Category Archives: Japan

Crawling Toward Vengeance

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My denial almost ended today, then I thought of another way to put something off.

This time of year at the school where I work is the time of exam making. (Also known as “our time“.) Normally this would be a happy time of great joy and vengeance (because those things totally go together) but for some reason I find I can’t enjoy the making of the vengeful exam as much as I usually do.

Part of the problem is that because of the way we’ve been teaching the grade I’m in charge of there isn’t a lot of material for a final exam, especially one worth 50% of the final mark. The students have done lots of speaking projects, made visual aids and even “invented” something they called “new” superheroes in the same way that kid in Texas invented that clock.

The performances are usually pretty good, but there’s no way to put that on a test.

As a result I do what anyone would do: deny and delay. I tell myself I have lots of time, and even do significant amounts of advanced mathematics to prove it, right up until the moment I don’t have lots of time. (Note: this is exactly how I got through university.)

Today, even though I still have lots of time, I managed to do some work on vengeful exam. I was as surprised as everyone else. I then hit a moment where I’d have to start making decisions and ran through a thought process that involved using last year’s questions without any changes; using last year’s questions but changing the second listening; using last year’s questions but changing the order; using last year’s questions AND last year’s listening recording.

Mind you, I do not believe that even the students who took the test last year could pass it this year, but even I felt a twinge of guilt.

Then, during class, I got an idea for a question. i made a few notes, but I’ll get to them later. Vengeance is a dish best served eventually.

That Place I Do Not Go Except When I Am Here

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Am I a hypocrite, desperate or simply practical?

I only ask because it seems that the only place I don’t have standards is the middle of Tokyo.

It often surprises my Japanese students that 1) I never eat at McDonald’s when I’m in the USA and 2) that I never go to Starbucks for a coffee.

I explain there are much better options for both fast food and coffee in the USA. Most Starbucks in the USA full of caffeinated writers plugging away at computers, abusing the free Wi-Fi and taking up all the seats. Someone merely sitting and having a coffee is either waiting for someone or ran out of battery in one or more electronic devices.

I say that, and mock that, yet, here I am in a Starbucks in Tokyo. I’m fully caffeinated, plugging away at a computer, abusing the free Wi-Fi and taking up one of the seats.

In my defense, because Japan for the most part by-passed portable computers and cellphone users got used to high data plan bills, it has precious little free Wi-Fi. Finding a place where you can plug in a computer and do some work without worrying about your battery dying. (re. this updated review) is difficult. About the only places you can do this consistently are McDonald’s (if you have a Nintendo DS); 7-11 stores and Starbucks. Even my cellphone provider has a “free Wi-Fi” service for which they charge a monthly fee. (No, I’m not making that up. I think in this case “free” means “you are free to use it at your leisure after you pay us.)

Luckily, right now this Starbucks is nearly empty. That’s a nice surprise as this store is usually the second busiest in the world after the Starbucks at the CIA headquarters.

That said, even if it fills up, as long as I have a comfortable chair at the table with the outlets, I usually don’t feel too guilty about taking up space.

Am I a hypocrite, desperate or simply practical?

Yes.

Finding and Making Fellow Travelers

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Yesterday, in my evening class, I did one of the hardest things I’ve ever done: lend one of my better fountain pens to a student so she could try it. I then watched as she passed it to another student to try.

Oddly, and I’m as surprised as everybody else, I didn’t hurt anyone.

This all started with a discussion of notebooks. I pointed out that, with a few exceptions, I prefer Japanese notebooks. The student was impressed, especially when I mentioned Tomoe River paper and how good it was for fountain pens.

That prompted one of my younger students to ask why I carried so many pens and I was like “because”. She then asked to see one and, because she will eventually fill out evaluations about me, I thought I should lend her one. The problem is, I didn’t have any crap ones to lend her and she wanted only the best.

