Anxious

I'm ready to be done with this week. There's so much to do before Saturday, but I still want time to go quickly. I'm going out of my mind with anxiousness. I don't want to sit at school all day. I have to teach this week, but it's the dickhead kids. I sat without classes for almost a month, and then the two weeks before I leave, the two weeks when I'd really much rather be not teaching, I have the dickhead kids.

At first I thought it was all in my head that these kids were little bastards, but now that I look back at my notes I realized over half of my second year classes were sassy and some of them were just downright rude. I'm beginning to worry that my lesson plan won't be fun enough to keep them engaged. Granted, last time my lesson fell completely apart, so I think part of me is still wounded from that, but I'm still not convinced it's entirely my fault. How can 2nd year students be dumber than 1st year students? It doesn't make any sense. Also, both of the two 2nd year teachers are really bad at classroom management. To put the icing on the cake, the one who is AWFUL at classroom management is even worse at English. I hate talking to him because not only is he awkward as hell and impossible to understand, but he won't talk to me in Japanese either. This creates a very effective loop of avoidance. Initially I tried to break through it by being proactive and friendly, but it's proving to be too much work.

Then yesterday I waited around all day for a time when both teachers were free to talk about lesson plans, and finally the less-awkward teacher approached me by himself to talk about the lesson. Afterward, he called over the other teacher who claimed to be busy for the rest of the day. If you knew you were going to be busy, why didn't you come to me earlier? Especially because me and the super awkward teacher were supposed to teach 1st period this morning. We ended up moving the lesson to Friday, which is fine because that class is one of the classes I hate the most and I'd prefer to have the kinks out of the lesson before I teach them, but the voice at the back at my head keeps saying, "Way to go, Steph, you made it so inconvenient they had to reschedule the class." But then I remind myself that it's not really my fault. I hate working in an environment that's all men, and I hate working in a place full of awkward people who are mostly too shy or too afraid to talk to me.

As far as the class goes, I'm not sure what I can do to remedy the problem when the teachers are part of it.

I tried to come into this week by engaging the students with fun physical activities. I'm letting them have a snowball fight in class (and I set it up in such a way that bullying and low self esteem can't happen for people who lose too much). They'll face off with vocabularly questions, winners get to throw their snowballs, and then move to the next pair. That way everyone is moving and you won't notice too much if the same people always lose. Yet still, I'm nervous. I gave them a really easy, really fun, completely un-educational, activity the last time I taught them and not only did they manage to not understand the simple instructions, but they also managed to make it seem boring. These kids must have some kind of magic power for suckage. God, I hate 17 year olds.

Which reminds me, I'll have to go to the bathroom and psyche up my sass in the mirror before every class, since I think that's the only thing they respond to.

I think part of the problem is that they're just not very advanced, and so this week if I go over ever detail and spell everything out for them, they'll be able to participate. It's less than ideal, I want to train these kids to use their heads instead of being translation robots, but I have to start small and gain their confidence first. I had to take this approach with some of my 1st year classes, but now they're more independent. I have only been in the second year classrooms twice, and only once with my own lesson, so there's no reason to believe the same thing won't happen after a little work with them.

I could do without this stress right now. I guess it's really not a big deal considering I'm doing my part, so it's not my fault no matter how things turn out, but I always have the overwhelming desire for things to go well. I can't not set out to fix other people's problems because I'm still responsible for making this class go well.

Wish me luck, 240 seventeen year olds stand between me and Christmas.

Just Do It.

Vital advice for any language learner.

I get really frustrated with Japanese sometimes, especially lately. I'm not taking classes, so the learning process is slow. I keep getting stumped on how to form certain sentences only to realize most of it is up to context anyway and you can literally get away with saying one or two words...provided they're the right words, and of course my non-native speaker intuition never helps me deduce what the right words are.

And now I'll be in the States for almost 3 weeks without any Japanese, and I have to have a 25 minute speech written in Japanese within a week after getting back to Japan. Shoot. What was I thinking?? Oh, I was thinking I'd be good at Japanese. Surprise, no!

Anyway, just when I start getting down about it, I teach an English class. People constantly make mistakes and somehow I understand them. Granted, this is only the case if the listener doesn't panic, which socially Japanese people are groomed to do. Still, I can't tell you how many times I'm sitting in class, staring down a befuddled child, and I think to myself, "Really, it's not that hard. Just do it."

And it's not that hard, really. Well, it is, but there's not a damn thing you can do about it, so you just have to use the words you know. That's why I'm glad that I'm here teaching English and not here doing another job. Constantly trying to get non-native speakers to speak English helps me out emotionally with speaking Japanese. It helps me identify when I'm being heinous about my Japanese.

The thing of it is, when you're learning their language people usually want to help you, and being around non-native speakers of English I've noticed that we have the uncanny urge to correct mistakes mere seconds after they are made. A really easy way to do it is to conversationally repeat what the person said, while making the correction in place of the mistake. People haven't been doing that to me in Japan, so either the Japanese way is to ignore it completely, or I'm not making many mistakes. I'm hoping for the latter.

Anyway, today after I finished class and was reminded of this lesson, one of the few women teachers made a casual comment to me about my illness from last week. I've been really anxious talking in Japanese lately because I haven't been practicing and after lying at home on the couch all weekend, I could barely speak Japanese at all. Then I was like "wait. people love it when you try. they don't judge you. just start talking and quit being a baby." and I did, and it was great. Usually you're judged more strongly for being quiet than for being wrong. Was my grammar correct? Don't know, I was talking too quickly to pay attention, but it turned out all right.

And I love this woman because 1) she speaks slowly and carefully but she makes it stylistically so I don't feel like a 3 year old, 2) she's not afraid to leave the "safe" conversation topics like "did you catch a cold," and "what are you eating for lunch?" and 3) she's not afraid of me or nervous around me at all. It makes it really easy to have a normal conversation and I value her presense for that. I know it's scary talking to people who don't speak your language well. When I was a stupid little high schooler working at Target, I can't tell you how many Latino customers I avoided when they weren't speaking English, even though I knew some Spanish. Still, I'm an adult now and I've learned that the worst thing that can happen is that you throw your hands up and walk away after one person starts yelling. It's awkward, but shit, worse things happen.

I've figured out that the worst part about learning Japanese isn't using Japanese or not having the words I want, it's the fact that I scare the people around me so much that they can't understand me.

No matter how slowly I seem to be progressing, I can't deny that I've learned a lot of kanji and that there are great strides in my ability to hear Japanese. I may never be able to have a debate unless I enter a Japanese university, but I am learning. In fact, I've begun to "just know" what people are talking about, even if I can't repeat how they said it and if I don't know all the words they used. I think this is part of the fluency process. It's scary, because I don't want to answer if I've misunderstood, but that's part of the game and the ultimate goal is to be able to speak without thinking.

After all, what more is a class than a series of speaking opportunities? So if you too are learning a language, please remember that you just need to use it and that you shouldn't think too much. Yeah, thinking is important, but usually it comes later. Please remind me of this at a later date when I'm beating my head against the table over some language failure, ok?