Welcome to Class

Well, folks, I have been working my blonde behind off for the last couple weeks. You can officially strike those blog entries about "boredom" right off the record. You see, the Japanese school year ends in March, and begins in April, so we are in the home stretch here. As a result, I have been told to devise a way to distribute grades to these poor students in my classes. My solution was to give an interview test. More on that later.

Anyway, I've been working on planning and explaining and scheduling this test, and my days have been surprisingly full lately...of work. I've been staying till 5 and 6 regularly, which for an ALT like me is about the equivalent of midnight. It's been rough, but satisfying.

Luckily, today I had no classes and was free to chill out a bit and quietly prepare for next week's interview tests. I usually eat lunch by myself, but I was beginning to get a bit depressed by hanging out in the teachers' room too much. They are so serious-looking, it just gets to me after a while. I was due for a lunch with the kiddies.

So, I headed up to the 2E (2nd-year students, E class - the English track) class and opened the door carrying my lunch for the day, some yakisoba and pork from the local Suuupaaaa Maaakat. As always, all the kids dropped everything, stared at me, and uttered various versions of the words "Wow" and "Huh?". I think they were a bit surprised to have the foreigner English teacher dude in their classroom at lunch time.

No matter, though. It was great. I ate lunch, discussed some hard-hitting subjects like what they ate for lunch that day, and then, right as their next class was about to start, they begged me to stay. Seeing as how I had 0 classes for the rest of the day, I acquiesed. Luckily, the next class was my favorite: Ancient Chinese Classics.

The teacher of this particular class was the closest thing to a Cowboy the school had yet produced. He always walks around with excitingly unkept hair, a dirty smile on his face, and a style of walking that I can only describe as suggestive. He just looks like a bad-ass through and through. He was quite amused by my apparent desire to bore myself to tears for an hour straight, but he politely showed me which page we would be translating and gave me a copy so I could follow along. Seeing as how the Japanese kids could barely understand the stuff, I was understandably lost. So, I just amused myself for the hour by trying to pick out which Chinese characters I could recognize at all. Out of perhaps 90 on most pages, I knew about 10. Basic stuff like "Water" or "Tree" or "North" or "Delicate snow blossoms floating on an icy tarn." Stuff like that. That's not too bad, considering most of those characters I learned from osmosis and not from actual studying.

Eventually, the teacher asked me if I knew the word "Tao." I said I did, and then he asked how I knew it. I proceeded to explain that I knew it from "The Tao of Pooh." Needless to say, he wasn't impressed. I tried to defend myself by saying that I had never read it, but to no avail. I can just hear it now: "Those Americans study Chinese philosophy through Winnie the Pooh. What ignorant bastards!"

After that class, I somehow got roped into staying for "Writing" class. This one was taught by an actual English teacher whom I know, so she was a little surprised to find me in her class. I tried to pay attention while she dissected sentences like "You are the last person I expected to meet here" and "Every time my sister goes out, she buys something," but I was pretty well bored by this point. Every time she called on me to corroborate some grammatical point, I was taken by surprised and invariably offered the solution to a question three points back. It was magical.

After that, school was over, and I felt like I had really lived like a student for a few hours. I was almost keeling over from tiredness! Next time I see one of those poor guys sleeping in my class, I'll just let him sleep! Oh, to be a student...