Monthly Archives: September 2014

One Twice Three Times a Driver

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I’ve written before about how I am, at best, on a good day, an average driver. This is probably why, to get my first license, I had to take my driver’s test three times. Well, that and the family car.

We had, at the time, what I think was a 1979 Ford Ltd. that even people who work on the USS Nimitz thought was excessively big. The math, therefore, wasn’t in my favor: giant car plus big city (well, when you’ve just moved from a town of 1,200, Salina, Kansas looks like a city) plus tendency to panic and overthink equals bad result.

My first test started with me acing the written test and then filling out a lot of paperwork. After that, I got a chance to do the driving test which starts with testing officer explaining “If you break one law, you fail. If I die, you fail and go to jail. (Something like that.) My test had some issues: I drove way too far to the right; I didn’t maintain the speed limit; my “emergency breaking” involved an impressive skid mark (on the road and I’m not sure about the testing officer because I can’t smell); and driving up on the sidewalk during parallel parking. Basically, I failed on points and the testing officer said it would take too long to list everything I did wrong so she only told me what I did correctly: I set the mirrors and put on the seat belt.

I seem to remember having to wait a few weeks or months before I could test again. That time I was still slow to change lanes after turning onto a cross street but I even impressed myself with my parallel parking and no testing officers were nearly jettisoned through the front window during  the “emergency breaking” procedure. However, during the test, I fell for a trap. I was directed to a stop sign at an intersection that offered no view to the left. I slowly rolled up until I could get a look and then drove on. At the end of the test, when I was feeling pretty good about things, I was told I failed because my “rolling California stop” counted as running a stop sign.

I argued that the California stop is merely an a priori adjunct of non-naturalistic ethics and that categorical imperative is holding that ontologically it exists only in the imagination. (Yes, that’s right, I stole from Monty Python) The testing officer, lacking a sense of vision and philosophy just repeated “You ran a stop sign. You fail.”

A few/weeks months later I went back, passed the test and finally got my license.

I’ve hated California ever since.

In With The Bad Out Comes The Good

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A short one today in honor of bad students. This is the first full week of class after summer vacation and that means that we are now reintroducing ourselves to our students and reminding them why they are supposed to fear us and/or why they think we are jerks.

Today for example, one of my worst students spent the first few moments after the bell rang zipping and unzipping his trousers in front of his friend’s face. I told him “I you need to do that, get out and do it some place else.” He stopped zipping his pants (with the zipper up, luckily) and sat down in a huff and added, in English “I don’t understand English”. My inner snark monster, encouraged by the devils over my shoulders said “I know. Maybe if you sat down and listened you might learn something.”

I then gave out the assignment, which involved telling a summer vacation story by captioning a series of cartoon images. The students were encouraged to use their imaginations and dictionaries and I wouldn’t give any hints except to remind them it had to be one story. (I also don’t help them unless they ask for help.) The bad student didn’t understand and panicked quite spectacularly. Even lashing out at foreign teachers for not having Japanese instructions on their worksheets. I told him, in English, as the inner snark monster reached 50% capacity, that a lot of Japanese blamed their teachers for their bad English not their own unwillingness to study. “Your bad English is not my fault.”

Finally, someone explained the lesson to him (probably in Japanese). He started writing and after a he had a few sentences I peeked at his paper and he was actually doing the assignment. This surprised me because I assigned a punishment letter to a student with similar behavioral issues and, although he appeared to working, he turned in an expletive laden screed full of death threats to me and the principal and wishes that we both would die. In his defense, it was the most English he’d ever written.

Eventually, zipper boy finished the assignment. Oddly, this was the quietest he’d ever been in class and he earned a very rare full class marks.  I may have to give him more caption assignments.

Next class, though, the students have to present their stories as a speech. They get bonus points if they can do it without using the paper.

The inner snark monster never got past 50% today. it is still mad at me. However, history has shown that at least five students will forget their papers next class, including zipper boy.

The inner snark monster will then go full snark and say “Lucky you! Now you get bonus points!”

Overnight Instant Sensations

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With Kei Nishikori about to compete for Japan’s first grand slam (more on that comment in a minute) I suddenly find myself thinking about other Japanese who’ve won things and those who haven’t.

