Category Archives: Work

Nice People I Don’t Really Want to See

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I spent the morning with people I like but didn’t really want to see.

I did this because the company I work for has one simple goal: keep my butt trapped in my house from 9:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m every day during the summer because, well, because they said so. However, every now and then they let me out of the house and tell me to come down to Tokyo for a meeting.

Frankly, I’d rather stay home and “work”.

The meetings involve all the private school teachers assembling at the Tokyo office for a three hour meeting. The meeting today started with our actual decision making boss giving us a short pep-talk about how wonderful we are and how the fact we are private school teacher shows we are like the best teachers in Japan.

The whole time, though, I couldn’t help but bite my pen to keep myself from speaking and or grunting (not a joke) and to think “Put up or the shut the fuck up” because the undertone of his speech was “You are wonderful and special and we will not give you a raise and you have to keep the busy work “work” days but at least I’m saying nice things for the 22.5 seconds I’m going to bother speaking to you before I go back to real work. Yay, you.” (Something like that.)

We then shared ideas and discussed our jobs as if we haven’t done that before at every meeting and wouldn’t rather be doing it over beer. Since there was no beer present, we wondered why we couldn’t have shared ideas via email.

The meeting seems to be less work, but with the travel, I actually end up working exactly the same amount of time and can’t just pretend I’m working, er, I mean working efficiently and effectively. The company is adamant enough about the time table that they remind us not to submit work too early lest it look as if we’re not working. (Note: that’s not a joke; we were told that, in so many words today. Apparently working efficiently and effectively is not allowed.)

The day wasn’t a total annoying loss. After the meeting I had lunch at an Italian restaurant that served the best grilled pork and grilled vegetables I’ve had in Japan (all for only 900 yen or $7.30) and I got a chance to go to a foreign food and beverage store and stock up on a few essentials: pasta, beer, and bourbon.

Tomorrow, I’m stuck in the house again. I will, of course, officially, of course, be working most of the day. I totally won’t be playing a game. (I also now have lots of beer and bourbon.)

Holidays Ain’t What They Used To Be

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The productive part of my summer holiday usually doesn’t start until I’ve disgusted myself with how unproductive I am. Unfortunately the company I work for has complicated that.

For reasons too complicated to go into (bureaucratic rock pissing) I no longer have my summers to myself. In the old days, once school was finished and a few days of overflow were completed, I was set free for a several weeks. Luckily, I was still paid because the school where I work wanted all teachers well rested and continued to pay the company I work for even though we weren’t actually working. I would use this time to spend three or four weeks back in the USA.

Then, a few years ago, the company I work for decided that they were totally the boss of me and that if I wanted to get paid in the summers the way I had been paid for 12 years, I would have to start “working” during the summer and on any day I wasn’t actually assigned to the school. This “work” amounted to producing some kind of lesson (officially over six hours of work) and sending it in via email. Mission accomplished.

If I don’t want to have to do any busy work, or want to go back to the USA or want to have an actual vacation, I have to use paid holidays. (This, I suspect, is part of what this nonsense is all about: when teachers leave, they can get compensation for their unused holidays.)

I should also point out that up to ten days of unused leave carries over to the next year. Any more than that drops off. This means I have 30 days of paid holidays per year. The paid holidays are complicated by the company being able to assign up to 10 days. (Note: they do this based on a Clintonian meaning of “is” is interpretation of the law.)

In the past, because I got summers off, I would just let ten days be lost and start over with a fresh 30 days. Now, though, I’ve started to use 10 of those days to save me from having to do busy work.

That said, all the busy work does is give me the illusion of being productive. I still sit with lots of half-finished projects mocking me from their “project piles”. Eventually, I get tired of staring back at them and start doing something about finishing them. If it’s a writing project, for example, I take the radical step of actually writing it.

But first I have to do my busy work. it doesn’t take much energy. It just drains the spirit a bit and lets me ignore the project piles a while longer.

