You ever get the feeling that someone’s out to get you? Well, not you EdenPrairie Adventures, we all know you’ve got plenty of people out to get you. Actually, I’m stealing this line from Calvin and Hobbes. “I just figure somebody’s out to get me.”
That’s the kind of feeling I get working at school. It’s hard being the only person of your culture in any environment. There’s so many misunderstandings and I constantly feel like I’m being judged or even condescended to. My first mistake was to take an American approach to problems, and try to solve them directly—explaining problems to my coworkers and being as honest as I could. No, no, that’s not the Japanese way, I’ve found. It’s kind of like a game of passive aggression chess. People hardly ever directly refuse you, they just lay thick, heavy hints here and there. Playing along with this charade, I might actually get to teach lessons my way, but with a larger class load than any other teacher, I don’t have the time to do it. Touche, Japan, Touche.
I’ve kind of learned to lay back and accept that there are bad teachers I have to teach with, similar to the patience you’d need to work with Kevin Costner in a film. I really don’t like going to the bitch teacher class who screams grammar at kids for 50 minutes (I can understand most of the Japanese in class now), occasionally turning to me with her winning smile, asking me to read a sentence. I swear, her transformation from “Oh, as soon as I write ‘conjunction’ on the board you understand the grammar. Figure it out yourself!” (in Japanese) to “Excuse me,” (Eyelashes bat) “[Whiteguyinjpan]-sensei, could you please read the sentence?”
But it’s worth it to put up with that (and learn a lot of Japanese in the process—I daresay more English than the kids learn), to go to hyper-sensei’s class, where he asks me an average of three questions a minute, such as “So, this sentence is difficult for Japanese students to understand, including meeee! So, the word, “sensual,” is very difficult. What is the meaning?”
Also I’m starting to garnish my own fan club—by that I mean I’m finding the students that are genuinely interested in learning English and speaking to me. From too many kids I get this superficial kind of interest, where they just like to shout random English at me, which is entertaining I admit, but they never stick around to speak to me in any language. And my letter-writing program is taking off. I got a sweet drawing of a samurai in one letter, and the stationary girls use is excessively cute—bunnies and hearts everywhere.
I tried going to both Judo and tea ceremony clubs last week. Equally painful, if you can believe it. In the tea ceremony, you have to sit in “seiza” position, which is the most unnatural way for humans to sit, and it took me a good five minutes to limber up enough to be able to walk. In judo, I had fun, but I was pretty nervous. At first, the teacher just picked different students and showed me the three basic holds—like pinning someone in wrestling. A girl student that speaks very good English had invited me to practice, and he made me wrestle her. That was a little awkward. I was very obviously hesitant, so he was like (in Japanese), “No, no, fight! Climb on top of her like this," and he wrapped his legs around her and pinned her without mercy. I was surprised that the boys and girls practice together in such a personal sport, since in every other sport—and in class—students always choose separate themselves from the opposite sex. So I’ve discovered that Judo must be the primary place for boys to meet girls—sort of like The Gap in America.