Since knowledge rests on weekends, we must look elsewhere. Further afield, as it were. Physics for Future Presidents is a series of lectures given by UC Berkeley physics professor Richard Muller. It’s targeted at non-physicists and covers some fascinating ground, particularly if you never really did any of the science that explains why that happens like that instead of like this. Check the one on nukes. Still hungry for knowledge? Well there’s about 100 hours of Google Techtalks to wade through. Let me know if you find anything good.

Posted in Schooled on Tuesday January 9, 2007. Shoutouts.

The very best part of having two trainee student teachers and an absent coworker is that rather than have a friendly ratio of two teachers to twenty students, you can combine the classes and suddenly be rolling with five teachers to forty students. Now that’s quality education. The payoff comes when you walk into class, and all four Japanese teachers retreat directly to the back, where they’ll stay for the remainder of the lesson, leaving you blinking frantically at the front. Rabbit in the spotlight. 88 eyes and nowhere to run. Sometimes, I feel like bringing a torch to class, shining it on my face, and stumbling through the desks yelling “Josh! Josh! Tell me where you are!”

Posted in Schooled on Thursday June 29, 2006. Shoutouts.

A treatise on why Uwe Boll should be fired, and my students appointed to think of plots for fantasy movies in his stead:

At the court of an Emperor (he lived it matters not when) there was among the many gentlewomen of the wardrobe and chamber, one who thought she was favored for beyond all the rest.

Posted in Schooled on Wednesday June 21, 2006. Shoutouts.

“And what is “sweat” in Japanese?”

There is the kind of silence you only hear upon asking a class of Japanese students to volunteer information. It is a thick, oppressive silence and it lingers with ferocity. My coworker decides that this single sentence is quite enough English for the day, and switches back to Japanese.

“Sweat, sweat, so how do you say sweat?”
There is another extended silence and I fight the urge to say something, anything, to fill it.
“Ase, ne. Ase is sweat in Japanese,” and there is a five second pause while the students digest this new information.
“What” one of them exclaims, “You mean Pocari Sweat actually means the sweat of a Pocari?”
“What’s a Pocari?” another chimes in.
“That’s disgusting. Why would you call any drink something’s sweat?” and the class explodes into chatter as they discuss how retarded this all is. What kind of an idiot would. Who in their right mind would. Why the hell would…

“Often, when foreigners first come to Japan, they are surprised by this drink” I say, “the name is very strange. Why would you want to drink sweat?”

Suddenly my JTE gets a gleam in his eye. I have seen this gleam only twice: the first was when I suggested feeding the students Vegemite (subsequent to that class, he had a specific vocab lesson where he taught them the words “torture” and “torturer”) and the second time whilst extolling the virtues of a Japanese diet (“I, ano ne, I think Japanese diet much better than Western, ne. Eat a lot of healthina foods. Do you know natto? Very good for you, I think. Let’s asking students which Western foods is bad for health.”) Oh fuck, I thought, here we go.

“Do you know Calpis” he says to the class and they stop their show of mock gagging about the idea of drinking sweat, and listen. “If you say Calpis in English, it sounds like “Cow Piss” which means the urine of a cow. So if you ask a foreigner if they want a drink of Calpis, maybe they will think…” There is a stunned silence which stretches slowly into an uncomfortable one. One of the students at the back finally looks up from her ketai.

“I’m never drinking Pocari Sweat or Calpis again. Never.”

Posted in Schooled on Tuesday June 6, 2006. Shoutouts.

The trials and tribulations of marking, spring midterm edition.

Part one, the good:

She is very fun and kind and cute. But she doesn’t have eyebrows. It is the same as me! But we do not care. We have no worries. Not eyebrows are charming feature!

Part two, the “I’m bad”:

I played truant soccer practice! I did a very bad thing. I was very bad human. But, in the afternoon I decided I practice soccer only me.

And part three, the incomprehensibly ugly:

They kill suffering the person who is killed. How to kill of them shows the person who is killed and it finishes. Person of who is killed is gone to hell. On some boat.

Posted in Schooled on Wednesday May 24, 2006. Shoutouts [2].

A month back, whilst on Kyushu, we stayed a hostel in Kagoshima run by the very lovely Mr Nakazono who had a particular way of intermingling English and Japanese in a funky mash-up that was as confusing as it was hilarious. I just realised one of my teachers has started to do the same thing:

You たちは “that one” を推測する. Ok, ですか? There are only 九つですね. So it should be かんたん for you. Easy for you. 宜しいですか?