You Can Stay But You Must Go Now

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Well, the devil over my right shoulder won the day and I did a good job in my demo classes today. Well, at least I did in one of them.

The first thing that surprised me, and actually put my mind at ease, was that the parents visiting the open campus were dressed as if they were going to a picnic. So were a lot of the students. On parents days during the year the parents dress up and I very often have to avert my eyes as the mothers seem to get younger and younger each year whilst I stay the same age. (Something like that. I’ve been 24 or 25 for at least five years.)

I also noticed that the turn out for high school classes like mine were much smaller than for junior high classes. This is because 1) it’s easier to get into the junior high school (requirements: Japanese and breathing) and 2) once you’re in the junior high it’s easier to get into high school.

Because there wasn’t much pressure, I relaxed. However, me being me, I immediately started changing the plan while I was standing in front of the class. This involved drawing a picture that represented fear of heights on the board and adding the words “collecting pens” to indicate my hobby (at least for today; I also told them I was 24) and added “#1 Fear”.

For the first class, when everyone, myself included, was fresh and energetic, I was able to sell all those and get a reaction when I pointed out the number one fear was “giving speeches” and that’s exactly what they were about to do. I then got a series of good speeches that ended about 10 minutes before I expected them to, which was 15 minutes before the end of class. I then went into actor improv mode and pointed out that the back of the speech paper was blank and, as a teacher, “I hate blank pages” and had them make pairs and write short conversation based on the speech.

I also noticed that one of my students was also a pen and pencil collector. He had, based on my quick observations a Pilot S20 mechanical pencil; a Lime Green Lamy Safari, a black Rotring Rapid Pro mechanical pencil and several other pens all tightly packed in a Lihit Lab Teffa pen case.

(Note: this means he’s not allowed to attend school where I work. He’s not allowed to have cooler pens and pencils than I do.)

The class went so well I knew the second class, the one after lunch, would be bad.

It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. The vibe was a lot different and the students weren’t as energetic. Once again it finished early and I assigned a conversation. Although some students asked for help, others just sat there staring at each other wondering what to do. I authorized my Japanese assistant (long story) to act as a human electronic dictionary and answer their questions.

No one had any cool pens though. I even had to loan one guy my Rotring 600 mechanical pencil because he hadn’t thought to bring any pens or pencils.

Unfortunately for him he gave it back rather than trying to steal it. That means he can’t come to the school either.

Over and Not Done and Not Rewarded Except in Spirit

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Today I prepared for tomorrow’s classes at school which is kind of odd since school ended two days ago. Sort of.

Tomorrow I’m teaching a class for the open campus at the school where I work and I have to admit my heart isn’t fully in it. When I was asked to participate it was with the understanding that the company I work for would, in some way, compensate me for it by giving me an extra day off on a day when I wasn’t actually working (long, long story and not an exaggeration).

Instead there ensued bureaucratic rock-pissing where the company I work for told the school where I work that it would have to give up one of its “We Got Dwayne Days” even though Dwayne was actually working those days and therefore they couldn’t be given up because Dwayne had already been got. (Something like that.)

Imagine a bunch of toddlers saying “I know you are but what am I” and “You’re not the boss of me” and that’s pretty much how I imagine the discussion going.

Also imagine a rag doll of me being tossed back and forth with no one actually interested in catching it.

Also keep in mind that at no time was I actually involved in the discussion which is why I probably still have a job.

In the end I am now “volunteering” to do the class mostly because by the time I realized I was volunteering it was too late to back out of doing it. (I suspect this is a feature in the system, not a bug.) Granted, if I thought this would help me in the long run–like, say, inspiring the school where I work to become the school I work for–it would be awesome, but that’s very unlikely to happen.

That would all be fine except that, because classes are over until September, my brain has already entered summer mode. I stop shaving; I have whiskey more often; I start working on personal projects; and I start playing games more often.

And that was only yesterday.

