Category Archives: Japan

Getting Through the Last Day

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I felt relaxed and calm and was thinking about playing a game. That’s when I started panicking.

The school where I work scheduled final marks for today. This involves turning in Optical Character Recognition forms written in pencil and waiting until the marks are printed and then checking them for mistakes. However, since we finished classes yesterday, all members of the foreign staff turned their marks in yesterday. This meant we didn’t have to arrive at work until around 4:00.

Of course, this let me get relaxed and distracted which meant I had period fits of “holy crap, don’t forget to go to work. Am I missing work right now?”

Soon after I arrived at the school, the printouts arrived and the head of the department confirmed yesterday’s mistake. I checked everything and went down to the computer room to correct my mistake, which involved writing a “T” one space too far to the left. (No. Really. That was the mistake.) The funny part is, it wasn’t even my class. It was the class I’d accepted a bribe to mark.

After that, I had to fill in the “class switcher” form which transferred students from my JHS 1 class to a different class. This should have been painless, but the form is, how should I say “unintuitive “. As I filled out the form, I did resist the urge to send my bad student down, even though he had a fairly decent score.

I’ll probably regret that next autumn.

A Tale of Fires and Buses

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I put out a fire after being thrown under a bus. Then things got weird.

The last day of classes is strange.

I arrived at the school where I work to discover a battery charger for a video camera on my desk. Its presence was apparently my fault. A colleague with a knee-jerk tendency to blame his fellow foreign staff for problems suggested that I look in my desk for something I never touched. (As if I were stupid enough to not realize that something might be in my desk or not. I suspect he used to work for a computer company’s customer service center, but that’s a future post.)

Even after I pointed out that different brands of cameras were involved, he still acted as is I didn’t know my Canon cameras from my Sony cameras.

In his defense, I took some time to recreate various situations as if I were Benedict Cumberbatch retreating to a mind palace and worked out that the problem was not my problem. I returned the battery charger to the place from whence it came–with a story that explained everything– and will wait further blame.

After that, I realized that a colleague had made mistakes on her final marks forms. (She has bribed me with rare cheesecake Oreo cookies to check her final marks.) It took a few minutes to fix the mistake, but I suspect I made a mistake myself. Luckily, I’ll be around tomorrow to fix the mistakes.

Hopefully, I won’t have to deal with a battery charger. Unfortunately, the Oreo cookies are already gone.

 

Too Much and Everything

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Despite yesterday’s predictions, I did manage to get stuff done. Most of it, though, involved consumption.

I was hoping for bad weather as I often let that make my go/no go decisions for me, but the weather people, to a person, described the weather with their arms out to their sides, puzzled looks and “yes, really, probably, your guess is as good as mine”. The only thing they agreed on was that it would be hot and humid. (In their defense, it was.)

I shortened my planned trip, although I did have to go to a couple banks because “pay day” and then did some shopping. I also ate too much at lunch. (More on that in a future review.) Then I did shopping for healthier snacks. (I’ll write more about that this in a couple weeks but the preview is I’ve recently begun slipping on snacks. My weight hasn’t gone up, but I can feel the physical difference with the sudden rush of sugar.)

After getting home, I turned on the air conditioner and sat down and did very little. She who Must Be Obeyed came home and pointed out it was raining and that it was my fault. (Actually, not noticing it, because the windows were closed because the AC was on was my fault, according to her, anyway.) Then, to remind me of life in Kansas, the weather decided to cycle through different seasons: it was sunny, rainy, sunny again, then dark and ominous.

While it was dark and ominous, SWMBO drove me to the post office to mail ink.

After we got, back, it changed to dark and scary, but when the rain came, it wasn’t that hard. In fact, we were very lucky most of the bad weather missed us.

Tokyo, however,  was apparently hit by at least three of the Biblical plagues, with “nasty rain” being the main one. Yes, that’s a Biblical plague. Look it up.

Standing Around Working

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I started out standing. I ended up sitting. In the end I did more than the students.

