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8/24
It’s funny, looking at your students in the States I don’t get jealous or sad that I’ve grown up. I would never want to switch places with them in a million years because their youth and potential has nothing on the experiences I’ve already had. And yet, I get a little jealous when the Japanese college students come in to visit the teachers (which has been quite often because University vacation is much longer than high school vacation). I look at them in their Tokyo-hip clothing and I can tell that they’ve accomplished something and that they’re respected. It makes me wonder if it’s a societal thing. We don’t respect people in their 20s, they’re babies after all. In Japan, they really don’t respect school aged children, but they give them a lot more responsibility, and I feel like after all that time having a certain relationship, it means more when they finally grow up and move on. Being a college student is something to be proud of. Or maybe it’s that in U.S. society people just don’t socially respect others in general and it has nothing to do with age. I’m not saying Japan is a perfect country of respect and social grace, that’s certainly not the case when you break it down, but I am saying that having such prescribed roles definitely means that, while things may be unfair by and large by U.S. standards, it ensures that everybody gets a little time in the spotlight once in a while.
Another thing I enjoy doing at work is looking around at the people and trying to figure out what student will grow up into what teacher and what teacher was just like what student 20 years ago. That’s an internationally possible thing for sure, you can do it at any school. People are different, but not different enough that they can’t be categorized into personality types. Sometimes they surprise you and there are many directions you can take your personality, but development is development and I think it can be tracked.
Since it had been almost a week, I decided to start hunting down teachers to give them their omiyage pretzels when they were not in the staff room. (Unfortunately, even so the whole process ended up taking 3 weeks, so needless to say some teachers probably got pretzels that were a little old…) This brought me to the biology office and back to the teacher who’d shown me all the cool animals on my last tour. I gave him the pretzels and immediately he rummaged through his desk to give me some mango kuchen cakes in return! That was nice and before I knew it he was pulling me back out into the classroom to look at the new crayfish he’d gotten, inviting me on the new specimen collection outing, teaching me new kanji, and asking me to call him by his first name (which I won’t be doing, because I can’t remember it ^.^* ). We’ve become friends, which is cool. Yosh-sensei, which he will henceforth be called, has a monster of a comb over and is a small 57 year old man with a lot of personality and he never cares how long her prattles on and on in Japanese. He just likes to give me lectures on various things and doesn’t worry about whether or not I can understand him.
Japanese is coming more naturally, as is proven by my ability to converse with older men, because men are men in any language and the older they get the harder they are to understand. Walking around town running errands after school, I actually felt normal. I don’t feel like a visitor in a foreign country anymore. I paid my first bill at a convenience store at that point, which is like buying your utilities at 7-Eleven as if they were candy bars. You give them the bill, they take your money. Done.
Coming back into the apartment I ran into my Neighbor Dude looking through his telescope in the middle of the driveway. I stopped to chat a little out of obligation, but had some bad feelings about it. The other teachers were just starting to get home in hoards and I was a little embarrassed to be seen with him. His reputation is pretty bad, especially at school, because everyone thinks he’s lazy and rude. And an element of that is true, but he’s not a bad person all-in-all, just abrasive, so I make sure to return social calls when he calls on me and I hadn’t from the last time. I’d mentioned his history before in the blog, but as a recap, apparently he was so disliked that he had to be switched with The Pred and they dragged her out of her school and swapped them for their second year here. (The rumor is that Mick-sensei was mostly responsible for this) So yeah, he’s a bit of a social leper and here he was blocking the driveway right when everyone was coming home. I feel bad for caring about being seen with him, but mostly I feel justified because like I said, he often rubs me the wrong way as well.
And talking to him I realize that every day I get more and more affirmation that I’m doing my job right. I’m a good fit at this school and by and large it’s a good fit for me. I was telling Neighbor Dude about how excited I was and how I was introducing myself personally to all the teachers and how I loved talking to them and he was like, “Wow, you’re their dream come true. They’ve been looking for someone like you, did you know that?” So it’s nice to know that I have the chance to be everything they want and that I’m doing a good job, but still, I had a moment of doubt when thinking about my neighbor’s situation. When talking to both him and the Pred, I realize that they’re slightly careless people and maybe never really got the full story, but neither of them really grasp the depth with which they’re disliked by any given person. I don’t know if it’s their own delusions, or if everyone here needs to be careful because the professional realm is a very serious place and someone is probably going to judge you too severely for a honest mistake, let alone a careless one. I don’t know. I’ll stay on my toes. For now though, I think I have a lot of fans at school.
