Car Accident

Friday night we had some excitement in Shiso (for a change), but not the good kind. My friend Lee, another JET, was on his way to my house when he got in a car accident about two blocks away. Luckily he was fine, but his car was pretty banged up. I was surprised when I got there, because he sounded so casual on the phone, but it was a pretty bad crash, there was glass everywhere, and a metal post on the street corner was bent. The streets in my neighborhood are small, and there are no sidewalks, and lots of blind corners, and a woman ran a stop sign at a blind intersection and slammed into Lee's car. We had to call our supervisors at the Board of Education to come down and help, because we had no idea what to do, and don't understand much Japanese. Still, it could have been a lot worse. The woman hit Lee's car on the front right side, the driver's side, so the right headlight and the tire and the side of the hood were really messed up, but if she had hit him a few feet further back, she'd have hit the driver's side door. Pretty scary.

Some Musings on Teaching

This morning after first period, the first year English teacher came back from her lesson in tears. I don't know the details, but apparently she had a really bad time with the students. I really admire her attitude and her teaching ability, she is only a few years older than me, and she manages, as far as I can see, to be both a respected authority figure and a "cool teacher." She seemed to have the whole thing down, that balance that I've been struggling to find, so seeing her so upset by the students really made an impression on me. I realized even the teachers who seem so together can be hurt by the students' attitude, it's not just me. It made me feel a little better, because I still get upset when the students are disrespectful or slacking off in class. But she always gets along with the students so well, and seems to really like them and care about them, and logically I know that is not going to change from just one bad class. So it made me think, even if there's a bad day, when the students drive me crazy or I feel like they hate me (or I hate them), it's just the inertia of the middle school universe, and the students' attitude is indicative of nothing more than how worked up a class is on a certain day. The next day I can get right back in the saddle, and like the kids again. In other words, misbehaving students are not bad students. The way students act in a group is dictated by many social factors, and I shouldn't take it personally. That's obviously easier said than done, but it gives me something to keep in mind. 

Tea and Taiko

Saturday evening we went to a public tea ceremony held at the Yamasaki cultural center. I'm not really sure what the purpose of it was. Lana got tickets from a student of hers. We got to watch them make tea and then we drank it, which was an experience. I hate green tea anything, and a lot of things here are green-tea flavored. But drinking actual green tea is another experience altogether. It's very bitter, and it's kind of room temperature. Lara and Lana both loved it, but I had to literally force myself to drink the entire bowl, because, as it was part of the tea ceremony, you had to drink the whole thing. I took a few sips and then put the bowl down, intending to finish it once I had gotten up the courage, but apparently this was the wrong thing to do, because the women serving the tea came over and were like, "oh, are you not drinking?" so I gathered you are not supposed to put your bowl down, or it means you are done. So I had to choke down the rest of the bowl of tea in a few gulps, and physically restrain myself from grimacing, then assure the woman who collected my bowl that it was "oishikatta" (delicious). Despite the tea itself, I really enjoyed seeing the tea ceremony, and participating in a local event. I saw a few of my students and one of the women who works at my school. It really is a very small town.

On Sunday we went to a Taiko drum concert at a store called Wakon in Yamasaki. We stop in there to browse a lot, especially after our ritual Saturday morning sushi run at the kaiten sushi restaurant, and we got to talking with the women who work there, and they told us about this concert. It was small, maybe 40 or 50 people on folding chairs in a corner of the store, and three drummers and a shamisen player (a shamisen is a traditional Japanese instrument which, if I understood what the boy who was playing it told us, costs about as much as a car. See here.) I had been feeling down the past few days because of the bugs and the second year students (see September 19th post), and then yesterday was really rainy and gross, and I spent the entire day scrubbing my house from top to bottom, and STILL there were a million fruit flies, and the place is still a mess. But the concert really put me in a better mood. It was very intimate, so it was a real experience. The musicians were chatting with the crowd, and they were really good. They even had people come up from the audience and play the drums. As the token gaijin, of course got pulled up on stage. It was a lot of fun. 

Sports Festival Pictures

Pictures from the Sports Festival are now up, but for reasons of the students' privacy the album is unlisted. If you want to see the pictures, email me, or comment on this post, and let me know, and I'll email you the link. 

:)

I'm at school, and it's the most interesting time of the day right now, so I'll comment on it. Every day the students clean the school, from vacuuming the rugs to dusting the bookcases. The school is like one loooooong box, with a single long hallway running down each floor, and one of the things the students do is take rags and sweep the floors. But how they do it, a few of them (boys) line up at one end of the hall, making an inverted V with their bodies, with the rags on the floor, and then they essentially race down the hall, pushing the rag in front of them, with their legs like propellers behind them. It's one of those things that is so amusing to me, because there is absolutely no equivalent in America. 

Oh, also, at this time of day, after classes end and before sports begin, the sound system pipes relaxing plinky music through the school. It's like lullaby music, and the students are supposed to reflect on what they've learned, or at least that's what the English teacher, Yanagita-sensei, told me.