(Imagine a slightly tipsy, slightly smelly bear working on a computer or writing with a pen and that’s pretty much what summer looks like around here. If it weren’t for She Who Must Be Obeyed being around, I might go full bear.)

In the end, I suspect I’ll do my best. I’ll also probably never do it again unless it ceases to be voluntary.

 

 

Easing the Pain With Purple

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Several hundred years ago (more or less) when I started teaching I got the strange idea to mark my students’ papers and exams with purple ink rather than red.

My idea, at the time, was to lessen the blow of any marks I made on a student composition by writing in purple ink rather than red ink. My theory was that although red generally serves as a warning color and a sign to stop, I felt it overwhelmed the comments themselves. The students saw red and that’s all they saw. A few red marks weren’t that impressive, too many overwhelmed. Students would say the paper was bleeding and since it was possible to bleed to death, it meant the paper was dead.

A comparison: Blue is too cool; red too harsh; green to approving; and pink too damned cute.

A comparison: Blue is too cool; red too harsh; green to approving; and pink too damned cute to be taken seriously.

I told my students that I marked in purple. This meant, as I think I phrased it, that the paper “wasn’t bleeding to death; it had only been roughed up a little” and could be saved with a little treatment. I don’t know if it worked, and I never did a counter test with red (mostly because I’d bought a pack of purple pens and wanted to use them) but several students later commented that they’d “checked the bruises” so my plan at least left that impression.

I’ve recently gone back to using purple ink, albeit for different reasons than before.

After a decade and a half of marking with red ink, I decided to switch back to marking in purple. My reasons weren’t psychological. I’m not a big fan of the red pens made available at the school where I work and used that dislike as an excuse to start using fountain pens when I marked. I used to use a red Pilot Vanishing Point, but I got tired of having to stop and refill it during marking because the converter didn’t hold much ink.

For this marking session, I chose my TWSBI Classic Mini. It holds more ink than the PIlot VP and has a medium nib that writes relatively thin for a medium. For ink I chose Pilot Iroshizuku Murosaki-Shikibu (or Japanese Beauty Berry). I could use red ink, but I’ve found red inks are harder to clean when it comes time to clean the pen and some of them look too pink to be taken seriously.

(Note: I had fewer students question my marks this time, but that may be attributed to a sudden burst of competence on my part. Yes, after all these years, I’ve finally learned how to do this job.)

Next term I may switch back to red just to see what happens, but I’d like to use up that Iroshizuku ink first. Until I switch, the TWSBI is now the Purple Pen of Pain.

The Purple Pen of Pain

The Purple Pen of Pain

 

Dilemmas of a Moral and Selfish Nature

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I have a unique chance to influence my future and the futures of many potential students and that has created a moral dilemma for me.

First a little history: Several years ago the school where I work had elective classes for junior high school second and third year students (8th and 9th graders). The classes alternated between being fun if we had students sign up who were interested in English and being tedious if the students had little interest in English but wanted to hang out with their cool friend whose parents made him take the course.

The courses were pitched, along with electives offered by Japanese teachers, in a large sales pitch meeting. My chance to do the sales pitch came after I’d spent a year teaching a particularly bad group of students who, despite being in an English elective they chose to be in, didn’t understand why I spoke English the entire time.

When I gave my sales pitch, I spoke English, reasonably slowly, and told them if they couldn’t understand me, they shouldn’t sign up. After I finished I got lots of “wow, are you F@#king serious?” looks from several teachers. Only one student signed up for the course but to this day I remain unrepentant about that pitch. (It helped that he was an awesome student.)

My current dilemma is that I’m teaching a pair of demo classes for the open campus at the school where I work. I therefore have the chance to influence potential future high school students before they become actual high school students.