How should I go about stopping the language creep?

Posted in Schooled on Wednesday May 17, 2006. Shoutouts.

I don’t know which of the following is more disturbing. One, that following the big “let’s kick off the new school year with 3 hours of booze” enkai the teachers turned, en masse, to Dave and I and asked, “Okay team DD, where is the nearest bar.” Two, that after a mere thirty seconds consideration, we were able to think of a bar capable of seating 30 people, no mean feat in Japan, within five minutes walking distance of the huge hotel in which the enkai had been held. Or that three, upon rocking up at said bar, the bartender remembered me, even though the last time I’d been there was about two years ago. It was significantly quieter this time around, no live Jazz and, sadly, no tiny vocal bombshells either. There were plenty of sofas, however, and an extensive menu and this was a good thing. Now I just have to wait until Monday and see how the Enkai “reset switch” comes into play. More about that another day.

Posted in Schooled on Sunday April 23, 2006. Shoutouts.

Every year, a bewilderingly large number of staff are transferred from school to school across Hyogo prefecture. There doesn’t seem to be an enormous amount of reason or logic behind the transfers and, indeed, a large number of them appear to be entirely arbitrary. This year at my base school, both the principal and veep were shipped off to different workplaces, along with three of the English department and a smattering of other teachers, amongst them my supervisor of three years.

She had been at the school from more than ten years, lived nearby, and had three young children attending schools in the area, including one at a nearby preschool. The Board of Education gave her two weeks notice and transferred her to a school almost fifty minutes drive away. Needless to say, she was less than impressed. I would be curious to see the logic behind making a transfer like that, particularly when it would appear that it benefits neither the students, or either of the two schools.

As far as I’m concerned, the transfers have little effect on my job. Occasionally it can mean a new face to teach with, or having to say goodbye to a coworker, but as my contract fixes me to one place it doesn’t concern me overly. With one notable exception.

The amusement factor kicks in when I rock up at my second school, where I teach once a week, and find that most of the staff I knew have been moved elsewhere. This signals a half hour of intense panic amongst the office staff while, “oh god, he works here? why did no one tell me? do we have a desk? what about there? quick, stick a label on it and get rid of them. No, the boxes. Get rid of the boxes. Under there. Throw everything in that drawer.”

So, now, rather than Daniel Woods, I am “ALT” printed neatly on a sticker of a whale and stuck to my desk. In my drawer, I find a folder of neatly photocopied British one pound notes, each meticulously labeled “Jem’s funny money. Oct ‘94.” I wonder if Jem got a whale sticker too.

Posted in Schooled on Monday April 17, 2006. Shoutouts [2].

A teacher is screaming at kid in the hall. He sounds tense and angry. The kid shouts back a few times, then gives up. Slams a locker door and runs off. I can hear the click of heels retreating down the stairs. The teacher throws open the door to the staff room and storms in. Once he’s out of sight of the hall he shuts the door quietly and laughs a full chesty laugh. “I can’t believe them.” The other teachers laugh with him.

Facades.

Posted in Schooled on Monday February 20, 2006. Shoutouts.

I was talking with one of my students about snow sports the other day and he said he’d been terrified of skiing ever since he was a junior high school student. He’d gone on a big ski-trip with his school, his first time on the snow. After they had strapped in, they put all the kids on the lift up to the top of the beginner slope. In Japan, a lot of the instructors for beginners are either Canadians or Kiwis who work the slopes while it’s summer or off-season in their own countries. So this kid has jumped on the lift, ridden to the top and then stacked it as soon as he’s got to the top and fallen in front of where everyone is getting off. This huge gaijin guy comes running towards him and starts yelling “STAND UP! STAND UP! STAND UP!” and the kid totally freaks out and tries to run away, except he’s wearing skis and lying on the ice and all he ends up doing is falling over again and cracking his head. He’s lying there stunned and the gaijin is trying to get them to stop the lift and meanwhile every other student is piling off the lift and falling straight on top of him.

He said he hadn’t been skiing since.

The best part of the whole story was when he did the “stand up” part, he was yelling and actually put on a very convincing Canadian accent and threw his arms around in the air. Coming from a student who had ten minutes previously asked me how to spell “May” and still hasn’t quite worked out the names of the days of the week in English, this surprised me a little. Great story though.

Posted in Schooled on Wednesday February 1, 2006. Shoutouts.