I Am Completely Serious

They were pretty good again today, but I’m nonetheless all annoyed at the Devil.

One of the other classes’ homework was to write “Sarah is the worst singer” three times. (The school is too cheap to buy the workbooks we’re supposed to have, so that’s how homework is assigned here – the older kids copy sentences, the younger ones words. Not all the homework mocks my singing, but some of it does.)

One girl, Kitty, did this and then wrote “The Devil is the best singer” seven times. I saw them playing together after class and asked Kitty, “Who is the best singer?” She hunched her shoulders and glared at me. It was cute.

It should be noted at this point that Kitty is one of exactly three students I have who is even mildly overweight, and that as one might expect of a Japanese middle-schooler, she seems to be kind of sensitive about it.

I’ve drawn little pictures of some of the kids’ faces to use in games. Today I’d written a sentence with blanks in it on the board: “____ is ____ er than ____ .” I gave Goody Proctor and the Devil some flashcards with nouns and adjectives on them, plus pictures of their faces and mine, and had them form sentences with them.

Goody Proctor spotted the pile of other people’s faces. “Who are they?”

I held a couple up and named them. “Oh,” said the Devil excitedly, “Do you have Kitty?”

I did, and gave her the paper Kitty. She carefully formed the sentence, “Kitty is heavier than Goody Proctor and the Devil.”

So though she did not overtly misbehave today, I’m somewhat less than thrilled with the Devil right now.

(Goody Proctor did “Sarah is heavier than Goody Proctor and the Devil,” but that was pretty inevitable. I’m just surprised neither of them thought to work the “fire engine” or “police car” flashcards in there.)

(We’re drilling a list of adjectives he had to study.)

Me: Is the elephant fat?

Mr. Rat: Yes yes yes.

Me: Are you tall?

Mr. Rat: No no no.

Me: Is your mother pretty?

Mr. Rat: …

Me: Pretty! (I do the prettiness gesture. (It’s hard to describe.))

Mr. Rat, in Japanese: I know what it means, I’ve just got to think about it…

Me: What? Why?

Mr. Rat, in Japanese: She’s okay, I guess.

Mr. Rat’s other bad habits include sticking the toys in his crotch and gesturing. There was one incident where he actually put some marbles in his pants. I washed them afterwards.

Miss Minnow: (in Japanese) I don’t think Teacher should make us color. It has nothing to do with English.

(They are coloring because I need to keep them busy long enough to check their homework.)

Me: Minnow has rocked for a long, long time…

Miss Minnow, disgustedly: (in Japanese) That’s a weird song.

Me: Now it’s time for her to pass the torch – new crayons? What color crayon do you want?

Blue: Blue, please!

Spaztastic: Pink, please!

Miss Minnow, angrily: Green. Please.

Me: Here you go. She has songs of drama and hiss-y fits -

Blue and Spaztastic: Thank you!

Miss Minnow, her rage towering like Olympus: Thank. You. (in Japanese) That’s a weird song!

Me: You must give your cape and scepter – to Blue! And another for Spaztastic!

Blue: To Blue!

-

Though in success news there, I have taught Miss Minnow and Spaztastic to say “Eeny meeny miny mo / Catch a tiger by the toe” instead of the Japanese version. (“Dochira ni shiyou ka na / Kami-sama no iu tohri,” translation “Which should I choose? \ The one the god chooses.”) And they use it without me telling them to! Out-of-class, even! Blue is still having trouble with “catch a tiger by the toe,” and says a bunch of nonsense syllables instead, but she still does it without being told. Yay! (I’m not going to try and teach them the second half – Miss Minnow might be able to manage it, but not the other two.)

And I’ve got Spaztastic singing the first line of the Ponyo song in English now. Miss Minnow won’t do it because it doesn’t scan properly, and she has taste, thank you very much.

Aw, Crying Four-Year-Old! And you seemed so happy when you had those gigantic sunglasses on yesterday! You were doing so good! Why’d you have to take them off, and then start crying again?

(Crying Four-Year-Old has apparently had some traumatic experience with, like, shapes. He ran out of the room to his mommy when I pulled out the shape flash cards at the end of class. Unless he was just getting tired.)

Formerly Crying Four-Year-Old had on a gigantic pair of sunglasses today. He lounged casually at the tiny little table, smiling at the five- and six-year-old girls and their mothers, feeling he looked so very cool in his gigantic pair of sunglasses. That was pretty awesome. No jerky kid can ruin that.

Even if every other student is awesome, it only takes one of you to ruin my whole day.

For the first time since I got to Shibata, I spent the weekend sleeping late, fooling around on the internet, not getting stuff done, and not eating.

This is how I know I’ve settled in.

