Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Tales from the Classroom, Part 1

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on October 28, 2008
in Precocious Younglings and Teaching in Japan
. 0 Comments

So after school I teach conversational English to a group of five second year students whose English is already quite good. They are practicing for a short homestay trip in, I dunno, January or February or some such, so we study things like giving directions and vocabulary for shopping and stuff. I have no idea how to teach this class, but the students are good-natured enough that we usually have fun despite my occasionally fumbling about for things to occupy the time.

Even though I speak almost no Japanese and the kids have a hard time forming English sentences, we are still able to get stuff done without the presence of a Japanese teacher. Part of the reason for this is that my students in this class have a couple of electronic dictionaries to share between the five of them that they use to translate any words that I can’t make them understand with pantomime and synonyms. These dictionary things are totally slick. There’s not been a word yet whose meaning the students have been unable to suss out with the aid of their trusty electronic dictionaries, and with the help of these devices combined with the students’ quick wits and considerable knowledge base, I’ve mostly been able to avoid the communication problems I experience in my other, larger, less motivated classes,

Sometimes when class kind of tapers off like it so often does due to my legendary lack of ability to plan things, the kids’ natural intellectual curiosity will drive them to look up random idioms on the dictionaries’ idiom finder and say said idioms to me just to see what I’ll do. Yesterday, I saw two students, the only boy in the class and the girl who sits next to him, passing an e-dictionary between them, whispering in Japanese and glancing up at me. Finally, they did a little surreptitious jan-ken-pon (which is identical to the American “rock-paper-scissors” in everything but the name), and the loser turned to me and readied herself to speak, glancing down at the LCD screen a couple of times to make sure she had it right in her mind. For my part, I tried to look as non-threatening and good-natured as possible so that she wouldn’t feel too nervous about speaking English. In an American high school you’d expect them to come up with stuff like “I have a raging hard-on” or “Fuck you, GI,” but I don’t have to worry about that so much in Japan. Still, I’m never quite sure what to expect when this kind of thing happens.

The first go round I couldn’t make out what she was saying because there was a lot of noise coming from outside the classroom as the baseball club ran drills out in the hallway. From time to time I could see them looking through the door’s window and trying to sound out the stuff I’d written on the board. “What was that?” I said, and leaned in to hear her better.

More confident this time, she said, “I feel like a million dollars!”

Man Has No Nature!

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on October 19, 2008
in Teaching in Japan
. 0 Comments

If I had to be all pithy about it, I would say that I don’t particularly like the job I am currently committed to performing for the next six months or so despite the fine opportunity for cultural exchange and personal growth that it presents. Luckily, I am under no obligation to be pithy, or even to be concise, and so have the luxury of going into greater detail about the melange of emotions—bad and good—that are evoked each morning as I walk into the teacher’s lounge of whatever school I am scheduled for that day and shout “Ohaiyo gozaimasu” in the high-pitched rumble that characterizes my oft-unused “outside” voice.

Ironically enough, the four years I spent as a high school student are both the reason I am here and the reason I have had so much trouble adjusting to the job.

Back when I was in school, my favorite teachers were the ones who made class interesting by sheer force of personality: Fr. Jesuit for his scatterbrained historical tangents and well-developed sense of irony, Dr. English-teacher for his puns and eminently dash-able one-liners, Dr. History-teacher for his frequent references to the use of LSD. Sure, there were discussions in all of these classes; however, the emphasis was still on lecturing, and I was content to just go to class and listen to my teachers talk about interesting things for fifty minutes. Under normal circumstances my teaching style would be shaped by this preference, and I would focus on attempting to fill my class time with dry humor and tangential ramblings. But since my audience consists entirely of non-native speakers, trying to adapt this method to my current responsibilities does not work, not even a little. It’s just the nature of teaching and learning a foreign language, and doubly so when you are teaching students whose language you do not speak.

My least favorite teachers traditionally were the ones who made me get out of my seat and actually do stuff in class. I always used to resent it when my Spanish teachers made us practice dialogues in pairs or do group activities, more so since I didn’t know anyone in any of the four Spanish classes I took throughout high school and college and at the time was hampered by somewhat crippling social anxiety that made every such class an ordeal. But now I get paid to try to get my kids to do exactly that which irritated me not that long ago.

