Maybe It Was August 11th? Either Way It Was Wonderful.

The weekend was pretty chill when the Pred and her hubby got back, though they were a ball of chaos. I just tried to stay out of the way and though I like them, was really looking forward to having some space. They went to run errands and returned maybe an hour or less before their train left, even though they hadn’t finished packing. I had kind of planned to take them out to dinner or at least dessert for a last hurrah, but it all happened so fast. They called a taxi and started lugging suitcases outside. In the end, they each had two international luggage pieces, two carry-ons, two-backpacks, and several plastic bags full of junk. They’d also sent two boxes ahead via the post office. I was nauseous just thinking about carrying all that stuff. It barely fit in the taxi! A little planning ahead would have eliminated this problem.

Speaking of problems, they told me apparently someone will be by to pick up the koto, the giant musical instrument The Pred’s husband was learning while he was here. So I guess I have to hang on to that. Also, there is a cake in the fridge, which has already been there for almost a week, and that needs to go with the koto and the bag of koto things…And the parting words on the way out the door were, “oh, The Pred will be back in March to pick up the synthesizer.” Not, “is it ok if we leave the keyboard with you for a while?...” Honestly, do you really need a keyboard? It’s a pretty regular electric piano from the 90s. I’m pretty sure you can get that anywhere. There was some angry under-the-breath comment like, “I guess if you get sick of it you can sell it to Hard Off,” but that was about as open-ended as the conversation got *sigh*

The ALT that lives next door saw them off too. He’s a ridiculous character himself, but even so, when they left we both looked at each other and made whistling sighs for five minutes, reflecting upon the heinousness that had just left our world. We decided to take a walk after that. He’s a very philosophical dude, but also very negative. It’s my impression that he kind of hates Japan but doesn’t know what to do otherwise so he stays. He’s fun enough to talk to about big ideas, a lot of which we view in the same way, but I take everything he says with a grain of salt and I feel like I’m constantly trying to turn around the negativity and/or correct something offensive he says. Apparently he’s quite famous in the JET circles as “The Guy Who Didn’t Get Along With His School So They Had to Move Him.” I’ll talk about impressions and job typecasting later though, it’s too big to get into now.

We walked through town and up one of the big mountains by the sea. I’d love to come back during the day so I could see more than a big blob of blackness for the ocean. We were literally inside a cloud, and though the whole sky was clouded over, we could see the darkness rolling over us. On the way home, we went past several houses decorated with Christmas lights. I don’t know why they were decorated, but it was pretty. I suppose that’s probably the reason right there.

If You're Into Education, Here’s a Gigantic Essay You Can Read…

I’ve been voluntarily up to my neck in teaching materials lately, taking everything I can and reading entire books. It’s great because my teaching experience thus far has enabled me to turn the crappy but creative lesson plans I find in our big training handbooks and turn them into ideal lessons for my students.

I spent the morning crafting a lesson plan around some foreign currencies I’d acquired. Since I have free reign of the international club and they want a English emphasis, I’m going to teach it like the Visiting Scholars program from UW but every theme will be a facet of Internationalism. Fortunately, the kids involved (maybe 20-ish?) are highly motivated so they’re decent with English, and for those who aren’t, I’ll make the activities flexible to their abilities.

I won’t start teaching classroom lessons until September because they have some term-end testing going on, among other things. (School starts in April here and there are only 3 Senior High School grade levels). My school is one of the most aggressive academic high schools of Hokkaido, so pretty much everyone’s plans have to revolve around 3 years of preparation for University Entrance Examinations. If you can’t get into a good college, you’re still kind of screwed as far as success in Japan goes, no matter how good your English is - hence the persistent reliance on reading and grammar here. For me, it’s okay though, it gives me a more realistic and academic teaching experience than, “Here is a classroom where no one will go to college, please play around for a while before leaving Japan. KTHXBAI.” Also, it challenges me to keep everyone happy, (students, teachers, administration, and myself) while making sure to improve their communication skills but not failing them on test preparation.