As a rule, the Japanese focus primarily on baseball with priority given to the local major leagues. When a Japanese player goes to the US majors, he’s given what can only be described as a base level of popularity. The news will always report what he’s doing, especially if he’s doing well. If he’s a star, Matsuzaka, Ichiro, Hideki Matsui, he’ll get a shocking amount of media coverage. If he’s playing, NHK (Japan’s BBC) will cover the game, until the moment he’s pulled and then they switch to regular programming and viewers never learn what happened. (No joke, I’ve seen this happen twice.)

However, everyone loves a winner, especially Japan which suffers from a very strange lack of confidence you wouldn’t expect from the third largest economy in the world (for now). The Japanese press is always looking for “Local kid makes Japan look awesome” stories and is always interested in what foreigners have to say about Japan, so long as what the foreigners have to say is positive. If it’s negative, there’s lots of excuse making and accusations that Japan is being picked on even though it’s the only country to have been attacked with atomic bombs. (Yes, they really do go there sometimes, especially on panel shows.)

Before 2011, barely anyone in Japan could name more than a couple players on the Japanese women’s soccer/kick ball team. Everyone knew their nickname “Nadeshiko Japan” but knew little else about them. Nadeshiko, by the way, is a surprisingly sexist thing to be called. It’s roughly the equivalent of calling them “They don’t make women like that anymore Japan” or “Good girls Japan”. However, after they won the world cup, they were suddenly popular. Attendance at women’s soccer started breaking records (at least for the team with the most “Good girls”) and some of them started appearing on TV a lot.

The same happened with a group of women wrestlers who brought home Olympic medals, and even a group of women archers and a some badminton players. They didn’t even have to be cute, just successful, although if they wanted to make real money from their 15 minutes, they had to be cute.

That said, no one is as brutal toward their athletes as the Japanese. If someone loses, a reporter will ask “what happened” in a very strict tone. The athletes have their own cliches “Well, I got a bad start and I wasn’t able to swim my race, I had to swim their race” or “I wasn’t able to play my badminton and couldn’t make the shuttlecock work for me”. At that point, it’s common for the reporters to say something like “well, I hope you’ve learned from this and will do better next time.” (I would love to hear the expletives some US athletes would unleash on a reporter who said that.)

This brings us back to Kei Nishikori. If he doesn’t win, he’ll get some praise for going where no one has gone before but we’ll see at least two weeks of detailed analysis about why he sucked. If he wins, we’ll hear about it for at least month and it will be considered a victory for Japan. (Even though he spent most of his career at IMG Bollettieri Tennis Academy and is currently coached by American Michael Chang.)

I hope he does well, but part of me kind of hopes he doesn’t, because the press coverage will stop sooner.

 

The Perils of Public Transportation Busses

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When I was in Albania I rode the train exactly once. It took nearly two hours to cover the 38 kilometers (23.6 miles) from Tirana to Durres. Basically, it moved slowly and stopped frequently.

As result, if you wanted to go somewhere in Albania you either splurged for a taxi (which would deliver you to another town for the right price) or you took a bus. Taking a bus was fraught with its own perils.

First, the buses assembled in fields and it took a while to figure out which bus was going where and which was leaving first. After figuring out which bus was leaving next in your direction. You acquired a seat and waited. The bus would only leave when the bus was full, and by “full” I mean every seat had to have a butt in it as did every “jump” seat between the regular seats. If even one “jump” seat was empty, the bus would wait. This filling process could take a few minutes or it could take over an hour.

I remember one bus taking so long that I and another passenger started a revolt. We said we’d go to the next bus and I would pay double my fare. A bunch of passengers started agreeing with us and the next bus driver climbed on and started counting passengers with one of the largest grins I’ve ever seen on a bus driver. Finally, our bus driver huffed and got going and did exactly what we all new he would do: he stopped to pick people up on the side of the road. One person was carrying a goat. (Don’t know if the goat had to pay full fare.)