Today I had five pass-back classes which isn’t that big of a deal except there isn’t much for me to do.

I tease the high, low and average marks. I take roll. I write out the full high, low and average marks. I pass out the answer sheets. I pass out the exams. I answer questions. I pass out the speech contest papers. I quell panic. I explain the assignment. I answer questions. I turn the students loose.

Unfortunately, all that takes only 20 minutes or so and I’m left with 30 minutes to fill. In my younger days, I took care to include extra activities until I realized I was wasting my time. (Long story.)

Today, the students were supposed to work on their speech contest speeches. A few actually did, but most did not. Instead they kept the papers out and chatted but didn’t actually write anything. Or they just did homework from other classes.

I spent part of the class standing whilst I worked on a few personal things. Then I got tired of standing, brushed off the teacher’s chair and sat down whilst I worked on personal things.

Oddly, I managed to stay awake, even after sitting down.

Now I have a couple days off to I’m already figuring out ways to waste them.

It Could Go Wrong and it Did

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It is often said that past success does not guarantee future success. No one mentioned it could lead to current hassles.

I’ve mentioned before that a small software glitch caused me to teach our oldest and youngest a few new “expressive” words (and more than a few snarls, growls and “are you shitting mes?”). What was especially frustrating was that the glitches were occurring in a spreadsheet I’d been using for over a decade with no trouble.

Granted, this year I decided to make changes, but the basic formulas remained the same. However, yesterday the spreadsheet decided to accept the data and not recognize the formulas. They were still there, but they weren’t working. I eventually got them working (after much “expressiveness” and then took the file to the school where I work and entered the data in the official spreadsheet.

The trouble is, the formulas weren’t working on the official spreadsheet either. They’ve also been in use for over a decade and the problems we have with them are usually user error.

I used my trick to get them working and it forced the formulas to work but didn’t fix the problem. New data led to the need for new “fixes”.

Granted, there’s probably a simple fix to all this, although finding it on a Japanese version of the software isn’t always that easy. We also run the risk of marks being wrong which, this time of year, is more of an annoyance than a problem, but it can lead to complaints from students and parents.

I’ll try to figure it all out tomorrow. In the process my Japanese colleagues may learn a few new “expressive” phrases.

Wearing Jackets in July

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I told the staff that I didn’t care if my students froze.

They laughed nervously but I think they understood.

The students were not so understanding.

The problem is that while the students get to sit for much of the class, my job is to stand at the front or rush around answering questions and putting out small fires. Because of this, I prefer the room to be somewhere closer to sub-arctic than sub-tropical. (The students, rather selfishly, prefer things to be more sub-tropical.)

I also feel that keeping the room cooler encourages students to stay awake. Once it gets warm and comfortable and cozy there’s nothing they’d like more than to put their heads down and enjoy a brief slumber and miss a good portion of the class. Or they are about to die of hypothermia because it’s so cold. Either way, they shouldn’t fall asleep.

My students have learned to bring jackets and have also quickly figured out which part of the room is the warmest, or at least out of the direct breeze of the air conditioner.

Of course, once speeches started today, despite earlier complaints that it was cold, everyone was sweating. By the time they stopped, class was over.

Busy is Sometimes Boring

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I could just copy yesterday’s post, but that wouldn’t quite be fair. Instead, I’ll just riff on the same topic.

Today I finished marking all my junior high school exams and somehow managed to tally the marks and enter them into the computer. This involved minor swearing at technology (long story for a future post) and discovering sections I hadn’t marked and scores I hadn’t tallied as I went along.

As I enter the marks I then have to assess the assessment. Was it too easy? (In one case, yes.) Am I marking too easily? (If I am it’s probably out of relief for having students, albeit only a handful of them, actually follow the instructions.) Can I manipulate scores enough to fail that little jerk and get him sent to the lower level class? (That remains to be seen…)

However, once I took my break, I stayed on break. I still have class marks to figure (that is where the little jerk will fail) but couldn’t be bothered to do much else.