At first I had to show her how to hold it. She started to use it with the feed up and I had to explain to put the pretty side up. I also explained, perhaps a bit to vehemently “don’t press, don’t press, for Goodness’ sake don’t press. Just let the weight of the pen do the work.” She wrote her name and passed it to another student. We repeated the same ritual and, out of the blue, another student began giving advice. Once he got the hang of writing with it, he couldn’t stop writing stuff.

I think he was especially impressed by the writing style from the stub nib. This led to the revelation that the student who’d offered advice was also a fountain pen fan, or at least familiar with them.

We then had a discussion about pens, including the Pilot Hi-Tec-C and a few others.

I hope to cultivate this interest in pens and fountain pens among my students. I’ll just have to remember to bring some pens I don’t mind lending out.

The problem is, I don’t actually have any of those.

Choosing is Half the Fun

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If you can’t experiment on your students, there isn’t much fun in teaching.

Every now and then I have a class that has a lot of extra classes. Normally, if I have three classes, they tend to meet the same number of times. For example, Class One might meet 22 times, Class Two 22 times and Class Three 24 times. Class Three gets some extra English, which they don’t always appreciate, but a couple classes isn’t that difficult to manage.

However, once every few years the timing of holidays and school function days result in a larger difference in classes. For example, a couple years ago, I had a class that met 7 times during the winter term and another in the same grade that met 13 times. This meant the second class got almost twice as much English as the first class.

Because of that extra time, I decided to experiment on the longer class by having them make a TV commercial. They had to create a new product, a visual aid and a 60 second commercial. It was a bit of mad scientist experimentation but it turned out well enough that I ended up stealing the idea for higher grade a couple years later.

This year, in my first year high school class (US 10th grade) a couple of the classes are meeting four times more than the third class. I’ve therefore decided to put on my mad scientist hat and experiment on them.

This term, the plan is for them to make a two minute commercial advertising a lesser known prefecture (the Japanese version of a state). They have to research the prefecture and make a poster/advertisement for it.

The most fun happened at the beginning: after they formed pairs, each pair sent a student to draw a prefecture. When the first pair got a prefecture that isn’t very interesting there was a lot of excitement for every drawing after that. It was mostly interesting to see which prefectures where considered cool and which ones were considered horrible.

Unfortunately, that’s probably the end of the fun, but that’s part of the experiment.

 

Self-Defeating Logic of the Teenage Kind

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One of my students today had a hard time finding a partner. He wandered around trying to find one and, because the class has an odd number of students, ended up by himself. When I finally assigned him a group, everyone laughed at the student who would be his partner.

I also may have made a mistake.

What’s odd about what happened today is that I had just explained that 1) this was a major project and 2) because it was major everyone needed to choose their partner carefully because 3) both partners would receive the same score. If one was good and one was bad, they’d both get the bad score.

What’s really odd is that the guy who couldn’t get a partner is one of my best students. Usually, it’s the bad students who can’t get partners and they end up in pairs with other bad students or made to participate in forced partnerships at my request/angry insistence.

This student is also a hard worker and it will be easy for his partners to be lazy whilst they only pretend to be busy. He also tends to dominate the speaking parts, which also makes it easier for his partners. Also, with three partners, each partner has less to memorize.

The rest of the class was unimpressed.

Part of the problem, and I realize this is ugly, is that the good student has an air of “kick me” about him. He is skinny and has slightly bushy hair and he reminds me of a fellow student who used to get bullied back in my Hayden, Colorado days. That student also gave off a “kick me” vibe that many people were more than happy to exploit.

I’m hoping that the problem really is that this student tends to volunteer to go first when I ask for volunteers. This usually produces angry reactions from his partners, even when I point out they get bonus points for going early.

My mistake, though, may have been choosing the pair at random and then letting randomness make the choice. The good student is now with one of my worst students–who 1) plays American style football; 2) happens to be almost as tall as I am and 3) is one of a handful of students I believe should never have been allowed into the high school. He’s never going to take the assignment seriously (he tends to try to improvise by putting on a comedy routine) and I’m afraid the last laugh will be on my good student.

In the end, I’ll probably have to let the good student work by himself and watch the other guy and his partner fail. That said, the third partner was absent today. I’ll have to see his reaction before I make any decisions.

