another (and he has hardly any stuff in his so it'll be quick and easy to move and clean up), I figure that the office wouldn't put a teacher in mine until they'd filled those up first. So, by that I'm guessing that there must be at least 3 new teachers coming in, and that's excluding those who will live outside the teacher housing.

So, good times! I'm not particularly impressed by rumours, but I am very interested to see who does actually leave and who comes to replace them. Last year there were an enormous amount of changes, but apparently this year there won't be as many. It always seems to be the good teachers who leave (Kotani-sensei and Ishino-sensei last year, to name a few) so hopefully this year my favourites aren't taken away from me :D