Back to Basics

Alrighty, back to the world of serialized blogs!  I'm back at my school, with a whole mess of new teachers, so let's try something I haven't done in a long while...

The pseudonym game!!

Obviously, I can't use real names or places on this blog, so I always have to come up with fake names for the places and people around here.  Let's start with the school.

Today, I'm at Plum Valley Junior High School.  Nestled comfortably between The Twin Wave Mountains, Plum Valley is home to kind teachers, mostly good students, and some of the weirdest architecture I've ever seen in a Japanese school.  Many of the teachers here are old friends, meaning I've worked with them before, some from my very first schools.  It's always nice to have a few friendly faces around to make you feel more comfortable at the star of a new school year, so I'm very grateful for this.  

The kids...well, I haven't met the first-years yet, but I know the second and third-years.  The third-year kids are pretty much brilliant.  They pick up concepts in English much faster than any class I've ever known, most likely due to their first-year teacher.  That woman took no crap from anyone, and I'm sad she's not here this year.  I look forward to finding out just how quickly these kids will be able to handle the toughest part of third-year English: the past participle.  Evil, evil concept.  As for the second graders, well...let's just say they ain't so sharp.  I'd say a good 20% of them are "special" students, and this school doesn't put those kids in special classrooms.  Now, I got nothing against the special kids, because they deserve a fun-filled education, but man, it slows things down to a snail's pace, because a lot of our lessons involve pair-work.  If your partner is dragging, it's not so much fun.  On top of that, all the boys in that year have zero motivation and negative concentration.  By "negative", I mean that they actually reduce the rest of the students' ability to focus.  Just one of these boys can derail your entire lesson in a matter of moments.  So all last year, the teacher and I struggled through every minute of every lesson, leaving us drained, and pretty much unwilling to go to class.  In the final six weeks, we were intentionally five to ten minutes late for each lesson, sorry to say.  So...we're gonna have to do some major work this year.

I hear the first-years are pretty much geniuses, so maybe that'll balance things out.

Now, let's move on to the teachers in the English department.  

ODD Sensei:  The ODD here stands for Older Damsel in Distress.  This woman is one of the kindest, most soft-spoken women I've ever met.  She's over 50, and is often overwhelmed by the rambunctious nature of adolescent girls and boys.  For the last three years, I've had to swoop in and tame the little rascals who take advantage of her kind nature.  And, honestly, I kinda think OddSensei enjoys it. Either that, or this is some old school Japanese culture stuff going on.  I can easily see this woman in her younger years, in a world very much like the old Japanese soap operas, kimonos, meddling mothers, tense tea ceremonies and all.  But she's cool, and...she's the head of the English department!

Gyro:  This is actually his nickname.  He tells me he got it because he can throw some amazing baseball pitch called a "gyro ball", but I honestly have no idea.  Gyro's a good guy, with a great sense of humor, but a bit too willing to be the butt of any joke.  I mean, really, even the TEACHERS make fun of this guy, and he just chuckles it up.  He's a bit heavy, and I think he's proud of it, and that's awesome.  But he's a bit too nice to the kids, and they have no problem walking all over him.  My teaching style becomes a bit bipolar around him.  One second I'm the only real authority figure in the room, and the next, I'm goofing off with the kids to remind them that English can be fun.  But again, Gyro's just a good guy who's just trying to figure out how to do his job.

The New Girl:  I can't say much about this one.  She's new, young, "pretty", and seems to laugh at everything I say.  And because I will naturally play off of this to make class more interesting, I'm expecting all the students to assume we are dating.  I'm getting too old for this...

The Other Girl:  This may seem like a cruel name, but I can tell...that's how everyone's gonna see her.  She's not as confident, not as pretty, and not as friendly as The New Girl, and I can't help but wonder how long it's gonna take before she starts to think less of herself for it.  Which means I'm gonna try to talk to her more.  She's just the assistant teacher, which means she's gonna be learning from the rest of us, so I gotta give her a good experience working with a foreigner.  That's really all I got for her at the moment.

Normally, you get maybe three teachers at a school.  One per grade, ya know?  But do the math.  We got three teachers, one assistant, and...me!  That means, undoubtedly, that there will be a class where all five of us are wandering around the classroom, bumping into each other, and basically getting in each other's way.  We don't know each other yet, do its probably gonna take a few weeks for us to learn each other's style, and that's OK.  

On the administrative side, we got my good buddy Princi-Pal.  This dude loves talking to me and telling me about his adventures in life, and always calls me "a strange Japanese man", mostly because I don't like the lame attempts the school lunch center makes at serving "American-style" lunches every once in a while.  It's like they take their cues from the worst of the worst American school lunch ladies.  And I roll my eyes every time.  Makes Princi-Pal very happy to see it.  This is our fourth year working together, so we're pretty much on the same page these days.  At ceremonies, he'll suddenly call me up and say "Translate my speech to English, OK?  Ready?  Here we go!".  I think he's just determined to make sure I have a role to play at this school, and I'm grateful for it.

Speaking of lunch, it looks like today's lunch is more Japanese style, which makes both me and Princi-Pal very happy.  We got rice, milk, scrambled eggs (Japanese style), crab salad (literally, salad with imitation crab meat in it) and some weird...thing, with konnyaku stuff in it.  Take a look!

Don't ask me what that stuff is, because I don't know.  It's called "konnyaku no okaka ni".  The question is, will I eat it?  You never really know what to do when you get these weird foods.  I think I'll write up a blog about school lunches another time, but yeah, I think ill keep including these things here.  

And that's it for now!  There are no classes today, so I'll be sitting at my desk, reading, writing, and otherwise trying to find a way to pass the time.  And now that I got my handy, dandy iPad, it shouldn't be nearly as hard as it once was.

Yeah...feels good to be back.

J