On another bus ride, from Tirana to Shkoder I nearly had a fight with the ticket taker. Usually, I tryied to sit at the back of the bus but every now and then one of the staff offered me the “honor” seat up behind the driver. This would have been fine, especially as it had more legroom, but every now and then someone wanted to talk when I wanted to read. On this day, the ticket taker wanted to talk in a bad way. Even though I said I had work to do and actively started ignoring him by reading, he kept tapping my leg. After one tap too many I grabbed his hand and twisted it around and we about came to blows. Finally a cop intervened and I got a different seat and learned several new colorful Albanian phrases for describing unreasonable people.

On another trip from Berat back to Tirana, our bus suddenly stopped in the middle of nowhere and we were apparently supposed to change busses but nobody seemed to be moving. I walked up and went into “don’t understand if it’s not convenient mode” and pretended I couldn’t speak much Albanian to find out if the bus was going to Tirana (yes) and get my way onto the bus. Of course, I got the “honor” seat, but since I’d established I couldn’t speak much Albanian I didn’t have to talk.

However, about half way back to Tirana, the bus stopped again, this time for lunch. The bus driver bought me lunch and beer and suddenly I could remember a few phrases in Albanian and hold a decent conversation.

 

 

Beer Pizza Sports and Instruments

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Today’s is random memories and I’m not even sure how many of them are accurate, but one of the best things about growing up in the ’70s was political correctness and “if you do this you will end up deadness” and the precautionary principle hadn’t yet ruined discourse and the ability to have fun. The worst thing that could happen to you was putting an eye out someday. We brought knives to school to show off and playing shooting games didn’t yet result in therapy and lock downs. You could even bring BB guns on school grounds in the summer without involving SWAT teams and suspension.

The other thing you could do was take overnight school trips and, while you were on the trip you could visit breweries. I do not remember why we went there, and I don’t remember what grade we were, but I remember visiting the Coors Brewery in Golden, Colorado on one school trip. The thing that stands out the most was hearing that the hops room (or the grain room) was kept at a high temperature and 100% humidity. I remember my friend Shawn and I pondering what that meant. Was the room full of liquid? (Now that I live in a humid region I can tell you that the room was #@%&ing nasty inside, that’s what it was.)

I also seem to remember that the teachers were able to sample some of the, um, local produce, although they did it whilst we students were on the tour. None of them, to my knowledge, were ever fired, although I may have just revealed a major secret.

The other trips I remember were some sort of band trip that involved eating apple crepes somewhere downtown, sleeping during a classical music performance and a trip to Celebrity Sports Center, which seemed like one of the largest places in the world at the time. I bowled a little and played some games. I wasn’t good at any of it but I had fun. (This was before the days when everybody had to be good at something or you weren’t allowed to do it.)

I also remember eating at the Organ Grinder pizza parlor which featured a two story pipe organ and a couple professional pipe organists (if that’s an actual phrase). I don’t remember the food at all, but I remember the show. I also remember the performers hitting a mechanical monkey every now and then when it wouldn’t stop playing the cymbals.

Either that, or I had sampled some of the local produce without realizing it.

Reckless Self Behavior Destruction Vices

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When I was in Albania, one of the things I noticed was a propensity for volunteers, myself included, to suddenly engage in self-destructive behavior of one sort or another. Some of them involved basic vices while some of them involved automobiles.

Partly as a result of culture shock, and partly as a form of self-defense, volunteers who’d never smoked before they came to Albania suddenly became smokers. Volunteers who had smoked before they came to Albania became chain smokers. Granted, when you’re surround by groups of locals chain smoking, and science says secondhand smoke is more dangerous than smoking, it is actually safer for you to start smoking cigarettes. (Something like that.)

Alcohol consumption sky-rocketed (one of my favorite vices at first) especially because the prices were relatively low. Skenderbeg Cognac was especially popular, but I tended to stick to beer, raki and cheap vodka (I think it was 15 cents a bottle but it might have been cheaper).

My other vices were
1) Chasing the wrong woman and ignoring the right one (a novel would be required to explain more) which is something I was prone to do before (another novel) and it got worse in Albania.
2) Being cheap. The latter involved always managing to let other people pay for things and never volunteering to pay for the group when a bunch of us met for coffee (total cost for everyone, 50 cents to 1 dollar). As you might imagine, that didn’t win me many friends, especially among the Albanians with us.
3) Blather and Gossip. Not only can I talk a lot without seeming to breathe, but for a brief time I was the guy you told things to when you wanted everyone to know (but God help you if you told me and you didn’t want people to know).