Southeast Asia has a record of grammar translation when it comes to foreign language education, but the focus is quickly shifting. Japan in particular is beginning to prioritize oral communication. In fact, less rigorous schools, like our rival school across town, have a more U.S. type views – though to be honest, I’d still rather be here on account of the challenge.

All things considered, the changing view is reflected in at least half my English staff. I’ll be working with 5 teachers of first and second year high schoolers (third year English classes are devoted entirely to test preparation, and the test doesn’t require an oral component so I won’t work with them). I went up to 3 of the teachers already and asked if I could interview them on their classroom style, and unsurprisingly, the ones who did it immediately were the teachers who said, “I love enthusiasm! I want you to focus on talking! I want you to play fun games! They get enough of that other crap from their other classes.” Of course, the strict, stogy man has not yet followed up with me. The other two, mumble-sensei and shadow-sensei...well, to be honest, I haven’t asked them yet and I thought I’d wait until the day draws closer because they’re a little intimidating ^.^*

I’ve though a lot about communicative competence versus translation lately and how they use different thought processes. Living here, it’s like I feel the different parts of my brain functioning and growing. It really drives home the fact that fluency is vital to communication and you can’t learn it unless you do fluency-based activities (like oral interviews or say, I don't know, living in Japan, for example :) ) I can use all the new words and grammar pieces in the world and I won’t be able to communicate naturally unless I’m comfortable experimenting with them. The same goes for the kids!

It’s sometimes very difficult to get this idea across in a traditional Japanese classroom when it comes to teaching oral communicative competence. These kids can probably read poetry even better than I can, but although they’ve studied English for 6 years they still quibble about saying, “Are you married,” and answering when someone asks, “how old are you?” Part of it can be attributed to shyness and nerves around a native speaker, but I think a lot of it is a lack of real world application. Fortunately, as a nonnative speaker of the dominant language, a lot of this is on the forefront of my mind at all times and as such I won’t let these kids down.

As far as the JET program goes, people have a lot of complaints about job expectations because of all this. Inexperienced teachers are bored, experienced teachers are more bored, and sometimes inexperienced teachers are wetting themselves because they’re being stuck in front of a classroom all day every day, taking over duties of the main teacher, when all they wanted to do was learn Japanese. In short, there are a lot of complications that come from the blurring of boundaries between cultures. I got lucky though; I’m a teacher in a school who wants a teacher AND needs a teacher.

Some people view this, “ok come play with the kids and leave so we can get back to our memorization,” as a flaw in the JET Program, like they're just putting us there for show. I’m not so sure. I mean, in an ideal world maybe they could hire real teachers to be real teachers and actually teach, but you can’t change the system over night no matter how many people are on board. There are a lot of other social issues in Japan that rely on the current structure of a Japanese high school. Even more importantly, it’s not usually what it seems. It’s important to keep in mind that the goals of many Junior or Senior high schools in Japan are to socialize children more than to educate children.

This goes for all subjects, not just English. Education is very independent, the students are expected to take responsibility and there is constant supervision but no hand-holding like we do in the States. Yes, there are drawbacks, for example, this independence can result in a lot of teacher-centered methods, since classroom time isn’t really needed for imparting information when students study on their own. It could be more productive if teachers worked like they do in the U.S. and at the same time students worked like they do in Japan, but the bottom line is that I don't think we can point fingers because while our teachers try very hard, our students get lazy as a result. In the end, we're all kind of even.

A Japanese school is more for raising good citizens than for making people smarter, so why would the JET program be any different? The primary goal of the program isn’t to teach English, it’s to create a relationship with a foreigner and motivate students to lead global lives.

