Between a Rock and a Wet Place

I won mixed bentou lunch roulette today! I got the school lunchbox and only 1 out of my 5 nibblets was fish and the rest were meat. Hellz yah! Usually it's the opposite of that.

I've felt a lot like a teacher lately, this is my third week teaching in a row, essays are flying in from the 3rd years, I'm being asked to proofread things by the teachers, and the big ALT English competition is coming up so I'm busy trying to organize that. Though of course this is not without intrigue. Today I asked the students to write down two good things to tell their partners (we're practicing congratulatory phrases), and then I walked around the room reading over their shoulders. Most said things like, "I bought a new CD!" or "I got full marks on the English test!" or "I met so-and-so celebrity!" One girl, however, wrote, "I'm pregnant." I'm still not sure whether she misunderstood the assignment or if she's dying to be a mama.

Speaking of class, I'm consistently baffled by the lack of logic and reasoning skills in high schoolers. Sometimes I'll explain things plain as day and they still don't get it. Or I'll be training the kids for the ALT English test and during a game of 20 questions they'll ask, "Do you like it?" Will "do you like it" really be a useful question to help you figure out what I'm talking about? Or sometimes we'll have established that such and such a thing is bigger than a refrigerator and then they'll go ahead and ask if you can pick it up. You're scored on logic too, Kids! God bless a college education.

I'm still pretty sick, but I'm considering going to the Onsen Festival in a neighboring city tonight. I'd really like to stay home and sleep (I fell asleep half strewn on my couch at 7PM yesterday), but it's a festival devoted to near-naked folks running around in subzero temperatures in and out of hot spring water, celebrating fertility. Meanwhile a man and a woman do a dance reenacting sex. Apparently he has a giant phallus strapped to him and in the end she winds up holding a baby. Expect pictures on Facebook.

10/02
I never know what to do when teachers are sleeping at their desks. On Friday I spun around in my chair to ask Batman a question, only to be met with him slumped over in his chair, head nodding. Awkwardly, I crept back to my desk. What to do, what to do? Am I supposed to wake him? It is the middle of the day. I don’t know, people in the U.S. catch a lot of flack from the Japanese workforce for only working 9-5 and for getting breaks and long lunches, but in the States you’d have your ass handed to you for texting, sleeping at your desk, or spending 2 hours every day in the break room watching television. I think it’s just a matter of where we like to spend our time. People in the U.S. would rather bust their asses in order to be free to spend their time at home as they like, where apparently Japanese people would rather chill all day, even if it means no free time. Also they apparently don’t mind being watched by their co-workers for 12 hours a day, me on the other hand, I go crazy never getting any privacy at work. I always spill my food because I’m too worried about people watching me eat with chopsticks and carry my soup across the room.

In the vein of judgment, halfway through the week of my teaching classes, hypocrisy began to run rampant. Ichi-sensei went on a superiority rant about how he only uses English in the classroom. Not only is this not the case, but I’ve walked past his class before and he usually teaches entirely in Japanese. In fact, sometimes I can only tell what class it is based on the sound of his voice because not a word of English is spoken. I don’t begrudge him that so much, I just wish he hadn’t been so condescending when calling me out when I mentioned how much Japanese is spoken in English class.

And I have to say, there was more than one instance this week where a teacher gave me criticism on my lesson plan, I pondered it for a while, and came to the unspoken response of, “Hm. Maybe it’s you.” Seriously, much of this system is contradictory. I’m in a place where people demand things of me but at the same time prevent me from doing them. I comprised my lesson entirely of communicative conversation exercises and if the students had been barred from using Japanese they would have been talking to a partner or a group for the entire period. When (for some UNKNOWN REASON) the students didn’t use English, a teacher told me they weren’t getting enough speaking practice, so he wanted me to have them repeat THE INSTRUCTIONS to the exercises out loud after I read them. In what fantasy land is that oral skills? The irony is that this practice took time away from their dialog practice.

Of course, my lessons are far from perfect. I’m still learning the Japanese classroom, and that’s hard for me. I look at the students’ faces and they are the same whether they understand or not. I haven’t yet figured out how to gauge the silence. I don’t know which words they know and which they don’t. It’s a wonder ALTs without teaching background or language awareness can teach at all. Again, I’m wanting to be perfect and I’m in a situation where I just can’t be. I think I’m going to view life quite differently when I get back to the States.

After our last class together for the week, I had another conversation with Ichi-sensei. This time he breathed a sigh of relief and told me he was glad the week was over. When we were talking about how students don’t always respond as we’d like, he admitted that most of the language used in the Japanese English classroom is Japanese. He also pointed out that as much as he tries to teach in English, it’s very hard to do when you’re the only one. It’s true. The kids don’t know how to respond and how to listen in English when they’re allowed to use Japanese. I reassured him that I don’t hate the players, I hate the game, so to speak. Japan is coming around, but I think it will be a good decade at least before its classrooms catch up to other foreign language classrooms.