The other thing that happened, especially in our second year was we started to get reckless. Albanian traffic was a remarkable thing as it was made up of people who’d just earned their licenses and were finally able to acquire cars. This made them a group of teenagers who believed the rules, in so far as they understand them, were mere suggestions. Despite this, it was normal for groups of us to suddenly cross the street without looking, often to the horror of newcomers who’d made the mistake of trying to follow us. (It was their own fault for not looking.)

We used to talk about why, and I’m not sure we reached any conclusions. I always joked (constantly that I did it because if they killed me I’d go to a better place (most likely although this blog may be held against me) and if they didn’t I’d still get to go to  a better place when I was airlifted to Germany.

I think, though, it was an odd symptom of culture shock. Albania was an exhausting and frustrating place to work and overtime that frustration built to a low level anger and everything around us. I suspect we were playing chicken with the country. Daring it to try to knock us out if it could. We wanted to go home but we didn’t want to quit.

Eventually it would knock me out temporarily, but I did get to go to a better place for three weeks.

A Container Full of Stark Raving Jerks and the Mad

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Autumn term starts tomorrow which means I’ll once again be riding the train. Riding the train means I’ll once again be thrown in the mix with the normal train riders and the train jerks.

First you have to understand that, for all their seeming politeness, the Japanese, especially those in the Tokyo area, are in fact seething with a surprising level of selfishness that gets turned loose as soon as the train doors open. The ugliest fights are for the seats on the ends of the benches and for the last seat on the train. Granted, I don’t mean a fight in the literal sense, instead it’s more of a “#@$% women and children first; I’m getting mine” attitude, Which leads us to:

Jerks Inside the Train:
Once in their seats, the occupants will immediately become train jerks and enter what I call the “Tokyo Doze” which is a form of sleep that allows the seat occupants to ignore the senior citizen, pregnant woman and/or man with crutches standing in front of them. This is especially true if the Dozers have occupied the “silver seats” reserved for senior citizens, pregnant women and/or men with crutches. (Not a joke. I’ve seen that happen, even with She Who Must Be Obeyed. More about that in a minute.)

Anyone who doesn’t get a seat then enters a battle for space. It’s important to plant your feet securely and grab hold of the cross bar. At this point, you encounter the Oozers. Oozers start to ooze over into your space in order to make more room for themselves. They use a combination of hips and carry bags to push you over. The secret to defeating the Oozers is, if you’ve remembered to grab the cross bar, a well placed elbow right next to their faces. They’ll stop oozing.

The next form of train jerk is the Readers. The Readers open up their newspapers full, especially if their seated, and it rubs and annoys you the whole ride. Or they are standing and they open it up to that it’s over your head or in your hair (if you’re tall). Or, the Readers pull out books and use you as a book stand. I’ve been knows to fold up the tops of newspapers and remind people I’m not a book stand. (More on that later.)

Jerks Outside the Train:
For the most part, the people boarding the train let the people on the train deboard. For the most part. But there is always a form of train jerk called the Barger. The Bargers come in two flavors, those who barge directly through the people trying to exit and those who wait until the main wave exits and then pushes through the slow moving little old ladies to get an open seat.

Before the doors open though, you encounter the Dashers and the Drifters. The Dashers stand in front of a door, then as soon as that door opens, they Dash down to a different door because they see more space or an open seat. If they bump into you, well, you should watch where they are going. The Drifters float between doors. (Important note: Unlike the USA and the UK, trains in Japan actually stop with the doors next to the numbered marks on the platforms.) When the doors open, Drifters suddenly choose sides and push into a line.

Hybrid Jerks:
Pushers wait until everyone else has boarded a crowded train and then use a combination of leverage and Judo to force their way onto the train, even if it’s so crowded that even the air has been pushed out of it. It doesn’t matter to a Pusher if a little old lady or a child is in the way, all that matters is that they are in the way the Pusher wants more space.

