On Root Vegetables and Bad Teachers

ON ROOT VEGETABLES
I should have learned from the microwave incident that when I say little things offhandedly, they can have surprising repercussions.

I was at Cromartie Jr High the other day, once again trying to keep from drooling on my paperwork. The principal walked in with a bucketful of some sort of dirty root vegetable type thingies. He came up to me and said in loud, slow, Japanese, "TAKENAKA". Ah. Yes, I see. Still having no idea what the scary, muddy, smelly things were, I grabbed my dictionary and looked it up. "Bamboo shoots". Okay. Good to know. I smiled and told him what they were in English. He then said something, and picked up a really HUGE bamboo shoot and showed it to me. As I understood it, he said something to the effect of "This bamboo shoot is really big, isn't it?" I agreed with him. "Yes, it's big." He laughed, and went and got some newspaper. I realized that some sort of error in understanding had been made as he started to wrap up the bamboo shoot. With a sinking feeling, I realized that by somehow agreeing that the bamboo shoot was big had apparently meant, "please, I'd like to take home an excessively large bamboo shoot so I can watch it slowly rot and decay, as I have no idea how to cook it." The other teachers in the teachers room were laughing at the fact that the foreigner had apparently asked for the biggest bamboo shoot. Just goes to show you that foreigners eat a lot, yea?" A few of the female teachers came up and tried to give me directions for different ways to cook this beast, but I realized that it was impossible, as I didn't have any pots or pans large enough to cook it in. I smiled politely and pretended to write down their directions.

I got home and, of course, never cooked the thing. It slowly started to rot until I finally threw it out with the burnable trash. It looked like a little mummy wrapped up in its newspaper. I was glad to finally be rid of the thing. Which is why when I went to Cromartie the next time and got yet ANOTHER bamboo shoot from the secretary, I wanted to start crying. My only consolation is that the season for bamboo shoots is rather short, so I suppose I'll only have to worry about smiling and accepting these things for a few more weeks. Until then, I guess I'll have to either figure out how to cook them, or figure out the Japanese word for allergy and explain to my office that I've suddenly developed an allergy for bamboo shoots. Is that even a real allergy? I don't know, but I bet that they would believe me if I told them many foreigners were allergic to it. But would I be willing to lie to dozens of people just to make my life more convenient? You betcha!


ON HORRIBLE THINGS TO TEACH CHILDREN
I thought the worst/funniest moment of my teaching career in Japan was going to be the time when a teacher asked to to teach students the translation for "otaku" (nerd). Nothing beats having 25 students chanting the word "nerd" in chorus. Or so I thought.

Perhaps some background would be nice before I get to the point. There is a teacher that I hat-...er...that I am less than fond of. She's not a horrible person; she's just a horrible teacher. A horrible, horrible teacher. A HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE, HORRIBLE teacher. Of all my English teachers, she has the second worst English skills of the lot. She always makes TONS of grammar and spelling mistakes in classes, and all her worksheets for the students have LOADS of errors all over them. If a normal Japanese person has crap skills at English, I don't care. In fact, I appreciate the fact that they try to use English. But when it comes to English teachers, I expect them to be good at English. And she's not. She's really, really not. I'm so embarrassed whenever we have international gatherings and she's in charge because her English is so crap. After teaching with her for awhile, I decided that maybe I should politely try to correct some of the mistakes she was making on the students worksheets. If her English is crap, that's one thing; but she's teaching my students crap English, and I feel like part of my job is to help teachers improve their English as well as the students. So one day, I pointed out to her that she had made a few mistakes on the worksheet. I did it in a very Japanese way. "I was reading this worksheet, and I noticed you wrote 'I will take bath'. And I think maybe it might be a little more natural to say 'I will take A bath'." She just looked at me blankly. "I mean, I've never actually heard this phrase used in America. Not, of course, that it may be used like that in other English speaking countries, but I think that it's not very natural to say it this way." Blank look. "And I think teaching students this phrase will be hard for me because I don't know how to say this at native speed because it's not a native phrase." Blank look. "Your English on this sheet is wrong." Her reply? "Oh. Well, I already printed out the sheets for all the students, so I don't want to change it now." We had about 5 other conversations like this over the course of a month, and each time, she refused to change the mistakes. No matter how politely (or rudely) I phrased it, she still refused to change the mistakes. So I had to say these wrong sentences and have students repeat after me, thereby teaching and reinforcing incorrect English.