Then Ichi-sensei went on to tell me about how his wife and him live separately and she was just in a car accident but is okay. For a few minutes I was like, “whoa, whoa, whoa, this is over-share in the States, let alone in Japan where you can go out to eat every other night with your friends and they’ve still never even met your wife.” He continued though and I learned that she lives in Sapporo because she is undergoing fertility treatments because they’ve been trying to have children for six years to no avail. I told him I’ve known a lot of people in the same situation and I’m rooting for him. I think we grew closer from that. Though he did end the conversation with, “She’s finishing one of her rounds of treatment this week, so I may have to go to Sapporo on a moment’s notice!” Which brought us straight back to I-don’t-need-to-know-when-you-have-sex-with-your-wife territory.

9/17
Last night I went to Mister Donut to meet Mochi and the English conversation group. I’ve decided they’re the most difficult people to understand in Japan. They don’t slow down, they don’t know how to slow down really, they use strange words but they’re smart enough to use original ones each time, and they’re not old enough to be comfortable throwing away all formalities for the sake of conversation. I just can’t understand them in Japanese.

Still, it’s normal for me not to be able to, I’m new to the language, and I need to not beat myself up for that.

I figured out that the piece of paper covered in kanji that they gave me last time was a club charter. I was still a little surprised at the degree of rigidity, but this is Japan so I guess I shouldn’t have been. I am a little bewildered by the fact that they told me straight out that I am second in command, but I didn’t want to ask who was first, lest that be rude like I should already know. So I guess I’ll just have to figure it out. We’ll be meeting on the other side of town in a public building, which is nice, but also means I’ll probably have to take the train in winter. I plan to take my bike or run even though it’s far. I don’t need to spend 3 dollars every week and then go out for exercise later anyway.

Then there was the moment where we picked the club name. I was completely unprepared for this. The most I’d thought about was lesson plans and meeting every Tuesday to talk. Still, to them it was the most important thing we did all night. Some people wanted to name it “Cherry” which I thought was cliché and also with their poor pronunciation it sounded like “Charley.” I was kind of tempted to go for an Engrish, name, it would have been *SO* easy, but I would have felt guilty in the end. Then, as they were prodding me to contribute I said, “Hm…I don’t know…it should be cool,” and then The Actress wrote down “Should Be Cool.” At first I was like “no no no, that was a comment, not a suggestion,” but then I kind of liked it. In traditional Japanese style, we shortened it down to “shu be coo” and then we Japanese-ized it into “Shubikuru,” which I think is a cool name. And then, since “kuru” is a verb in Japanese (to come), they used the kanji for the second half of the word.

I’m not kidding, everything is named in this process around here, including grocery stores and companies and rock bands. It’s a little amazing.

I’ve been seeing a lot more friends on Skype since I’ve been trying to get up early and a lot of people responded to my entry on The Most Heinous Class Ever. It’s been really nice hearing from people all around. It’s good to feel connected.

Today during first hour I walked into a class and I knew I didn’t like them. Even though I called them out on it right away with a joke, “What is my name? HINT: NOT THE PRED,” they continued making jokes (not even funny ones) about me being The Pred. And they’d go ballistic laughing. They were throwing out all manner of jokes in Japanese, but I was just annoyed because they SO weren’t funny. Quite uninspired and boring, actually. I wanted to be like, “I can understand you, y’know, and you are not saying anything funny. Quit laughing.” I can only assume they had such low respect for The Pred on account of some class they had with her, because for some reason just saying her name was funny. The Pred as an idea was funny to them. My next class was boring. We’ll see what the third has in store, it’s the only class I haven’t met yet. Hopefully they don’t suck, and with that said, I am so ready for Silver Week vacation.

The other day I said you can tell how a class is going to go based on the ikemen haircuts, but now I’m also thinking you can tell a class of delinquents based on their squirrelly-ness and attempted ikemen haircuts on skinny rat-like faces. This is a horrible stereotype, I know, but I think stereotyping is a different thing in Japan. With all the social conformity, I think it raises the likelihood of correlation between a stereotype and a behavior. For example, the only kids you see with dyed hair and baggy pants are like the ones I saw last night while I was walking through the train station. They were the kids lying on their stomachs in the middle of the traffic path smoking cigarettes and casting dirty looks. I smiled at them (I’m from America, I’m not threatened by your quirky behavior. Nice try.). Still, it’s really startling how much more likely you are to be sneered at by a rough looking person than a typical one. It kind of makes me angry, like they’re ruining it for everyone else who wants to be different. Also, part of me feels guilty for making a statement about stereotypes being true, but like I said, I don’t think I’m making this up. Whether the kids start acting that way based on how they look or they start looking that way based on how they act, I’ll never know. What comes first, the chicken or the egg?

I did enjoy their hip hop dance routine in the station though.

