New, long post about the new school year coming soon. Until then, here's a short story.

So I was heading to the bathroom at my base school the other day, and as I was switching into the bathroom slippers, some 2nd year boys were coming towards me. I said hello, they said hello back, and I went into the bathroom. I fully expected the boys to keep on walking and go to their class, as they usually do after I say hello. These boys, though, apparently had a bee in their bonnet about something. I could hear them giggling and whispering in English outside of the bathroom. They waited there while I went to the bathroom, washed my hands, and came out and changed back into my indoor shoes. Then they all asked me together (ever heard 6 boys ask a question in a foreign language in unison?), "What did you do last night?" And no, they weren't being stalkerish and weird (although 2 of these boys were part of the group I labeled as "My Three Stalkers" last year); this was the new target sentence that they had just learned. Apparently, one of the teachers had mentioned to the students that I like to watch Japanese comedies and dramas, and the boys had discovered that I liked some of the same shows they did. So they wanted to see whether I watched the show or not. This may not seem like a big thing, but the sad truth is that most students won't even say hello to me, so the fact that they asked me a question and waited for the answer, and then even replied to the answer, was really nice. It almost makes up for all the times they run away from me during interview games in class.

New School Year Part Deux

At the beginning of last school year, my teachers didn’t change all that much. If you remember Mr. Passivity, he left for another school in my city. And I got a new, young teacher at my worst school. And I got a new temporary teacher at one of my other schools. So there was not a lot of dramatic change/upheaval. This new school year was a little different. Before the new school year started, this was my list of teachers.

Base School
M sensei – really nice, one of my best friends in Japan
O sensei – can’t speak English really well, so she always tried to avoid having me in her classes. She was originally a music teacher, but the school needed an English teacher, so she got “promoted”. Tough old bird, though. She had throat cancer earlier in the year, had surgery, and was back at school, literally, inside of a week.
Physically Demonstrative sensei – semi-decent teacher, but she’s one of those older ladies who feel that because I’m foreign, they are allowed to constantly invade my hoola hoop of personal space. She would always grab on to me, get WAY too close when speaking to me, and it didn't help that she had really bad coffee breath all the time...

Cromartie
Freddy – I think I wrote about him before. REALLY good teacher, a little strange, but knows a LOT about western culture (he understood a Soul Train reference)
Ice Queen – bit of a misnomer because he’s actually a guy. He’s always busy, and he translates every #*(& word that comes out of my mouth in class (seriously – I say “Good morning” to his second year students, and he jumps in with “ohayoo gozaimasu”), and he NEVER talks to me unless he can help it. Not sure why he’s an English teacher…
Oneesan – Oneesan means “big sister” in Japanese, and she was kind of like a big sister except for the fact that she’s about 4’9” tall. I always talked to her, and she was one of the best teachers I had. She was really creative and had tons of ideas for game activities and such.

Ghetto
Mr Genki – This is the new young teacher I wrote about awhile back (he told students “don’t touch” when they were looking through my stuff). I don’t know about his teaching style because they always paired him up with Dependent sensei, so I’ve never seen him teach alone. He has earned my undying love, though, by his obvious interest in English and in western culture. Almost everytime I was at the Ghetto school, he would find time to talk to me (usually when he was playing hooky from his baseball coaching duties). He made this school a lot more bearable.
Dependent sensei – Nice older woman, really sweet, terrified of English, and afraid that her age was making her forget all her English. She couldn’t plan a lesson on her own for the life of her, and even when she did plan lessons, they weren’t that good or exciting. But she tried, God bless her. She made Mr Genki teach every lesson with her so she wouldn't have to teach alone.
Rabbit – poor, poor woman. She had lots of really good ideas for teaching English; unfortunately, she had ZERO classroom management abilities (it was in her classes that the students would stand up and walk around, leave the classroom, yell, look through my stuff, etc.), and her English wasn’t that great, either. To add to that, Dependent sensei taught together with Mr Genki, leaving Rabbit to teach the 1st and 2nd year students (though Mr Genki helped with the second years).

And then we come to this year. Many changes were made. Only one was for the better. The others either kept the status the same or made it much, much worse.

dundunDUN