“It’s a weird position to be in,” I told one of the other assistant teachers working in my prefecture. “Back then I would totally have hated having a language class with me as the teacher.”

“What would have gotten you to pay attention in Spanish class, then?” she asked me. “If you knew that you could do it in your classes now.”

“I’m not sure anything could have,” I said, after giving it some thought. The only thing I have been able to come up with even after a lot of pondering is if the practice dialog was on video and took place between two naked women and a man who was fully clothed but also on fire. I might have lifted my head out of the puddle of drool on my desk for that. My lack of interest in Pictionary and Word Finds as viable class activities wasn’t one of those “Jesus this is so boring, I could totally do a better job of this,” sort of thing. Like Socrates, my criticism of the system did not go so far as to suggest anything better. I simply was more interested in sleeping than I was the subject matter just then, and Pictionary and its various ilk prevented me from being able to sleep by forcing me to get out of my chair and engage the material. The main difference I can see between me and the kids I am teaching (many of whom, at least at my ghetto school, seem about as interested in English as I was in Spanish way back when) is that I was able to snooze my way through high school while still taking AP classes and maintaining a 4-point-something GPA, which is great if you can swing it, but not recommended for the general population.

I’m not trying to say that I think games and activities are a bad thing or that they shouldn’t be a part of the learning process. My point here is that my experiences as a student have colored the way I approach the business of teaching English, and this is a problem because I am still coming from the perspective of a fashionably jaded, 19-year-old slacker prince. Back then I would have considered anyone who told me “Hey, here’s a board game you can play to practice the passive tense!” to be a total cheeseball who was not to be trusted. Even once I got to college this mindset did not disappear completely; when I took Conceptual Physics (Physics for Non-majors) junior year, I skipped all the lab days where we ran experiments and stuff because I was unwilling to expend the effort for such a minimal return. Labs counted as extra credit and I already had an “A” in the class and was confident in my ability to maintain that good grade without any help. My job right now is basically to be the embodiment of the very persona I would have scoffed at not too long ago. This makes lesson planning extremely difficult because I am incapable of coming up with my own ideas. I am so quick to write off the kind of vocabulary-building games that are encouraged by my superiors that my brain no longer possesses the mechanism to come up with those kinds of ideas by itself. I thus get all of my lesson ideas from books and websites—no big deal, there are plenty of resources for ALTs out there that I can cherry pick ideas from—but this too presents a problem because my immediate reaction to every potential exercise is “That sounds totally retarded” no matter how well it would probably work in class, necessitating multiple readthroughs of such material to extract as much quality material as possible. More than that, though, it is hard for me to sell the idea of Bingo (a time-honored ESL tool) to a classroom full of Japanese teenagers. The whole thing comes off as half-hearted. I also am further limited by the necessity that, since most of my students do not speak enough English to understand the instructions I give in class, any such activities I use be simple enough to explain via demonstration using gestures and crude bone tools.

Of course, I knew that my job would involve all of these elements. I simply underestimated how much I am a product of my experiences, and how little those experiences have prepared me for the situation I in which I find myself.

So I would say that so far I enjoy teaching, and that it’s the “teaching English as a second language” thing that is really my problem. Being able to talk to my students, even if it’s just asking them what their favorite sport is or what kind of music they like, and having them come up to me in the hallway to start conversations, is one of the most rewarding experiences of my entire life, and teaching is probably the best way there is to really learn about a new culture. However, the problem with ESL is that it puts me solidly outside my niche and prevents me from playing to my strengths while exaggerating my weaknesses. Language has always kind of been my thing. Whatever problems I had interacting with people in my life, I have always usually managed to compensate for these problems by being funny or verbose or both at the same time. You take away my ability to communicate and what do you have left? Mostly you have a skinny-ish guy with glasses that don’t stay on his nose who doesn’t look people in the eye for more than two seconds at a time and who only has enough control over his body language to express three emotions: “nervously cheerful,” “neutral,” and “good-naturedly confused.”

The Full-On Multimedia Experience

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on October 3, 2008
in Consumable media! and The Day to Day
. 0 Comments

So I took some video of my apartment in Iwate prefecture back when I first moved in, and have recently uploaded it onto Youtube. Hope they are enjoyable, or at least interesting.