An Excuse is Not a Reason

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There is an odd thing that happens to some students when they enter the mid point of their high school careers: The reasoning parts of their brains shutdown leaving in operation only the parts necessary to maintain basic physical functions.

This usually manifests itself as attitude and excuses.

Today, a student I’ve mentioned before (the one who gave me the “Penis Man” superhero) arrived to class five minutes late. He then put his head down and made ready to take a nap.

I went over and woke him up and reminded him of the rules: if you want to sleep, you may leave the classroom and go sleep. He then told me that the reason he wasn’t working was that he’d lost his paper. This, to the teenage mind, is a logical excuse. He lost the paper and therefore he now has free time.

I told him to get a notebook and copy the questions from someone else, as three other students had already done. I also reminded him he hadn’t done his superhero speech yet and should work on that. He said “okay” which is Japanese high school boy for “fuck you” and then did his best to try to sleep sitting up.

When I reminded him he needed to hurry because if he didn’t do the superhero and supervillain speeches he couldn’t do the final project (which requires the two characters) and then he’d fail the term and, almost certainly, they year.

He said in Japanese “I don’t understand English. Har har har.” Which is Japanese high school boy for “I don’t understand you which means you’re stupid. Har har har.” Again, to the teenage mind, this makes logical sense.

I told him it was too bad he’d lost his papers because he’d need them next year if I was in charge of the grade. He said “I don’t understand English. Har har har.”

I said “I know” and failed him for the day. He never did get a chance to sleep.

 

Back But Not Back Quite Yet

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The big problem with coming back after Autumn break is that you’ve lost all rhythm to your work. The problem is made worse when you’ve had an October with lots of starts and stops. The problem is even worser when you’re only back for one day after a long break.

It’s as if your vacation has suddenly been interrupted by someone calling you back to work for an emergency.

I complicated it by  adding a new part-time job. This isn’t usually that big of a problem except this job has me walking in the door at 11:35 p.m. That left me feeling somewhere between “spritely” and “zombie” (with more slant toward zombie). I wasn’t that tired and I didn’t get cranky but I wasn’t 100%.

Luckily, neither were my students. They seemed surprised to be back (and they have class tomorrow) and were, at best 50%.

They got work done, but my last class, which featured a role play about the two partners meeting in 2035 for the first time in 20 years, was treated as optional by a few groups of students. I pointed out that it was not actually optional but it didn’t have my usual force, even when I suggested a couple students keep their textbooks because they’d need them next year when they repeated the class.

(Note: the school where I work will allow high school students to fail and force them to repeat the year or transfer to a new school.)

I quietly gave zeroes, which is unusual as zeroes usually arrive with force and noise, and I’m not sure the students who got zeroes fully appreciated that they were getting zeroes.

This means that next class about five pairs will have to perform their role plays or get zeroes for a second day in a row. I hope I can be louder next time, but we’ll see. The next class is on a Wednesday, which is the day after my part time job so I have my doubts about how high my energy level will be, at least until I get used to the new class rhythm.

Or, if things go horribly off kilter, I may only give zeroes for people who wake me up during class.

 

 

Air Shows and Neighbors

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I was kind of rude to a guy today because I was trying to watch a free air show.

We live along one of the approaches to the Iruma Air Base, a Japan Air Self-Defense Force base and that means we constantly get fly-overs from transport aircraft, helicopters and the occasional fighter.

Once a year, though, if the weather’s nice, we can see the practice for the annual Iruma Air Show. Fighters and transports fly over head in formation and some demonstrate combat tactics. On November 3–Culture Day–if we look to the West we can see parts of the air show itself.

Today She Who Must Be Obeyed came back from work and mentioned that we should go out and see the planes. It turns out we got to see a large portion of the performance put on by Blue Impulse, Japan’s version of the Blue Angels/Thunderbirds.

