Nose pickery

I so wish I had brought my camera to class today, because one boy in the 2nd row from the front was going at his nose in such an industrious fashion that one could practically hear the drill bits whirring from a distance. I hope he didn't hurt himself. Both Sugar and Saint are out on business trips today, so I had this sannensei class to myself. Since last year, the sannensei classes have been divided into advanced and basic classes, a tactic that is at least in theory a great idea. The basic division moves through the textbook at a slower pace, covering the fundamental grammar points the kids need to learn in greater depth, and the upper division moves through at a faster pace and eventually delves into adventures like free conversation, one of the greatest acts of comedy ever visited upon this quiet mountain town.

Anyway, this class was the basic division of sannensei English, and they should ideally be covering material like the passive voice and present perfect tense, but in reality have trouble counting past ten. And yet, I'm obligated to stay more or less on track and teach them the prescribed grammar of the week...regardless of how each lesson builds on the previous one, and without said previous knowledge one can't be expected to be promoted much beyond the rank of CLUELESS.
It's not like there are security cameras in the classrooms, though, so on the rare occasions when I have a class to myself, I have a bit more freedom than usual. At first, I (foolishly) thought that a review of the grammar at work here would be a good idea, but these kids were radiating such profound disinterest that I nearly lapsed into a coma, right in the front of class.
OK, no grammar. Time for a little song and dance act. If they were going to view me as the bad guy here, I was determined to at least be a villain with personality, so I started picking on them. See, the lower division kids may rarely study English and they may be completely unable to hold a conversation, but they do still know more than they are willing to let on. It's getting them to admit that (both to themselves and to me) that can be akin to pulling teeth. With the grammar already up on the chalkboard, I had them fill in the blanks with words they knew to make a present perfect sentence. The trick with getting even the most basic crap like this to work, though, is to ignore no one. Single out the quiet kids, stare, tease, dance circles around them - anything to make them laugh and realize that it's acceptable to have a little fun here. Even the most apathetic always break, eventually.

Students slip through the cracks of society and become destined for futures of absolutely nothing here only because too many teachers let them get away with it. After all, what the hell kind of junior high school student is going to step up to the plate if nothing is expected of them? The ones who really make an effort to disappear, though, are ironically the ones who fail most spectacularly at avoiding my attention. There's one in particular that comes to mind - for the sake of this blog, we'll call her Clam, since she closes up just like the real thing whenever she's in a classroom desk. She's one of those whom I know to be perfectly socially capable, since I see her talk - usually quite animatedly - with her friends, and have also spoken with her in Japanese in between classes. Any time a lesson starts, though, that clamshell comes down and she closes up tighter than a...well, insert your favorite metaphor here.
I'm a little shocked that most teachers here are content to ignore a giant mollusk sitting in (on?) a desk; I think Clam's attempt to crawl into her shell makes her stand out quite obviously amongst a sea of uniformed, black-haired children. It's actually a little funny to watch, because as you approach her, her head instinctively lowers as she makes an intensive study of the pleats of her skirt. Back away, head comes up a bit. Forward - down again. Students here won't flat out disobey a direct instruction from a teacher, though, and my first one is always to make eye contact with me. So, the shell comes up eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever so slightly...she peeks out...giggles when I make strange faces at her, but usually lightens up a bit. It seems to have become a running joke - I'm aware she's trying to remain unnoticed, and she knows this. She still acts as though she is trying to avoid my attention, and makes a dramatic show of how much it pains her whenever I call on her. Anyway, I hope she's getting something out of this big pony show, because I'm not sure any other teacher here, no matter how young or liberal they are, would upset the "harmony of things" to mess around a bit and draw this girl out of her shell for even an hour.

Anyway, that's that. There is also the upper division, though, and managing their classes has been one of my favorite experiences here so far. Anyone who has worked as a teacher before (or even just tried to impart information to the apathetic) knows how much it sucks to struggle with unmotivated students - it's not that they're necessarily stupid, they just don't give a shit. This is the complete opposite. My upper division kids are the biggest reason I miss last year's sannensei, many of whom have gone on to the better high schools in this area. Sure, their skills are more developed because they actually study on their own from time to time, but more importantly is the fact that they're just fun to work with because they want to be there. Free conversation was something that Saint and I came up with for last year's class after they finished the prescribed, brain-numbing, gov't-stamped-and-approved New Horizon textbook that really should be burned on sight.
The process is simple enough - giving the students a topic and then leading them in some conversation activities that require them to speak entirely on their own instead of parroting cheesy dialogue from a textbook - but it was the result that often slew me. Some of the real choice ones (and yes, these all really did come from 14-year olds in free conversation in English without any assistance) were:

• "Don't pretend to know everything."
  
• "I like George Bush because he is strong and he has many chemical weapons."
• "Shut your face hole."
• I want to meet Arika Takarano because she is my goddess. All of her music is very good. I think she will become a religion."
• "When we got on the ship, I saw some dolphins. They were cute. I like their fins. Maybe they were delicious."
• "The person I want to meet is a secret because I'm embarrassed. He is very beautiful!"
• "I don't remember why I was an elementary school student. It was annoying."