A Tour of my Japanese Apartment, Part 1
A Tour of my Japanese Apartment, Part 2

Overall it is a very nice place, and I appreciate it even more so now that I have seen some of the holes the other teachers with my company have been given. Still no refrigerator, though; I guess in about a month if I need something refrigerated I will be able to just stick it outside in the snow.

Welcome to Japan.

Published
by
Mr. Blithe
on October 1, 2008
in Stories from the Edge
. 0 Comments

I’ve been meaning to write some stuff about the month or so I’ve spent in Japan so far on this website that I created for the express purpose of doing exactly that thing, but there have been… complications.

As with any jaunt outside of one’s zone of comfort, noteworthy events occur much more frequently here than they would under normal circumstances. So, whereas back home I could take stock at the end of a month and find that the only events worth writing home about during that time were that I finished, say, reading Transmetropolitan and continued my long-standing streak of not getting laid, the same amount of time in Japan has yielded so many new experiences that time itself seems to have warped and even wrapping my head around all the stuff I need to tell the folks back home about is overwhelming.

I have some backlogged content that I am working on writing out to chronicle the story so far in greater detail, but here’s a general overview of the situation.

I arrived in Narita, Japan on the scheduled day with no knowledge of where I would eventually end up, prepared to spend up to a month waiting around for any additional information. I’d even allowed myself to think that spending a month in Tokyo with nothing much to do while getting paid a monthly salary would actually be a pretty swee. However, fortunately (or perhaps <em>unfortunately</em>, it’s still a little early to make that call), a placement was found for me while I was in the air over the Pacific Ocean, and upon arriving at the training site I was given the name of the city in Iwate prefecture where I would be living for the next seven months. The name itself meant nothing to me, which is a shame, because if I’d had any conception of Japanese geography or demographics I might have asked them if there was possibly another place they could send me and avoided a lot of irritation. It turns out that Iwate is like the Wisconsin of Japan, cold and desolate and kind of a backwater.

Meanwhile, despite the remote location, my apartment is actually super-nice. The problem is just that it is super-nice in all the wrong ways. I have an intercom with a built-in video camera peephole, a keypad lock on the door, three huge rooms and a bathroom with an enormous bathtub… but was not provided a refrigerator, a stove, or lights, and was not able to obtain Internet access for four weeks because I had to wait for the service provider people to come to my apartment and install something onto my phone jack. Skulking around my apartment all day with my makeshift furniture and lack of practical amenities with all the aforementioned, unused bells and whistles makes me feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic savage curled up among the ruins of a long-dead but highly advanced civilization.

So I spent the first two weeks of my tenure with almost no outside contact save a payphone on the corner that eats ten-yen coins like they are the antidote and whatever Internet cafe action I could find when I took the train into Morioka on weekends; a number of my very good friends from New Orleans and the surrounding areas recently got screwed over by another big hurricane, and I didn’t know about it until almost a week later. Even now that I have a phone and an Internet connection, the logistics of living in a place where almost no one speaks any kind of language I can understand definitely take a toll. The isolation has been a little overwhelming. Seriously, there were puppets.

Some nights when I get home I will say the word “fuck” a few times just so that I can be sure that I still remember how.

As far as work goes, it is something of a mixed bag. I am teaching at two high schools. The first school, let’s call it The School of Suck for anonymity’s sake, is in the town in which I live, and is about a ten minute walk away. The students I teach there are mostly punks who talk in class and make teaching extremely unpleasant. I also teach at the School of Rock three days a week, and the students there are much nicer, although when I teach them I am usually tired because the commute by car is about an hour.

On days when there is snow on the ground it supposedly takes much longer.

I am to understand that it snows there constantly between November and March.

Great.

So far I have missed my family, my friends, pizza, burritos, and seeing movies in theaters.

So far I have not missed the “Your mom” jokes.

Rather than trying to summarize the last month in the “This happened, then this happened, and it was super fun, and then this happened” format, which I am not such a fan of, the next several entries will most likely be focusing on the deconstruction of specific small elements of my observations in Japan, along with short narrative descriptions of incidents that can be thought of as representing some larger aspect of my overall experience. Or, you know, whatever else I feel like writing about.

I uploaded the first batch of pictures that I built up during my exile. They can be viewed on my Flickr account. Hope you enjoy them.