To add to the many joys this teacher heaps upon me, she's a HORRIBLE classroom manager. She has absolutely NO control over the second year students this year. They talk, yell, get up and walk around, throw things, make fun of her and me, etc., and she doesn't try to stop them. Perhaps their most annoying habit is when they get up in the middle of class and start looking through our teaching supplies. In one of my first classes, several boys got up during my introduction and started picking up my dictionary, notebook, and pictures, and took them back to their seats to play with. And they do that in every class. They get up and start looking through my stuff. When I try to stop them and say, "Stop. Don't touch.", they look at me blankly and say "No English [I don't understand English]" and continue to mess with my stuff. And whenever I try to look at the teacher for help, she refuses to look in my direction and correct the students. Sometimes she'll look up when they pick up my stuff and ask her "What's this?" Now that I'm thinking about it, I think I should bring in some horrible things with my teaching supplies. I wonder how you say "tampon" in Japanese?

So to sum up her negative aspects, she's bad at English, she's got bad classroom skills, and she's just an overall bad teacher. But on the positive side. . . . . ummm... having trouble with that one. And for some reason, God has decided to smile upon me by blessing me with her 5 times instead of 3 (most teacher teach 3 classes [one grade]. For some reason, at this school, she teaches 2 grades [5 classes] and the other English teacher only teaches 2). Add this to the fact that the teachers at this school are incredibly nosy (on days when I'm at this school, they wait until I leave to teach a class, then some of them open my desk and look through my bag, purse, and teaching supplies. They've ruined a few pictures by spilling tea or food on them.), and you can probably understand why I DREAD going to this school. Seriously, every time I see it pop up on my calendar for the week, I want to sob uncontrollably (and I almost did last week. I had a class with the really bad class with Miss Incompetent, and the students were so bad that I almost burst into tears from frustration. I was closer to yelling at students than I have ever been, and that includes my American students). At my other schools, even if I'm having a bad day, I can at least fake a smile and depend on the fact that one of my students will do something to make me laugh. Not at this school. The only thing I can depend on is the fact that I will literally be counting the minutes until 4:30, when I can escape. I've been convicted lately that I need to work on my attitude towards this school, because if I start the day convinced that my life will suck, I don't see how it can really get better from there.

And as another tangent connected to what I said last time about being "in love" with a new teacher - I found out in April that this school was going to get a new English teacher. I was excited at first because that would mean that I'd only have up to 3 classes with Miss Incompetent, and thus maybe I could look forward to going to this school like I look forward to going to the other 2. But the more I thought about the school and everything that I don't like there, I realized that in order for me to actually look forward to coming to this school, the new guy would not only have to speak near perfect English; he'd also have to have the physique of a Greek god, the face of an angel, and the ability to find me a beautiful, unique, and interesting person he'd be interested in dating. When I did meet him, I learned that he does have a decent handle on English, even if he sounds like he's Russian. And he's kind of cute, in a little kid sort of way. And maybe he has the physique of one of the lesses Greek gods, perhaps Bobules the god of old cheese. So while I didn't have hope that I'd look forward to going to this school, I at least thought that I might not hate it so much. However, for some unknown reason, my school has decided that the new teacher will team teach with the good teacher at this school, and has thus left Miss Incompetent to continue teaching 2 grades on her own. There goes my brief glimmer of hope. Crushed. Destroyed. Annihilated. Never to be thought of again.

All this leads to one particular lesson with Miss Incompetent. And this lesson is rated PG-13 (maybe leaning towards R). Miss Incompetent usually comes to me at the beginning of the day and shows me the lesson plan. She'll highlight the target sentence and show me some examples she wants me to have the students repeat. This lesson, the target was to teach students plurals. 1 cat, 2 catS, etc. in hte form of "Someone has Something." So she had a sample conversation for us to have. I've stopped looking at her sheets before classes, as even if there is something wrong, she won't change it. I have now learned what a bad thing that is. What is to follow is not fiction. I got to class and after a few minutes, she asked me to read the sample sentences. "Jane has 3 dogs. Taro has many DVDs. Dick has big balls." ...

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Yeah. You read that right. Of course, the sheet had pictures of Jane and her dogs, Taro and his DVD's, and Dick and his soccer balls. Of COURSE it was soccer balls. What ELSE could that sentence have meant? I can't really describe the sound of 28 Japanese students informing me that Dick has big balls. Certainly a unique experience. But wait, it gets better. The teacher decides on a little spontaneity. The students are learning numbers as well, so she wanted to teach them the sentence "how many?". She wanted to model that question, so she asked me questions about the sample sentences. "How many dogs does Jane have?" "She has 3 dogs." "How many DVD's does Taro have?" "He has 20 DVD's." "How many balls does Dick have?" I so wanted to answer that last one with something like "Well, ever since the accident, only one." But I didn't. So help me, I have NEVER tried to keep laughter in as hard as I did during that lesson. Just goes to show that even if you hate your job, you can still find moments of joy in every day, if only you take the time to look.