The devil over my right shoulder is telling me to put on a great pitch because “more students equals more money for the company you work for and you will get, well, not much actually but you will have the satisfaction of having done your best. Etcetera”. The devil over my left shoulder is telling me to “drive the f@#kers away; drive the obnoxious little f@#kers away. Keep them out of the school. Make them someone else’s problem. Don’t let them become your problem. Do it to Julia! Do it to Julia!”

In the end I suspect I’ll be kind and courteous and put on a decent class, especially as parents will also be in the room and others will be staring in the windows. Even I believe in making a good first impression sometimes.

I will make the students do a short speech, though. That ought to drive some of them away. In the nicest possible way, of course.

 

A Row of Mistakes Makes You Wear a Suit

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Several years ago I made the mistake of filling out my OCR forms by using the spreadsheet provided by the school where I work. This was not something I usually did and, after what happened, I never did it again.

For various complicated reasons we have to turn in marks before we turn in marks. This allows the homeroom teachers to counsel students and parents and, in some cases, lobby us to “enhance” the marks (more on that in another post). To turn in the marks before the marks we have to enter the marks into a spreadsheet. I’ve always found the spread sheet kind of clunky and prefer to use my own spreadsheet.

In the year in question, out of haste, I used the school’s spreadsheet and, because of haste, I read the wrong row for several of the student’s marks giving them their “end of year mark” long before the end of the year.

This led to a badly timed “meeting”–note: the Japanese have a tendency to want to have meetings “right now” even if “right now” is not a good time for you and you don’t have all the facts you need to provide the information they want–where the then department head asked me about the scores and I, who’d been worried I’d messed up all the marks, was pleased to discover I’d only messed up five or six.

Because I was relieved, the then department head determined that my level of humility and self-torture was not appropriate and he called my company to complain.

My company then called me and meetings in Tokyo and apology letters ensued. I also agreed to meet the then department head in the presence of representatives from my company to do a formal bow and apology. Keep in mind, at no point did I feel any of this was necessary because I felt I’d already apologized and part of me hoped the then department head would die in a fire (figuratively, of course) for running to my company, but I put on a suit and went to work to apologize.

A couple things happened. First, I ended up not having to apologize. I still don’t know why except that my explanation put the blame on their spread sheet as well as my inattention. Second, everyone saw the suit and wondered if I was heading to a job interview. I said that I hadn’t planned on doing so but event might have just made it necessary. Third, most of the women at the school seemed to like how I looked in a suit and encouraged me to wear them more often. (Note: Technically I think they liked the suit; not me in a suit.)

It all worked out in the end and for a while the running joke when someone thought they were in trouble was “Well, I guess I’d better get my suit ready”.

Luckily, I haven’t had a reason to wear one since then.

 

The Pencil Marks the Spot

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The school where I work still enters final marks on optical character recognition sheets. This isn’t as old school as it gets (we could be using Hollerith code) but it is rather old school and it also requires a certain amount of penmanship. This is where a lot of people get in trouble.

First some background: The OCR process involves filling in the OCRs with pencil, turning them in at a specific time and then waiting whilst the secretive people in the secretive old school computer room scan the cards and make a print out. We then checked the scores (on continuous form dot matrix paper from a dot matrix printer) and, if there were any mistakes, we waited whilst the corrections were made and reprinted. My first year at the school we turned in the cards around one in the afternoon and didn’t see the results until around five-thirty. I even had to call She Who Must Be Obeyed and delay our night out.

This slow process apparently scared some people because a couple years later we had an intranet system and a program we could access from our desks. The problem was the program wasn’t particularly intuitive (it had complicated steps to get to the complicated steps) and there were lots of complaints. Then the company went bankrupt and we were back to OCR cards.

Apparently, though, a deal was struck to speed up the process and now the turnaround time is usually an hour. Mistakes are taken care of quickly, too. The biggest mistakes usually involve 8s and 7s which can look like 0s or Bs or 1s. (Well, there was also that year I entered marks from the wrong row but that’s another post.) It helps to keep your pencils as sharp as possible, even if you have to resharpen them during the writing process.