(Situation-dump here.) Not that my opinion matters, but I feel vaguely like a wuss for not saying anything. In order from easiest to hardest:

Continue reading “Regarding RaceFail ’09″

PEOPLE

Apparently it will be out in April.

’cause if you think pugging Thunder Bluff at peak hours is hard? Try pugging Thunder Bluff at peak hours while smoking pot.

Apparently, that’s harder.

The girl who looks exactly like Mr. K – nickname Princess, age seven, classmate of the tanuki-drawing Zuzu – grabbed my boob today.

I was wearing the blue shirt, and I pointed to my sleeve and asked her, “What is it?” She had already successfully formed the sentence, “It’s a yellow chicken.” Instead of saying, “It’s a blue shirt,” Princess grabbed my boob, then laughed. Why did she do this? I do not know. But apparently it was funny. I skipped her next two turns.

Shortly thereafter, her male classmate, whose nickname is “Cookie” (I gave all these nicknames myself) encouraged Zuzu and Princess to eat him, explaining that he was “a delicious cookie. And metabolic.” Metabolic?

Something I figured out my second or third week of doing this is that “ecchi,” meaning “perverted” or “kinky,” is actually the letter “h” – as in, the first letter in “hentai.” I guess it’s like saying “the f-word.” (I figured this out because the older kids tend to accuse each other of being “h” when we get to that point in the ABC’s.)

Anyway, I called two of my students “h” today.

Ken’ichi had not done his homework, but fortunately, today he showed up ten minutes early! And I was there – waiting. I grabbed him, sat him down at the table, asked him if he had a pencil, made him borrow one from Bonze when he said he didn’t (he lied), and stood over him while he did it. He kept a nonstop monologue of complaints the entire time. Bonze thought this was the most entertaining thing that had ever happened in the history of ever. (Bonze always does his homework and it is always perfect.) Perhaps this will improve Ken’ichi’s behavior in future weeks.

Also today, Mee invited me to go eat lunch with her and her grandmother. Awww, Mee. Since 1) I have less than twenty minutes to eat and get back on Saturdays, and 2) her grandmother looked absolutely horrified by this proposition, I pretended not to understand the invitation and shooed her out. (She told me that they were going to to the ramen place in case I changed my mind about not understanding, but as there are several ramen places nearby, this was not helpful.)

The two Sullen Middle School Girls I have on Fridays, whom I have named Goody Proctor and the Devil, were actually good yesterday. The Devil did her homework for the first time since the-teacher-before-the-teacher-before-last was here! The previous teacher tells me (exasperatedly) that he’d given up even giving them homework; I feel so proud of the Devil now. (Though I think it’s probably that her parents-or-guardians yelled at her – I’ve given her black marks the past few weeks, and I assume someone looks at their grade sheets some point. I mean, the classes aren’t free.)

Goody Proctor does her homework about half the time, but yesterday she hadn’t, so I made her do it while the Devil and I played a card game. And the Devil actually played the game with me and formed sentences with the words I gave her and everything! Without throwing the cards! This is unprecedented!

Their concentration wasn’t perfect – they kept interrupting to complain about stuff or ask me how to say weird things (What do you call blond hair? Can you say “yellow hair,” or is that weird? Why do you guys want to know this? How do you say “I’m going to throw up?”), but they were at least talking. I really hope that this isn’t a one-time occurrence.

(Part of the sullen middle schoolers’ problem is that they don’t sleep at night. Goody Proctor’s worse than most, and her only real Disciplinary Issue (beyond aiding and abetting the Devil) is her habit of trying to nap during class. Her mom doesn’t come and get her until fifteen or twenty minutes after we finish up, and she always goes out in the front area and sleeps on the couch.)

I guess that the Monkey King is based on Hanuman? They are both magical monkeys who can jump hundreds of miles and have monkey armies, so I’m assuming it’s not a coincidence.

and got myself all worked up about something tangential:

For a guy who claims that video games can never be “high art”, Ebert seems to have a pretty high opinion of a film that owes a lot to 2D game visual conventions. It’s a good movie, but it’s not “astonishingly original.” He’d have a better idea what he was looking at if he’d ever played a video game.

(Don’t click on that first link if you’re a gamer, it’ll just raise your blood pressure.)

1. Blue is quitting, so it’ll just be Miss Minnow and Spaztastic together. This is going to be fantastic.

2. I was cleaning up for Ken’ichi’s class, while two of his classmates who had shown up early, Bonze and Jerkface, fooled around with the toys. Bonze, looking out the window, said, “Ken’ichi’s here, but he’s not coming up…”

Jerkface looked out, too. “Huh? Oh, he’s doing his homework in the car.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t finish it. KEN’ICHI!

3. I now have the worst cold in the universe. Thanks, parents who bring their kids in sick!