It’s funny, looking at your students in the States I don’t get jealous or sad that I’ve grown up. I would never want to switch places with them in a million years because their youth and potential has nothing on the experiences I’ve already had. And yet, I get a little jealous when the Japanese college students come in to visit the teachers (which has been quite often because University vacation is much longer than high school vacation). I look at them in their Tokyo-hip clothing and I can tell that they’ve accomplished something and that they’re respected. It makes me wonder if it’s a societal thing. We don’t respect people in their 20s, they’re babies after all. In Japan, they really don’t respect school aged children, but they give them a lot more responsibility, and I feel like after all that time having a certain relationship, it means more when they finally grow up and move on. Being a college student is something to be proud of. Or maybe it’s that in U.S. society people just don’t socially respect others in general and it has nothing to do with age. I’m not saying Japan is a perfect country of respect and social grace, that’s certainly not the case when you break it down, but I am saying that having such prescribed roles definitely means that, while things may be unfair by and large by U.S. standards, it ensures that everybody gets a little time in the spotlight once in a while.
Another thing I enjoy doing at work is looking around at the people and trying to figure out what student will grow up into what teacher and what teacher was just like what student 20 years ago. That’s an internationally possible thing for sure, you can do it at any school. People are different, but not different enough that they can’t be categorized into personality types. Sometimes they surprise you and there are many directions you can take your personality, but development is development and I think it can be tracked.
Since it had been almost a week, I decided to start hunting down teachers to give them their omiyage pretzels when they were not in the staff room. (Unfortunately, even so the whole process ended up taking 3 weeks, so needless to say some teachers probably got pretzels that were a little old…) This brought me to the biology office and back to the teacher who’d shown me all the cool animals on my last tour. I gave him the pretzels and immediately he rummaged through his desk to give me some mango kuchen cakes in return! That was nice and before I knew it he was pulling me back out into the classroom to look at the new crayfish he’d gotten, inviting me on the new specimen collection outing, teaching me new kanji, and asking me to call him by his first name (which I won’t be doing, because I can’t remember it ^.^* ). We’ve become friends, which is cool. Yosh-sensei, which he will henceforth be called, has a monster of a comb over and is a small 57 year old man with a lot of personality and he never cares how long her prattles on and on in Japanese. He just likes to give me lectures on various things and doesn’t worry about whether or not I can understand him.
Japanese is coming more naturally, as is proven by my ability to converse with older men, because men are men in any language and the older they get the harder they are to understand. Walking around town running errands after school, I actually felt normal. I don’t feel like a visitor in a foreign country anymore. I paid my first bill at a convenience store at that point, which is like buying your utilities at 7-Eleven as if they were candy bars. You give them the bill, they take your money. Done.
Coming back into the apartment I ran into my Neighbor Dude looking through his telescope in the middle of the driveway. I stopped to chat a little out of obligation, but had some bad feelings about it. The other teachers were just starting to get home in hoards and I was a little embarrassed to be seen with him. His reputation is pretty bad, especially at school, because everyone thinks he’s lazy and rude. And an element of that is true, but he’s not a bad person all-in-all, just abrasive, so I make sure to return social calls when he calls on me and I hadn’t from the last time. I’d mentioned his history before in the blog, but as a recap, apparently he was so disliked that he had to be switched with The Pred and they dragged her out of her school and swapped them for their second year here. (The rumor is that Mick-sensei was mostly responsible for this) So yeah, he’s a bit of a social leper and here he was blocking the driveway right when everyone was coming home. I feel bad for caring about being seen with him, but mostly I feel justified because like I said, he often rubs me the wrong way as well.
And talking to him I realize that every day I get more and more affirmation that I’m doing my job right. I’m a good fit at this school and by and large it’s a good fit for me. I was telling Neighbor Dude about how excited I was and how I was introducing myself personally to all the teachers and how I loved talking to them and he was like, “Wow, you’re their dream come true. They’ve been looking for someone like you, did you know that?” So it’s nice to know that I have the chance to be everything they want and that I’m doing a good job, but still, I had a moment of doubt when thinking about my neighbor’s situation. When talking to both him and the Pred, I realize that they’re slightly careless people and maybe never really got the full story, but neither of them really grasp the depth with which they’re disliked by any given person. I don’t know if it’s their own delusions, or if everyone here needs to be careful because the professional realm is a very serious place and someone is probably going to judge you too severely for a honest mistake, let alone a careless one. I don’t know. I’ll stay on my toes. For now though, I think I have a lot of fans at school.
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