We saw lots of hearts made from smoke and lots of loops and, then, all of a sudden some guy on the street was asking where I was from. Because I was, for a brief time, considering going into the U.S. Air Force as a pilot; because fighters are just cool gadgets and I like cool gadgets; and because I figured he was either selling religion or crap, my initial reaction was “I’m from fuck you.” (For the record, I didn’t say that. I said I was from the USA but didn’t actually look at him at first.)

Eventually we figured out that 1) he’s from Germany, and 2) he’s been my neighbor for 14 years but we somehow never managed to meet or see each other. For most of that he lived down the street and around the corner and up the hill, but for the past year or so he’s lived across the street and we still didn’t see each other. That surprise was what prompted him to interrupt our free air show.

Eventually he went off to exercise, which is good, because about two minutes after he left, four Blue Impulse planes flew over head. It was pretty cool to meet him and pretty cool to see the planes, too.

 

Cheering for the Discount if Not the Team

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The Japan Series baseball championship ended a few days ago and I’m pretty pleased with the results. Although I don’t follow baseball that closely, I do follow it here in Japan. My favorite team name is the Carp (because Carp) but my favorite team is the one with the best discounts.

Japanese baseball teams are owned by corporations that use the teams as marketing more than as sources of income. (The main source of income actually seems to be fees earned from sending Japanese players to the US Major Leagues.) As a result, the Japan Series was the Fukuoka SoftBank (telecommunications) Hawks versus the Tokyo Yakult (probiotic dairy product) Swallows. The Hawks won their second series in a row and that means several days of product discounts at every company affiliated with SoftBank.

This is pretty good, but it was better when the Hawks were the Fukuoka Daiei (department store chain) Hawks. When they won the Japan series in 1999, the discounts at all their stores were excellent and several items were priced at. She Who Must Be Obeyed cheered for them in 2003 in anticipation of the discounts. (They won and there were discounts.)

The discounts were also good at the fast food chain Lotteria when the Chiba Lotte (food and chemical) Marines won.

There are, of course, teams you hope will never win. For example, the Hanshin (electric railway) Tigers and the Yomiuri (media conglomerate) Giants, are right out. Yes, they are the most popular teams in Japan but what do I get when they win? I get nothing. And nothing don’t buy my love. (Something like that.)

In the future I’m hoping to see a series of discounts, er, a series championship from the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham (food processing) Fighters (because tasty dead animal flesh) or from the Hiroshima Toyo (actually Mazda) Carp (because cool name and car stuff).

Until then, I’ll try to enjoy the SoftBank related discounts. I’m hoping if they three-peat they’ll offer some discounts on their smartphone plans. It’s only a coincidence that I want that and that they are my phone provider. Well, not it’s not.

 

Once More into the Vortex of Suck

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I hadn’t intended to write about this topic again, but my students made me do it.

In the same class where students got extra homework earlier this week, two of the same boys decided that sleep was more important than 1) listening to what I was saying and 2) doing the assignment I gave them. It’s as if my giving them homework and them completing it earlier this week somehow gave them a pass for any bad actions they did the rest of the week.

The funny part, and more proof of the Vortex of Suck, is that they put their heads down at the same time. After I woke them up, they had a glazed, zombie look in their eyes until I started to explain the assignment. At that point, they put their heads down and went to sleep. I stopped explaining the assignment, woke them up and gave them a choice: do the work or leave the room and go off and sleep together. (Something like that.) I also told them they should save their textbooks because they would most likely need them again next year.

They opted to “not sleep” which is different than “be awake”. They didn’t work and I had to warn their partners in Suck that they shouldn’t talk to them lest they face consequences again.

What surprised me was the attitude the pair expressed. They acted as if they were somehow smarter than I was and that somehow I wouldn’t chase them down and make them do work as I had just done earlier in the week. Perhaps because there is a short break coming up they were thinking that I might forget about them over the break. (Actual answer: teenagers.)

Next Friday I’ll see them again and we’ll find out if the attitude is still there. I’m pretty sure it will be which means my attitude will go to 9 or 10 (for the record: it goes to 11) and they’ll get extra work. They’ll also get new seats up by me.