Buggirl's Increasingly Strange Tokyo Tales...

Today, when my supervisor and I were leaving city hall, one of the Japanese security guards who sits in the main entrance stopped us. He proceeded to tell me that one of his…relatives…something…lived in Istanbul for 5 years. Then, seeing my confused expression said (and made a gesture) “Bellydance!” I smiled.

Then, when we exited the building I asked my supervisor…”How does he KNOW?!”

“I don’t know! But yesterday he stopped me to tell me you’re beautiful!”

…”The other security guy sometimes goes out of his way to tell me you’re waiting for me….I get so pissed that people don’t know what my job was, or what I do now…but I can’t ever complain they don’t know who I am.”

My current supervisor and I get along much better as people and now as teachers since we've spent the mornings this semester in the same car (first semester I biked to all my schools)…now that he knows my teaching style and gets excited about talking teaching with me…well...the more I suspect that he has little to no power over my future. I think my last supervisor had the most vision, the most control, and dropped the ball and communicated nothing to anyone when he was shifted to being a vice-principal.

Ah, well.

My supervisor and I drove to two Jr.High schools today to meet with ALTs. Before we left city hall my supervisor had to drop into the security room to check out a car. He mumbled “Time to check my alcohol level…”

Japan has 0 tolerance for alcohol and driving, but I thought he was making a joke.

Nope. This year, getting a government car is preceded with a BAC check…and specifically it is done in the morning.

I laughed my ass off.

I wonder how many issues with government workers showing up drunk, or drunk from the night before, prompted this change.

 I’ve been making paper airplanes for the summer English program. I am ready.

It was hard to walk past the rows of desks, with my handfuls of paper airplanes, and not launch an attack on the government workers here.

I have also become the trash queen today. The recycle bins are giving me the PET bottles I need for the bowling lesson as well as the newspaper for tonight’s packing.

A large chunk of my morning was entering the info for all the summer camp name tags. The Japan version of creative name spellings is creative name kanji…although I was relieved to find that if I got stumped on how to enter a kanji on the computer despite having the reading… it was hard enough that my co-workers also struggled. The two worst kanji I managed to find in my giant kanji dictionary before my Japanese co-worked found them in electronic dictionaries. I have kanji-cred for the day

(惟for the しいreading in a name was one of the stumpers…as was 滉　in some context)

My brain is fried after 150 names.

Four rounds of the Ninja Game with 6th graders and we top off the week with 12 or more special needs students from 1st-6th. I am knackered. It is Friday.

I love working with special needs classes (in part because the teachers get my style in ways normal teachers often don’t) but this group should have been broken into two smaller groups (1-3 and 4-6) for sanity sakes. Still, we touched colors, talked about fruit colors, talked about color mixing, and then mixed colors in our hands and made a handprint flag. Then I answered questions…which were more about trying to understand and then reacting to whatever a child with a raised hand wanted to say to me and thanking them…for example the question of “Haruna…Banana!” get answered with “Haruna, nice to meet you. I like Bananas too! Haruna likes bananas! Thank you, Haurna.”

Like 1st and 2nd graders, they still find magic in hearing what words are in English and they still need a great deal of repetition and structure. Those students, unlike more grown-up students, don’t crave new experiences…because it’s all new and confusing for them. You have to work the new in carefully and then repeat repeat repeat.

Next time I am here I know the special needs teachers will be requesting me, they are very happy right now.

Sweaty hot today, still. One of the teachers tried to tell me that it was 120degrees…but I suspect his calculations were wrong. It’s simply in the 80’s with high humidity.

Tomorrow is my last school teaching day of the semester. I’ll be doing the Ninja game with 6th graders and then a special class with the special needs students. I’ve made a hybrid of a few lesson plans for the special needs group but it will all be around color and will culminate in us mixing two colors with our bare hands and making a class hand print flag of our original colors. I miss doing special needs classes.

In other schools occasionally the special needs kids come in with their assistants and join the regular students when it comes to English Communication classes…but that can be embarrassing because those special needs kids kick more English ass than the regular students: they’re not embarrassed about answering, they enjoy simple memorization tasks and grouping words, and they are probably more in touch with “learning to watch for clues as to what to do when you don’t understand” than the average kid…and have probably been better drilled in how to deal with the frustration of not understanding.

I realize that much of what I do is teach students how to cope with frustration. I usually have to talk to teacher before class and say “Yes, the first time they get into groups and have to answer this questions they will be very confused, but you need to let them be confused because after they try…and they see my reaction… they will fully understand what is needed of them and will be able to do the task and will be better able to deal with the stress of answering while not being 100% sure in future English classes.”

A teacher here told me that moving in Japan makes people sick. I believe that…although I am never sure what to believe about “We Japanese…”

Last week a teacher, when I couldn’t come up with the English word for electric fan quicky, said “Aaaaah, that’s because you don’t have fans in America. Everyone has air conditioning!” I explained that in America, like Japan, we have a variety of hot-weather solutions including electric fans, thank you.

Still, it doesn’t top my favorite myth of America. My old school, at lunch time, once let it slip that they thought American women don’t go through menopause. This group included a school nurse.

At the high school I worked at a teacher once told my coworker (Giles) that he couldn’t help Giles find a podiatrist because Japan doesn’t have podiatrists because, due to taking their shoes off at the entrance, they don’t have foot problems. Universal gaijin reaction to hearing this has always been “has he ever LOOKED AT HIS STUDENTS' FEET?!?!” as Japanese high school girls are always a rich source of some crazy pidgeon-toed and knock-kneed issues.