Cutters are an especially vile form of train jerk. Outside the train they may be a Drifter or a Dasher or may seem like normal people. When they door opens they walk in carefully and then abruptly change directions. For example, you enter on the right, the Cutter enters on the left. Suddenly, the Cutter decides he should have gone right and cuts in front of/through you. It’s like someone on an expressway suddenly realizing they’re in the wrong lane and about to miss their exit.

This takes us to our final category of jerk, the Foreign Asshole. The FA comes in a couple forms, most of them loud. If they are not talking loudly and disturbing the wa, they are being unpleasant to other train jerks.

Guess which category I’m in?

I’ve been known to, how shall we say, get vocal with Dozers pretending they are asleep, especially when She Who Must Be Obeyed was several months pregnant and had been cut off and forced to stand by a Cutter. I’m also pretty good at leg sweeps and can perform world class soccer dives that bring both me and the Cutters down. I’ve stood close to Cutters once they got a seat and pretty much had a “chat” with them about their rudeness. I once gave a man three warnings about resting his book on my shoulder, then snatched the book and put it on the luggage rack.

Oddly, I’ve never been a physical fight. Mind you, I don’t intend to, I’m just an FA when it comes to dealing with train jerks.

The Casual Business of Waiting Your Turn

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Classes start this Friday at the school where I work and that means I’ve had to drag myself in a few times to get ready. Today, especially, was important because I had to proctor a make-up test for a student who managed to fail seven different classes.

What’s odd about the week before school starts is how much it reminds me of a track meet.

My only experience with track and field occurred, if I remember correctly, in 8th grade. I was trying to get the Sports merit badge in Boy Scouts which required I play a full season in two approved sports. I’d already played basketball–and that was the only sport I played for more than one season–and that left track and field. Now, technically, track and field was not an approved sport but it was Hayden, Colorado so lacrosse, soccer and water polo were right out and the powers what are in the Boy Scouts were lenient.

This left the problem of deciding which events I should join. I was capable of short bursts of speed, but not 100 yards worth. I wasn’t coordinated enough to do high jump. I couldn’t even clear a bar set at waist level. (My Fosbury Flops were, well, you can finish the rest of that pun.) For the record, I admire high jumpers probably more than any other athletes as I do not understand how they do what they do.

I ended up running the mile and doing triple jump and, for at least one tournament, throwing discus. I was, at best, an average miler; a below average triple jumper; and an absolute disgrace as a discus thrower. I was also, clearly, not worth the coaches’ time. I don’t remember getting any specific help on getting better from any of the three coaches at any time during the season. I learned the basics of triple jump by watching other jumpers.

Having come from basketball, though, what surprised me about track practice was the way it seemed disorganized. People wandered about practicing various events and occasionally being told to run to some location out in the middle of nowhere and then return. It didn’t feel like a team practice.

The same was true of track meets. It was very strange to be told “be over there in an hour” and then be more or less left on my own. There was no sense of being on the same team and no particular cheering section. No one seemed to care if you made it to your event or not. I remember how odd and scattered it all felt.

The same is true of the week before school. Teachers wander in and prepare lessons (most of them dressed in shorts and  t-shirts as if it really were a track meet) and no one seems to care that anyone else is there. With make up tests we’re not even sure if the students will be there. (My student showed up, by the way, which means I lost a bet.)

Starting Friday, everything will be more regimented and some of us will start working as if we were on the same team.

 

Itsy Bitsy Noiseless Patient Spider Agreements

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As I have become the designated bug killer in my house, I thought today I’d talk about bugs, or more specifically, spiders.

When I lived in Nou-machi, my apartment was surrounded by large green and black spiders. We quickly made an arrangement, the spiders and I: If they didn’t come inside my apartment, I wouldn’t kill them.

This agreement would, however, undergo a few modifications.

First you have to understand the spiders’ size. They were about 3-5 centimeters (1 1/3 – 2 inches) across. Their legs would just about reach across the width of an iPhone without having to stretch. They built their webs around the walkway lights and around my door light, which meant getting from the steps to my front door was rather like walking through a tunnel in lost Carcosa. The webs themselves were surprisingly strong and could move your cap a bit before they broke.