I’m working tomorrow and can figure all the class marks after that. Then, starting Monday, passback classes begin and we get to annoy the students by passing out their summer homework.

Mark Mark Mark and Mark Again

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I’m not sure what the weather was like today, even though I was sitting next to an open window. I know that it was cloudy in the morning and stayed reasonably cool the rest of the day. That’s all I know, though, because I didn’t bother looking outside.

For reasons no one fully understands–except possibly bad karma–I’ve got 11 days to mark 55 exams but only five days to mark 160 and on one of those days I’ll be working. This means I spent the entire day today plodding through exams with a random TV show on in the background.

After much plodding, a couple naps and too much sugar, I’ve got the work load to the final push phase. One set of exams is finished and the scores figured while two more sets are waiting to be finished. All that’s left are the long writing sections, one set of which will be easy whilst the other set is going to be annoying.

Unfortunately, it appears every student wrote something–fortunate for them, unfortunate for me as that means I have to actually read something before assigning a mark.

Well, at least I’m supposed to. We’ll see what happens when time starts running short.

Pens Among the Office Supplies

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I was mostly looking for notebooks, and scaring the hell out of the people who make them, but ran into a guy who likes fountain pens and that slowed me down.

Today I was lucky to have the time to head down to Tokyo Big Sight to attend the International Stationery & Office Products Fair Tokyo. I’ll write more posts on this in the future, but today’s story was typical of why I like the pen and stationery community.

First, I made it my mission to track down non-Japanese pens and stationery. I found a number of pen manufacturers from Korea, Taiwan, China and Turkey who all offered interesting pens (one of my favorites featured Japanese ink and Swiss pen tips in Chinese bodies).

However, this year there seemed to be more notebook manufacturers than last year.

It therefore became my job to scare the notebook manufacturers by using my two wettest fountain pens to test the fountain pen friendly nature of their paper. A typical conversation went:

Me: Are these fountain pen friendly?
Victim: Yes, they are.
Me (taking out my Nock Co Sinclair full of pens): Oh, really?
Victim (as I write on the paper): Gasp.

Several of the manufacturers expressed relief when their paper held up–more on that in a future post–and all admitted they were nervous when I started testing. None of them failed horrible, all though some did have minor bleedthrough. Granted, some of them seemed to think I was more professional than I am but no one was upset by the testing.

Note: I realize that, perhaps scaring the hell out of people is not the best way to win friends and influence people, but it did kind of make me a friend. One notebook maker, though, said he was a fan of fountain pens and, sure enough, his notebooks held up well. This, however, led to a long “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” meeting where we played with each other’s goods, so to speak.

I was impressed that he was interested enough in fountain pens to interrupt his work to try out the ones I was carrying. He also gave me a couple notebooks, including one with a cover and two refills and promised more samples if I was able to show up on Friday.

Still don’t know if I will, but it does have me wondering who else I can get samples from since it’s the last day…

The Also Serve Who Only Sit and Wait

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Mostly all I did was sit around today. There wasn’t much else for me to do.

During exams at the school where I work our main job, after writing the exams and recording the listening sections, is to sit and wait. We are not the exam proctors, but we are on call in case there are questions and/or crises.

During high school exams we at least get to sit at our desks and “do work” but during junior high exams our job is to occupy desks that are not ours and generally be loud and obnoxious.

Some of us, though, well, some of the others actually, do attempt to “do work”.

We sit in the tiny junior high teachers’ offices and wait to be called. Typically there aren’t that many questions, but that seems to alternate between years. In the past, we’ve discovered mistakes on exams that required us to enter the rooms and write the corrections on the blackboards.

The main hassle is the jhs teachers’ offices are tiny little rooms that remind me of the guard rooms at prisons. (In fact, the rooms overlook a large atrium that could be mistaken for a cell block, if you ignore that there are no bars or women in orange suits.)

Because the rooms are so small, even a quiet conversation between us becomes a disturbingly loud distraction to any poor teachers attempting to “do work”.

After that, we sorted our exams and I then spent the rest of the day sitting whilst I marked exams.