Beyond that, there was something just priceless in seeing my students get into savage, cutthroat arguments in English whenever a difference of opinion came up. Considering that they barely knew more than a thousand vocabulary (at least, in theory) by the time they finished the 3rd year textbook, it was rather amusing to see what they managed to put together. To this date I still haven't quite nailed down the right adjective to describe the scene where a cute little uniformed Japanese schoolgirl points her finger at her classmate and shouts in heavily accented English, "Shut the fuck* up!"

Surreal, maybe?

*No, that wasn't one of the vocabulary in the textbook.

Updating my life

The word on the street is that two big events in my life have been decided recently, but since my streets are several thousand miles from most of yours, I'll write about it all here.

First, I will be visiting Minnesota in July. I will be there starting on July 2, and am definitely planning to attend CONvergence. The Romulan Consulate is returning for our 3rd year now, and will naturally be toting buckets of alcoholic beverages that make you barf blue. We will be gracing cabana room 109 from Thursday through Saturday night, and as always, we will have a better party than the Klingons. Those of you on Facebook should look for an ad for it there sometime soon.

The other big item is that I will not being staying in Japan for another year beyond this one. I've been accepted to the University of Hawaii Shidler College of Business's Japan-focused MBA program, a 21 month program that includes in the latter half a several month internship in Tokyo - here's to hoping that this leads to riches and fame (or at least the former), because the cost of tuition and living in Hawaii will probably make me cry.
I very much doubt that my schedule will allow me to return to Minnesota in between leaving Japan and moving to Hawaii, so I will do my best to see everyone at CON and in the week following.

Aside from those two snippets, there have been a few other current events here and there, so I'll try to hit them all in this post...

I may have mentioned from time to time that while living here, I've been training in the Japanese sword art of iaido under the town dentist here in Kosaka. Along with Mike and Tristen, two other English teaching friends of mine here, I tested for and earned my 1-kyu rank in Akita City this last weekend. For those unfamiliar with martial arts rankings, 1-kyu is the rank that comes before a first degree black belt. I hope to continue with this and take my first degree black belt test sometime around December, but that of course assumes that I'm able to find a good dojo in Hawaii. I hear that there are several, though, so that shouldn't be too much of a worry.
My only concern now is my knee, which has been misbehaving recently under the strain of one particular form that it doesn't care for. I'm working on resting and strengthening it now, so I anticipate being back up to full speed before long.

What else...my parents and sister visited Japan recently, so I got to babysit them for a couple weeks. The big surprise for me, though, was my supervisor's reaction to the whole affair. Now, Kosaka's a small town that doesn't exactly see scads of foreigners (or really, tourists from anywhere). This means that adding 3 to the current count more than doubled the gaijin population here, at least for a bit. I didn't quite expect this to be cause for trumpets and fanfare, but I was apparently wrong. When my supervisor caught word of this, he asked if it'd be OK if we have a "mini-mini-welcome party."　Sounded simple enough, and I was of course happy to give him the opportunity to have a little fun with the foreigners. He went on to arrange a catered dinner that at least 40 people showed up to, including a bunch of my coworkers, the superintendent, the chairperson of the Board of Education, KJH's principal, etc...
Probably the highlight was when my supervisor announced a surprise performance - he had arranged for 4 of my students who play taiko drums to do a brief show for us!
I know all four of them pretty well; they're some of my better current sannensei students. Even being giggly teenage girls, though, they managed to keep this whole thing a secret from me, so it was pretty cool to see them show up and do their thing. The little introduction speech they put together in English was cute, too. I thought I had some better pictures of their show, too, but somehow they just vanished like a fart in the wind...
Isn't technology a joy?

The weather here, after securely orbiting Planet Suck for quite some time, is now awesome and so I am biking every day I can. Lake Towada is my favorite for that so far, so here are a number of pictures from recent visits:

Mmm, nummy blue water...

Can you spot itty-bitty Tristen at the bottom of that cliffside descent?

If you think it says "Watch out for bears," you might be right.

Lake Towada Shrine. Mercifully, the gift shop is too far to the right to show up in this picture.

A tiny shrine on an island that's actually in and not alongside Lake Towada. They haven't put a gift shop here yet, but I'm sure plans are in the works.
Okay, in all fairness, the tourist traps are not as prevalent as I make them sound. And most of the stuff they sell is actually pretty cool - at least, assuming you didn't grow up alongside it.

Why do I have a picture of a dangling bug? I don't know. It was neat, and Japan has big bugs.

This was probably a lot cooler in person than it is in photograph, but I still feel compelled to post it. Underneath (and really, all around) one fountain at Towada Shrine, there was a great cacophony of very mysterious noises that we eventually realized was the croaking of an entire civilization of frogs and such. What you're seeing here is a direct shot underneath the fountain, as well as a few piles of frog eggs that appeared to be...quivering. I would have liked to get a better picture, but I couldn't see too well under there and didn't know if there was something waiting to eat my camera (or hand).