It’s an interesting experience and makes me reflect often on my own education. The classroom of the program for Japanese at UW was very active and practical. It even used an integrated skills method, and still I'm using my brain in new ways. Sometimes it surprises me a little when convenience store clerks don’t pull as much from context as Mary-san and Takeshi-san from my textbook dialogs lol but what more could they have included in these dialogs that they left out? No one starts off learning a language and wielding it perfectly. In fact, no one does that with anything they learn, which is one of the biggest lessons I need to absorb in my lifetime. I always feel like I need to do everything correctly, straight from the get-go. Considering I can’t do the impossible, it leads to a lot of hesitation and guilt that I shouldn’t have to feel. Over all, I think the opportunity to break out of the mold was given at UW, I just didn’t have enough skills yet to do it. In other words, they gave me a good foundation and now that my skills are growing, I can rely on the memorized dialogs that echo in my brain if I’m unsure about generalizing a grammar point in another way.

I think I had a good foundational education and most importantly it made me love Japanese even more because it was fun.

The Aftermath

After my predecessor left, there were a few days where I just sat in the center of my living room and said to myself, “Look, Steph. Everything the light touches is our kingdom."...Well, it didn’t exactly go like that, but if it had, the next line would be, “Everything the light touches...what about that shadowy place?” “That's beyond our borders. You must never go there, Steph. That land belongs to the mold and the ants.”

Still, it was fun thinking that I now owned everything in the apartment, could do whatever I wanted with it, and didn’t have to worry about anyone else but myself. Granted, I didn’t have the energy I would have had if I had been allowed to start redecorating straightaway (**skip to the present, I’m not still not even half done and it’s been 2 weeks, I think I missed my excitement-fueled golden opportunity**). I began to clean and I started with the kitchen, which was no easy task because I’m the type that likes to empty out every little crevice. I don’t want to miss a single treasure in this apartment!

Some treasures I did, in fact, find! A plethora of spices, including Indian ones, more furikake (rice seasoning) than I can eat in all my time here, various sauces and such which I look forward to exploring, some cute bentou boxes, and unused adorable dishes.

The stranger things I found in the cupboard on the spice rack: a roll of salmon wrapped in some food that was probably very expensive but was now little more than expired fish, 3 separate and gigantic cans of curry powder, a bike reflector, dead batteries, and a pack of cigarettes (the ALT before me definitely didn’t smoke, so I often wonder who put them there and how old they are).

There were also mystery items, most of which I’m very glad I didn’t try, especially the one I later translated to “powdered bath soap.” For all the powdered edibles in Japan, I very easily could have mistaken that for food. Why it was in the spice rack, I’ll never know. I also found a 2 inch block of dark squishy stuff that looked like caramel, but when I translated it I realized it was cooking salt. One of the mystery items I understood enough to be tea, so I tried it, but it turned out being umeboshi tea. Boshi is the un-ripened sour plum, umeboshi is the pickled version, if that wasn’t unappetizing enough. It’s something I try never to eat. And although I can read the package, I’m still not convinced that it IS umeboshi tea, because it tasted WORSE than soap and I can’t think why anyone would drink that. This tea is the only thing in Japan I’ve seen yet that I just can’t accept.

Among the grosser things I found – black licorice watermelon seeds...all over the place. I guess it’s a snack, but these were just a mess in my cupboard. I wouldn’t have wanted to eat something like that FRESH, let alone molding and scattered in every crevice of the 3rd dirtiest place in my home. It’s a wonder we didn’t have worse vermin problems than we did!

Mostly the kitchen was just dirty, dirty, dirty. As I made my way down to the range, I found a pipe I thought was probably clean as it was going to get, but it was a little bumpy so maybe I’d wipe the metal a little just in case...turns out as I scrubbed a discovered it was not a black metal pipe, but a blue plastic pipe coated in burned grease. It took me 4 nights to get it as clean as it is, and still I have to scrub the ceiling and walls. I haven’t touched the sink, and there is no hope for the rest of the range and the cooking hood, they’re pretty much ruined.

The real kicker though was cleaning out the utensil drawers. In one drawer, I found maybe 30 disposable razors scattered about amongst the Tupperware. As I moved through the rest of the house, I discovered the same disposable razors in any place where things could be placed. Also in copious amounts were: individually wrapped q-tips, hair ties, to-go soaps. If you haven’t noticed the pattern yet, they are the things from complimentary baskets in hotels. Apparently The Pred was a bit beyond obsessive about not paying for hygiene.