“I enjoyed asleep with people all over the world.”
Or so said one of my students in a writing exercise yesterday. I love those accidental not-so-innocent comments. Especially when they come from the shy girl who rarely talks. Anyway, Oshima is really kicking into high gear now that school is back in session. I think that’s one of the reasons why I’m finding it so easy to blog right now; if I get too bored, I’ll get paralyzed by the boredom and not do a damned thing. Now I have some forward momentum, and can take Japanland head-on again.
I’m back at the north school, Oshima HS, which has a much different feel than Kayou Koukou. At Oshima, there’s no students hanging out in the staff room shooting the shit with the teachers, kids aren’t sleeping on the couches in the hallway, the sounds of electric guitar and drums aren’t a constant assault on your ears, and everyone just seems a little bit more tired and depressed. KK is a school for kids with behavioral issues, but I’ll be damned if I don’t identify with the kids there a whole lot more. Their English level is pretty darned good, and they’re eager to get up and interact, but also really eager to get distracted and give me a lot of hell.
But I’d rather take the hell than have to do what I do at Oshima HS everyday. Today I was teaching a class on the Olympics, and where everyone at the previous school was imitating athletes and being super fun about it, I struggled to extract even the slightest response from my students today. Seriously; it was like trying to feed a ringing alarm clock to a cat.
Me (hand raised): “Please raise your hand if you watched the Olympics.”
Them: …
Me: “Okay, please raise your hand if you DIDN’T watch the Olympics.”
Them: …
Me: “Fine. Yuki, what sports did you watch during the Olympics?”
Yuki (shocked, pointing to herself in disbelief): …
Me: “Yes, you. What is your favorite Olympic sport?”
Yuki (shaking her head, eyes wide like I’m about to kill her dog): …
Me: “Yuki, answer me or I’ll rip your arms off.”
Yuki: “Eigo shabenai. (I don’t know English)”
…and so on, for the next fifty minutes. If you’ve ever gotten angry at your dog and started yelling at it, only to have it look at you confused, cock its head to the side, and then walk away, you have an idea of what this was like. Every Wednesday morning this ritual repeats itself, and every Wednesday I pray to whatever’s up there that there will be at least one troublemaker in the class that day to shake things up. Alas, none. It’s a class full of silent, robotic, unresponsive Japanese kid-drones.
Mind you, their inability to answer “Yes” or “No” questions, even after I translate them into Japanese, is after four full years of English language education. They’re all incompetent due to no fault of their own, but rather the system’s for drilling English grammar and vocabulary until the cows come home. Unfortunately, this system isn’t going to change anytime soon, and any school that doesn’t have an ALT gets the same “Sunshine English” or “Expressions” textbook approach of listening to a CD and filling in the blanks, or rearranging sentences, or repeating after the teacher’s terrible accent.
Sorry, I could go on forever about how unbelievably shitty the Japanese foreign language acquisition program is, and there’s lots of articles out there about that already, so I’ll spare you that.
We did get a new Vice Principal today, though. I saw him yesterday at KKHS. Unfortunately I didn’t recognize him the second time, so I succumbed to the dreaded “Double Hajimemashite” (the equivalent of saying “nice to meet you” to someone twice). Doing that showed that I’m a terrible foreigner who can’t tell the difference between Japanese people. It’s going to be a fun year with this guy.
When I saw him yesterday, he was with the principal of Oshima HS, but they were in KKHS for some odd reason. Then something altogether unexpected happened: all within one frame of vision, I saw all of my vice principals and principals from both schools in the same place at the same time. I thought my eyeballs would melt Raiders of the Lost Ark style due to the sheer volume of concentrated evil in the room. I had to go back to the staff room.
Later on, I was walking across the skyway between the two buildings of the school and caught a glimpse into the Principal’s office, which resembles a board room in Hell, and saw all of the administrators around the table inside. It not-so-subtly reminded me of a comic book den of evil villians plotting and scheming about how best to take over the world.
Anyway, I need to go — I have a lot of important daydreaming and not working to catch up with.