ENTRY 29

Honesty in Evaluation

1月18日 (月ー火) 12:17pm JST

Tomorrow, people from other schools will come to evaluate how things are done here at F* High. This has naturally created a certain level of panic amongst the teachers.

We’ve had countless meetings, extending back to before the winter break, about how to teach debate to the 11th graders. I really like the 11th grade class with an English-focus. They’re decent with English, I guess, but it’s Japan, so they’re not great. Each of the students has a personality, and they’re different enough to make a one-season Japanese drama about it. There’s the fat kid, the energetic kid, the pale kid, the sky kid— what else do you need?

Anyhow, we’ve had three days in a row of special lessons because of this evaluation thing, and more are in the queue because of another scheduled visit.

It all seems kind of dishonest to me. When I was a kid, my mom would always tell us to clean the house before relatives came over for a visit. I thought it was deceptive of us not to show our lives for what they are and to try to put a freshly vacuumed gloss on everything. “So what if the house is a mess? It’s an honest mess!”

Now though, I wonder I haven’t become my mother about keeping up appearances. Especially as it relates to family, you feel you owe them a better life than you have— because they gave up so much to create your life, you want it to seem worth it all.

1月19日 (火ー水) 12:31pm JST

The class went really smoothly. And I felt reasonably good about it. Until I had to go to an hour plus meeting of Japanese teachers, in which the only parts of the meeting made comprehensible to T--- and me were the parts in which we were berated.

At first, I tried to amuse myself by taking phony notes:

• Groceries?
  • Bread
  • Milk
  • &c.
• How many kanji can I think of?
  • 家
  • 週
  • &c.
• &c.

Eventually however, I had to pay attention, since we native speakers were being directly criticized in our own language. As it turns out, I’m not loud enough nor Glossary/{{genki}} enough, and I don’t interact with the students. (Never mind that this was a textbook debate of the sort they had done three times in a row.)

All this combined with my not drinking Coke at lunch put me off my game when it came time to teach later. I’ll admit that I wasn’t on point that day, but T-sensei hardly helps with her wishy-washy style. Some teachers take charge. Some teachers defer. She hedges. And we didn’t plan the lesson out beforehand. So, it was a really bad combination of things.

Before my next class, I got a warm can of café au lait out of a vending machine, but since K-sensei’s plan for the communications class involved students writing silently at their desks, my newfound energy wasn’t particularly useful.

Anyhow, the moral is: School is for chumps.