This led to the first modification: I would tear out any web that hit me in the face or head as I walked to and from my apartment, even if the web wasn’t in front of my door. I would also tear away any webs that touched my door, although I let them have the front window.

The second modification was that they couldn’t build any webs on the laundry pole on the back balcony where I was supposed to hang my laundry.

However, the third modification was a rescission of the second modification. This was done because the “balcony” was little more than an unsupported plastic shelf stuck to the side of the building, I wasn’t confident walking around on it, so I ended up drying my laundry indoors next to the window and using a fan. This actually worked better than putting laundry outdoors in three of four seasons (Pleasant, Humid and Static). (My adult students were convinced I was crazy, but I had dry clothes and they didn’t, so there.)

What I earned from this bargain with the spiders was a nearly mosquito free existence. My apartment had a rice paddy right in front of it (that I once fell into; long story, especially since I was sober when I did it). and a rice paddy next to it. There was a third rice paddy on the far side of the parking lot. These weren’t as bad as you’d think because they had frogs and crawfish eating a lot of the mosquitoes, but Nou-machi could still be overwhelmed with the little bloodsuckers especially during the Season in Which It Rains.

I only found spiders inside twice. They died.

Thou Art Hither Now Get Thee Hence

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One of the fun parts about being a foreign teacher in Japan is that I can get away with a lot. One of the problems of being foreign teacher in Japan is that I can’t get away with a lot forever.

On rare occasions I’ve taken students to the principal’s office or to their homeroom teacher in the teacher’s office. With junior high this is rather risky, not only am I foisting my problems off on someone else and admitting I can’t control my class, but I’m also “forgetting” that education is both compulsory and a right until the end of 9th grade and removing a junior high student is a questionable legal act. It’s better to stick them in a the corner, or at a desk just outside the door. Also, in Japan, the Group is very important and being removed from the Group can be quite shocking. With high school students this isn’t as big a legal deal, but removing them from the group is.

That said, I’m also the only teacher I know who’s thrown students out of class during observations.

The first time happened in a first year high school class. One of my worse students, let’s call him Mr. Sato, was famously bad and the kind of student who immediately goes to sleep and counts on his friends to take notes. Since my class was a speaking class, that wasn’t possible. He had to be awake and he had to work with a partner.

However, on the day of open classrooms (during which other teachers in the school could observe our classes) Mr. Sato’s usual partner was absent and he believed that meant he didn’t have to do anything. After the warm up, he immediately went to sleep. I woke him up and he pointed to the empty chair next to him and went back to sleep. I woke him up again, he pointed to the chair again and I pointed the empty chair next to another student and said be his partner. This repeated a couple more times. Finally, the fifth time I woke him up, Mr. Sato snapped and said “WHAT!” which is Japanese for “leave me the fuck alone already”.

I told him to get out and, surprisingly, he left without any argument. This, in it’s own odd way, is telling. As I said before, In Japan, the Group, in all its forms, is important. Mr. Sato clearly wasn’t feeling a part of the group.

The teacher observing my class was visibly shocked, but he understood.

The second time it happened was fairly recent and occurred during open school when three mothers were observing my class. The open school happened to fall on a presentation day when my students had to get up in pairs and do an original conversation. The first couple pairs were okay, but the third refused to go up. I wasn’t too surprised, as one of the partners, let’s call him Mr. Kato, had been sleeping, trying to do other homework and generally being unhelpful during the writing phase (prompting his partner to declare “I don’t have a partner.”) I said they didn’t have a choice. They had to go up and do their conversation.

After some “negotiation” they finally went up and, well, first Mr. Kato tried to take his script (not okay) then he tried to cheat (also not okay) then he tried impress me with his attitude (fool). I pointed out I have a nine year old daughter with more attitude and better English and put him and his partner out in the hall to practice. I apologized to the mothers and, surprisingly, they stuck around apparently to watch the end of the match.

Eventually Mr. Kato and his partner went up and did a decent job, which earned me some points with the mothers. Although that’s exactly the kind of stuff I have to worry about and I reported what had happened to the homeroom teacher (I also told him the other students had done well). It’s also the kind of stuff I really ought not try a third time.