The Mystery of the Vanishing Saturday
10月14日 (木) 10:08am JST
Ah, the endless mystery of S-sensei.
This week’s clues:
- She’s only been at the Deaf School for two and half years.
- Her grandfather was a doctor during the war.
- She doesn’t let her daughter watch a drama set in the Meiji era, since it’s inaccurate.
- Her father was a famous—and rich!—dentist.
Hmm, her teeth are unusually straight for a Japanese…
So, I finally taught the lesson I was born to teach. Years ago, my roommate and I got some worn out menus from Waffle House that were about to be replaced. We basically just kept these in our bathrooms as supplemental reading material, until I brought them here. Since then, I’ve been waiting to do a lesson based around them. I even brought a paper WaHo hat, just to fill out the ensemblé for the waiter.
The lesson itself was simple. They just went through a script and filled in the blanks with things from the menu that looked interesting to them. My girlfriend did suggest that the script contain a section where the waiter complains about her two barefoot kids and deadbeat husband, but it worked well enough without it.
One of the kids seemed to slow down the lessons, but there’s not much I can do about it. Well, besides making him drink S-sensei’s secret stash of liver-rotting energy drinks…
10月15日 (木ー金) 12:35am JST
Since the students have school on Saturday for exams, we don’t have school today. However, since today isn’t a national holiday, I had a chance to deal with bureaucratic functions that I had been putting off. I went to the Immigration Office in Toyama (on the second floor of a nondescript building and labeled only in kanji “Nagoya-something-Toyama-something-country-something” which can easily throw even the best Japanese scholars off the trail with its initial mention of a city hundreds of kilometers distant…) to get a re-entry permit. I also went to the post office to mail a box full of aluminum cans.
I cleaned up around the apartment some. Vacuumed, did laundry. I was supposed to make a listening quiz for the students’ exam but made little progress. I’ll work on it more tomorrow (I tell myself) when I’ll have access to teachers.
It’s hard to know what level to pitch an exam at. Maybe slightly easier than the book, so they have a chance to get it in two listens? I dunno, hard to say. I wonder when T--- comes back from America. Or if they want me to work on Saturday…
10月16日 (金ー土) 12:48am JST
T--- was back at work today. She appeared at the train station at our usual time, but our train was running late for some reason. We ended up sardine packed on a train far too small for unusually large crowd.
I had to revise my test in progress when it became clear how different it was from the last midterm. I listened to the tape of my predecessor and heard that I needed to chop it into smaller pieces. Writing the test took most of the day, but I don’t have normal classes because of exams.
Since I took Thursday off, I am expected to come to school tomorrow— even though I will have nothing to do. It’s so evil of them. I can only imagine Japanese high school teachers enjoy hanging out at school, since they end up spending their whole lives there. I, however, have much less attachment to secondary education and would prefer to spend my time in more erudite surroundings.
That said, it’s unclear that being at school is really that much worse than being at home. I’ve become a bit of a recluse socially. After work, it’s just my PowerBook and I, adrift in the world…
Same as ever, really.
10月18日 (日ー月) 12:01am JST
Working on Saturday sucked all the weekend-ness out of the weekend. Of course, there was no work to do Saturday, just like there will be no work to do tomorrow, while exams continue.
I’ve been feeling in a funk the last few days, and I ended up anomalously sleeping from around six to ten Saturday afternoon. My sleep patterns were messed up, but I managed to wake up Sunday morning and try the Japanese church on my block. On the one hand, I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, just to try it out. On the other hand, I’m white, which inevitably creates a fuss of the sort that I extremely dislike. Nothing’s better than knowing you messed up your grammar and still getting “上手ですね.” Lies, lies.
I did understand the gist of the sermon, when I paid attention, but it was pretty long, so I started drifting near the end. I do like the rhythm of Japanese hymns. I also managed to add a lot of useful, everyday words to my vocab like, “sin,” “the cross,” “thanksgiving,” “chapter,” “verse,” and 方々 (hôbô which I always knew sounded like a Japanese word). All in all, not the worst sermon I’ve heard, but not the best either. I like all the regional changes, the Great Hanshin Earthquake to illustrate our lack of preparation for unpleasant things, 四 and 九 to show our avoidance of the idea of suffering, (just like teriyaki burger, I guess) and how it was mixed in with the usual “my daughter doesn’t like to do her homework” examples…
10月19日 (月ー火) 12:39am JST
It’s official: I’m expected to start grading exams tomorrow. Suck.
I started playing “Mario Sunshine” this weekend, and I’m at about 47 shines already. Some levels are just ridiculously intense. Also, I’m purposefully avoiding all blue coins and restarting if I accidentally get one. I’ve never managed to get them all before (though I’ve gotten all the other shines), and I think it might be easier to collect them all at once with a checklist in hand. It’s a theory at least.
I wrote my sister a postcard in exchange for the one she sent me. Our theme is “stuff we haven’t personally seen.”
It’s funny how for things like Mario, one can summon up endless patience (or nearly so), but for things like writing letters, diary entries, and working on grad school apps, all the procrastination in the world isn’t enough. Human nature, I suppose. Like neglecting one’s earthquake kit or avoiding 四 and 九.
10月20日 (火ー水) 12:45am JST
Exams are even more tedious than I imagined. Each homeroom has about forty kids, and it takes more than an hour to grade their essays. So far, I’ve graded four homerooms (three at school, one at home), and I still have one left. Of course, this is just the 10<sup>th</sup> graders. I also have two sections of 11<sup>th</sup> graders’ tests, which I haven’t looked at yet and I don’t know how long they will take. And I also have to plan a class tomorrow, but that’s no big deal.
Each essay is graded on a scale from 1 to 15, but the grades are fairly arbitrary. Pretty much every paper has several errors of idiom, if not of basic grammar. So, the system I’ve worked out over time comes to + length compared to the target number of word - spelling - capitalization - really, really bad grammar ± my mood. The process is fairly random.
Their topic was, “Is it necessary for Japanese people to learn English?” and most of the answers were genetic permutations made by crossing the same set of source sentences with randomly mutated with mis-spellings and mis-Capitalizations and mis-grammars. Some of them tried to parrot the listening section I made for the test a couple days ago. However, I don’t think parrots are sophisticated enough to butcher grammar in addition to pronunciation.
So far, the best arguments have been, “we lose the world war II” hence we study English and the kid who said he had two points, first point, “I won’t need English in the future.” After this, he stopped writing— fulfilling his prophecy!
10月21日 (水ー木) 12:56am JST
Thinking in the shower, I realized that S-sensei is the only English-sensei whose first name I know. (Or last name, depending on your perspective.) She’s “friendly child.”
Of course, all this is neither here nor there, since I didn’t have Deaf School today. I’m going Friday for the school’s anniversary.
Instead, I was slogging through exams in the teacher’s private tatami room, when M-sensei burst in to tell me that I was missing class. I had thought that the class was after lunch, but apparently, the schedule was extra-especially screwed up, besides the fact that they moved my Friday class to Wednesday.
Grr. Poor communication. Grr. Poor preparation. Grr. Partly my fault. Grr.
Now, yet another typhoon is doing its thing outside. This is definitely the worst one yet and even made the lights flicker. After work, we managed to Japanese-guilt N-sensei into driving us to the train station in the pouring wind and rain (or fuuu 風雨). T---‘s umbrella managed to get mangled in the winds.
I finished the last of the exams today and can now attest to the popularity of Hirai Ken, Mr. Children, SMAP, and the Beatles among Japanese experience from extensive research. (AKA the essay topic was name your favorite song.)
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