A faint glimmer of light

At the end of this terrible week, and this supremely awful day, there was a faint glimmer of light. I am helping some of the third year students prepare for an English speech competition, and from now until mid or late October I will be staying after school to help them study. They have to write a speech and then recite it from memory at the competition. The first girl I helped today was really quiet, and her pronunciation was pretty weak, I had to work a lot with her on the "th" and "w" sounds, and especially the l/r difference. I've never really taught phonics before, and it's hard when those sounds don't exist in Japanese. I was a little discouraged. 

Then the second student came in. I'll call him TM (even on a personal blog, I need to be careful about the students' privacy). I worked with him a bit yesterday, we went over the first paragraph of his speech, and practiced reading it a few times, and I pointed out a few errors and pronunciation issues. After the first girl, I wasn't expecting much. But when I asked him if he could do any of it from memory yet (mind you, he JUST got the final copy of the English translation yesterday), he covered up the paper and recited the entire first paragraph perfectly. I was literally almost in tears, I was so happy. After such a bad week, and such a terrible class today with the second years, and feeling like the students are all slackers, I was so happy to see how well he did, and how hard he must have studied last night. He's such a sweet kid too, he's got such a sweet smile. He really made my day a whole lot better.

The most supremely awful day

This week has been a long string of irritations, culminating in today, the most supremely awful day. 

Last weekend, we had some miscommunication about a plan some of the Shiso JETs had to go to Osaka, which led to us not going anywhere, although we had three days off. It was because I prefer to have a plan, like a hotel reservation and a departure time, when I go on a trip, while the others prefer to be more spontaneous. Thus, miscommunication. 

On Tuesday afternoon I started feeling under the weather, and by the following morning I felt like I had a knife in my throat every time I swallowed. 

On Wednesday I finally got around to cleaning my house, and almost the minute I started, I found a HUGE infestation of maggots living in, on and around my kitchen garbage can. That same night I found another cockroach by the back door.

Thursday morning I found a giant poisonous centipede crawling into the house under a crack in the front door. I sprayed it with bug spray and luckily it ran back outside and died. I am also worried about the possibility of ticks living in my tatami mats. I know its possible for that to happen. You have to air and spray them to protect them. The problem: I have a huge house and the floor is almost all tatami. Plus, I'm scared of what I might find underneath.

Today, Friday, I woke up with my throat still sore. It was garbage day, which I was feeling icky about because I had to figure out a new regimen because my old way of doing it (keeping the garbage in the kitchen all week until garbage day like I did back home) caused the maggot problem. On my way out back to get the garbage from the new outside bin I installed, I cracked my head on the metal bars outside the bathroom window, hard enough that I was bleeding. I dumped the garbage, but I was late for work, so I biked there, in the rain, bleeding, feeling icky. 

Lunch today was by far the worst I've had. The school lunches are never to my liking exactly, although sometimes they are bearable. I agreed to eat them a) as a show of solidarity with the other teachers, who all eat it, and b) because if someone else prepares my meals I'll be getting some vegetables in my diet (especially here--Japanese food is very healthy, comparatively). But today's menu really was the worst so far--a bowl of rice with some weird purple flavor flakes sprinkled in it, and a bowl of vegetable-laden miso-like soup with tofu. Those of you who know me well will be surprised to hear, the tofu was the most enjoyable part of the meal for me. And that's saying something. Oh, and the ubiquitous Japanese cold tea, that is served with everything, and which tastes, to me, like dirty water. 

Despite all this I tried to rally my spirits, but the final nail in the coffin was this afternoon's 2B English class. This is the class with the boy who has ADHD. I prepared a lesson that included a game where the students had to go around and ask each other questions in English. Supreme FAIL. Seriously bad idea. That boy, and three or four kids sitting around him, did not pay attention the entire class, he was facing backwards the entire time, they were all carrying on their own conversation, three or four other kids in class were sleeping with their heads on the desk, and the rest of the class was really quite and didn't want to participate. Of course, once they were told to get up and walk around, they didn't speak any English. I was so frustrated, if a student back home was being that disruptive and disrespectful in class, they would be in so much trouble. But the teachers' attitude here is to just let it happen. They know its a problem, they don't like it, but they seem not to know what to do. They kids don't get in trouble, so they walk all over the teachers. I've tried to be very accepting of the cultural differences I've experienced so far, but this one is the first one where I seriously want to scream "why the hell are you doing it that way, that's stupid, do it differently." I guess the trade off is that the students here view the teachers more as friends, but then there is a complete lack of discipline. I'm quite afraid of the students when they get rowdy, because I know there is no mechanism to reel them back in. 

Oh, and at the end of the class, my JTE (Japanese Teacher of English, the teacher I work with), who is a really sweet, soft-spoken woman, went ape-@#$& one one girl who held up a note she had written during class that said "I don't understand English" (in English). The teacher started screaming at the girl, and STILL the class did not get their act together and say, "woah, the teacher is really mad, we should probably respect her authority." It's not that I think they're bad kids. It's just that the way the system is here, they are given no sense of consequences for misbehaving. When you hand out worksheets for them to do, some of them just ignore them and sleep or talk to friends. It's really like working and paying attention are optional. That is so completely different from my experience in school, I don't know what to think.

今日の歌 (Song of the Day)

Current music: L'Arc~en~Ciel, 瞳の住人