My biggest complaint about the current system, though, is that you can’t submit early. With the unintuitive program we could finish everything the night before final marks were due and run away early. With the OCRs we can submit at any time, but the secretive computer people won’t fire up the OCR machine and scan them early.

My other complaint is that the dot matrix paper isn’t the classic green and white style. If you’re going retro, go full retro.

Getting Back the Whatever it Was Again

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I’ve written before about the post-marking malaise but today’s was especially odd.

I tried spacing my marking out more this term. In the past I’ve usually done intense bursts of marking followed by burn out, malaise, denial, more marking and lots of British detective dramas. (And that’s just the first two days.) This term though I had a daily quota. I did a percentage of the tests each day and then stopped. The theory was the quota would leave me time to do other things which would eliminate the malaise.

It didn’t quite work that way.

Marking has a habit of stretching out to fit the time available. Even after all my years of teaching I can only take student writing in small bursts. Part of this is a result of reading dozens of different types of handwriting writing written in different shades of pencil grey.  I’d like to require my students to write in pen but I don’t have the patience for the memos and meetings that requirement would involve. (Also, the cross outs and rewrites would get sloppy and probably be even harder to read.)

Reading grey writing on average quality paper begins to hurt the eyes after a while. That and the bad English slowly ruins the brain and I have to do something else for a while. That slows the process down. Then, after I finished my quota, I find I’m too tired to do anything else.

Now that I’m finished with my marking, I’m trying to reorder my brain into doing other stuff. The problem is that involves organizing stacks of stuff that has been set off to the side to make space for exam papers. I’ve got notebooks and pens from the ISOT that I want to test. I have a list of people I met at the ISOT I want to contact. I have a list of products I want to review and I have no idea is some of them are actually for sale yet.

The problem with that is the initial inspiration for most of what’s in the piles has been lost. Also, they’ve been mixed as they’ve been moved and removed and moved again. The sorting takes time and doesn’t actually count as doing something productive.

Tomorrow is a light day–mostly double checking marks and getting ready for pass backs–and it’s a chance to do something productive.

That doesn’t mean I’ll do something productive, but at least I’ll have the chance.

 

On Marking and the Happy Dance

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Some day I actually will dance the Happy Dance of Joy in the hallway, but that will probably be my last day at the school where I work and will probably involve lots of references to Johnny Paycheck, (although, technically, given my work situation, most of that will have happened before with some of it to come after).

(Note: the Happy Dance of Joy looks a lot like a fast version of what these ladies are doing.)

Today we gave back junior high school exams and that means I won’t have to see my worst class until September when autumn starts. Adding insult to insult, my last class today was my worst class which meant I had to hang around until the afternoon to deal with them.

Fortunately, someone had threatened them in exactly the right way and they were surprisingly calm even though there wasn’t much for them to do. Although I was glad to be done with them, I wasn’t in the mood to dance. (Note: I am almost never in the mood to dance even when alcohol is involved.)

Passbacks involve getting the students sat down; writing some scores on the board; handing out answer sheets; handing out exams; correcting any mistakes; and handing out the speech contest print.

Today, for the first time in a while, I had a number of students bring up tests with marking and math mistakes. (Long story involving Japanese instructions and changed minds and bad powers of observation.) I corrected a few mistakes which led to a rush of people trying to lobby that something was a mistake. Complicating the issue is that this test is the only test where I actually mark the long writing. In the future I will just read it and give points. Today, though, I try to show how I mark by, well, actually marking.

This leads to students counting my marks and trying to match them to their scores whilst I try to explain that’s not how it works. A perfect long writing that’s off-topic gets almost no points. A long writing that’s long on coherence and mistakes will get a high score.

Once that was over I felt like doing the happy dance. However, if that’s going to happen it will happen at the end of the year when I never have to see the bad class again.

I probably still won’t dance because I’ll probably end up with some of the same students next year.