An interesting thing, in the class full of rat-faced laughing bastards, there was a picture of two boys from the class kissing pasted right next to the clock. Another interesting statement on Japanese youth culture and sexuality. You see this kind of thing in manga, two beautiful young boys about to kiss, passion fusing them together. This kiss though was kind of hard to look at, because they didn’t have the chemistry. You could tell they were heterosexual. But it’s very counter-intuitive from a U.S. standpoint where such a picture would have to be so good it’s hot or so bad it’s hilarious. I get the impression the kids thought this picture was cool, neither hilarious nor sexy. It wasn’t blended in with a million other pictures either. There was maybe a note or two, a clock, and the photograph on the wall and that ‘s it. In the States, a teacher would have definitely taken it down. This leads me to believe that 1) gender expectations are very different between boys and girls, and 2) it’s so non-sexual that it’s allowed, and they’re so not homophobic here that people can think it’s cute. That’s not necessarily a feather in Japan’s cap, however, considering they might be so non-homophobic because they so don’t consider homosexuality a legitimate thing. I’m not sure. I’ll keep my eyes open.

Year 2, Class 4 should win some sort of prize for ridiculousness.

Most of my classes today were very subdued and their English was poor, but I came into Class 2-4 and they were noisy noisy noisy. My favorite kid from the archery club was in that class and Nemoto-sensei had told me the class was “cheerful.” Boy was that an understatement. My predecessor had told me that the sports boys were usually stoic, except the baseball team, who will flirt with anyone and anything. This class was a lot of baseball players, if it's any indication of what's to come.

I’ve decided you can judge the flirtatiousness and boisterousness of a classroom based on the hairstyles of the boys. The more ikemen haircuts the more likely you are to get nothing done.

We played my game and the shit busted apart. Kids were screaming at each other and one boy, after having to answer a question in English, insisted that he needed to go to the bathroom instead of answering the question. When the game was over, one of the boys started chanting, “Game more one!!” I didn’t care that the English wasn’t correct, I just was happy he was speaking English!

Then the teacher says, “No, we’re going to have our quiz,” and I’m not kidding, one kid goes, “EeeeEEEeee??” and then two, and then before we know it, all 40 of them are going, “eeEEEEeeeE??” in a loop for literally 30+ seconds until the teacher caved and asked if I had another game. I didn’t feel like thinking anything up, so I told them I’d do another special one next time just for them. Then the boy from archery club raised his hand and asked if we could do a question session. Of course, I knew that was trouble, seeing as once the teacher consented (so much for the quiz??) they started chanting for the boy who’d gone to the bathroom. Clearly I was in for trouble. When he returned, the room erupted and everyone was prodding him to say something. The first question was about Japanese food, then the next questions were about boyfriends and it steadily got worse and worse, but I’m proud to say I was prepared. THIS is the classroom everyone warns you about, so I was READY for them (bear in mind, there's no way to win in this situation unless you break all the rules).

Bathroom boy: "Will you go fishing with me?"
Me: "When?"
Bathroom boy: "I love fishing."
Me: "...oh yeah?"

Ikemen boy 1: *thoughtful pause* “Tell me about your first love.”
Me: “Okay. I was fourteen. It was summer time. Johnny Depp was my boyfriend.”
The students didn’t really get it, but they weren’t fazed...

Ikemen boy 2: “Do you have a boyfriend? Can I be your boyfriend?”
The class erupted in laughter. The teacher did nothing.
Me: “…Do you have money?”
Class EXPLODES in laughter.
Ikemen boy 1: “I have money!”

Bathroom boy: “In this class, which boys do you like the best?”
Me: “I like the boys that speak English a lot.”
Bathroom boy: “KIMURA! CHANCE! チヤンスがあるんだ！”
Kids prod Kimura to ask a question.
Kimura, at a loss for a question, gives a statement: “I want you.”
Me: *strikes disapproving pose like I’m about to end the game*…do YOU have money?”
Kimura: “No I do not :( :( “
Me: “Good luck then.”
Ikemen boy 1: “I have money!!”
Me: “Then, we can talk after class!”

Ikemen boy 1: “What is your dream proposal?”
Me: “Hm…difficult. My dream proposal...probably...inside a giant robot.”
Ikemen boy 1: “I don’t…I can’t…”
Me: “That’s too bad.”
Ikemen boy 1: “I can do this: We can go to suchinsuch restaurant. It has a good view. I will bring my money. I love you.”
Me: “Will there be robots?”
Ikemen boy 1: “um…”
Me: “No...Any other questions?”

Bathroom boy: “Will you write…er…*asks sensei*”
Nemoto-sensei: “He wants you to compete with him at drawing a crab.” *classroom is quiet*
Me: “…*rolls head in best fighting pose, in gangster voice* CHAAAALLENGE??
*bathroom boy comes to the blackboard, we both grab chalk…and the sneaky bastard starts writing crab in kanji. I shoot him a dirty look, and write crab in English and underline it.*
Bathroom boy: “Ok, ok, real, ok.”
Me: “ok.”
*We begin to draw and he draws something that looks like the Cheat from Strongbad Email and I draw the cutest crab I can muster…then I draw a giant dinosaur eating his crab and the class goes crazy. He starts to draw on my crab and I wipe the board smugly with my hand*
Bathroom boy: “;_; You. Winner.”

Eventually we did a lesson in the last 10 minutes lol BEST. CLASS. EVER.