And next, a fresh young talent just in from NY...

Word.
Things I have done in preperation for next Sunday include:

Record and broadcast announcements over the radio, in English and Japanese.
Written an extensive biography of myself to put in the newsletter of the group hosting the event.

Things I have not yet done in preperation for next Sunday include:

Pick out what I'm going to wear
Plan out, write, or in fact even decide upon a topic for my 30 minute speech and presentation.

Anybody got any suggestions?
It's got to be interactive, crowd inclusive and things. Areas of my expertise include the X-Men, the History of Rock and Roll, and trying to pick up girls. Skills include rudimentary ukulele playing, an area of funny voices, and classroom leadership capabilities. Little help?

a clown, a friend, a princess

An inconvenience to the plans I had had for the last hour of school today—these being to search for and copy down ukulele tablature on the internet while abstractly contemplating tomorrow’s lessons at elementary school—I have been asked if I would like to go to a meeting being held by the principle of another school. Which means, "There’s a meeting at 3:00. It’s in Japanese. You are expected to attend. It ends half an hour after you are supposed to go home." Boo! But then they told me there will be tea and sweet cakes. Hooray!

***

It's tonight, I've eaten and am going soon to sweet sweet bed. I left work an hour and fifteen minutes after I was supposed to today, not fifteen. The meeting was long, and in Japanese, and at the end of a long day. Did I mention it was in Japanese? In the afternoon when I was asked "if I would like to go" and was feeling somewhat testy about it I tried to counter, saying that if they wanted me to go then I would be happy to, so is that really the question? I made a bigger deal out of it than I should have I suppose; I knew what they meant. I think I was already a bit keyed-up at the teacher who was trying to ask me to go, my handler Matsumoto sensei. He's an infuriatingly poor communicator and very much a buffoon, and talking with him usually puts me into something of a sour mood. He is in fact the first person I have ever known who immediately calls the word, that word, buffoon, into the forefront of your brain from the cobwebbed collection of one-liners from plays and comic books that stays stuffed under the bed where your good ideas sleep at night. The kids play with him, but he is not really a player in their games; a sometime prop, a sometime intrusion, Matsumoto sensei. He's young, it's his first year at the school. Music and art. And because he also has the role of being my special handler (I have one at each of my schools and at the office) he "team-teaches" the third and sixth grades with me. I have been trying to be more communicative more in advance about lesson ideas, reasoning that at this point I should probably just accept that a general intuition will not surface to help him or myself out during class; so yes, I try to up the communication on my end, but it remains difficult. Interestingly enough, it is when comunication becomes really frustrating with people like Matsumoto sensei that I find myself speaking only in English instead of what would be obviously more helpful, which is speaking in Japanese. It will often be things I know how to say, or at least how to get across with the Japanese I know. But I won't use it. It'll run through my head in Japanese in a little reel, and I will calmly, testily sign-speak in English, ignoring it. "Then we'll play rocks-paper-scissors and the winner gets one of the other guy's play business cards." The minutes go by. I used to not understand the phenominon of why I refuse to speak Japanese in moments like these, but having given it some thought I believe it could be called, "passive-aggressiveness." See? I get it now.

The buffoon Matsumoto sensei is counterpointed by Ide (that's, "ee-day," folks) sensei. Who is wonderful. He's a great friend at that school, and we would see each other outside of school too except that he's a new father and his spare moments are spent lovingly and exhaustingly at home. He speaks English with a great deal of natural expressiveness and feeling. When he talks he's real. Ide sensei came through as my morale hero this afternoon before the meeting, when upon seeing me walk into the room he greets me, double-takes, and says, "wait, are you going to understand any of this?" I give him the enormous, sarcastic, sure-faced nod where YES means HELL NO, and he says, "well, then you shouldn't have to be here!" Someone whispers to him that the vice principal told me to come, and he starts to walk out of the room to find the principle so she can excuse me, but I had figured out by then that the real reason I was there was so that our principal could show me off to the other principal who was visiting for the meeting, so I told him not to worry about it. Honestly though, the fact that he not only noticed that something was amiss about my being there but then went to access the Heirarchy and try to FIX it make it all feel OK. He's a real one, that Ide sensei. No robot there; he notices things, he's real.

And then of course there's Yuriko. Whoops! I mean "Kimura sensei." She's the PE teacher, although you could also correctly identify her as THE FUN, AWESOME TEACHER I'M HAVING A SECRET AFFAIR WITH!!!!! Not affair as in married woman affair, don't worry. Affair as in kind of a relationship but not really a relationship relationship. A romantic project let's say, to steal (not coin) a good term. Yuriko is pretty great, and we like each other; it's cuddly and kind of sweet and pretty darn nice. Like, genuine likeage going on for us. And the school we're at together isn't the one that's right in my neighborhood, so we don't have to hide hide hide in the mornings from the schoolkids that live in my building. One interesting factor in our current happy involvement is that Yuriko is moving to Kyoto as of April 1st (unless she's fooling, har har har), so it's not such a big invested kind of thing. Sure it's sad, but maybe also kind of perfect. We like each other, but there's no real need to think very far outside the boundaries of, "when's our next date?" Also, it leaves me mostly guilt-free about pursuing other concurrent romantic projects; not that I'm going to end up dating more than one girl at the same time (I should be so lucky, nu?), but I can keep myself feeling—and more importantly and truthfully, seeming—like I'm available; after all, the impending truth of actual availability is only about six weeks away. Hmm. Bittersweet, this one ... well, more happy than that. Semisweet? And speaking of, Happy Valentines Day.

The History of Love

I have just finished one of the best books I've read in a long time, the best in a way which most other best books I've ever read aren't able to be. The History of Love is a complex, touching, and wonderful read. Go buy it. Go read it. I chewed through it over the last three days, at first totally unable to put it down, but quick to discover that whenever I DID manage to rest on it for a while my minutes and my hours became occupied richly and warmly by pictures, conversations and stories from the people whom I had met in the few moments that seemed ages ago when I'd lived a lifetime between the covers of this wonderful book. Go, buy it, read it!

What time is it Mr. Wolf?

It is far, far too late at night for me to be up. Napped this afternoon instead of doing my prepwork for tomorrow, which means I needed to do it tonight. Of course, I procrasinated tonight instead of doing it promptly after conversation class ended, so that's that. Procrastination tonight came by way of making mushroomy miso nabe and reading about Bengla, Freeze Drying and Japanese Language in the Wikipedia. It is some supreme awesomeness indeed, that Wikipedia. If you have no idea what the heck I'm talking about, follow the link to global enlightenment. I modified an entry yesterday on one of its sister project sites, the Wiktionary. In the Simple English subset of the Wiktionary, the entry for "Honey" had previously read:

A sweet liquid made from bees. It is usually golden or brown.

By bees. Honey is made by bees. The sweet liquid that's made from bees is known I belive as Trader Joe's Sticky Awful Mexicano Death Juice. Honey is made by bees.

Reconfronting my pile of prep work for tomorrow was not so bad, except for having left it till about midnight to dig into. But it's been mostly a fun night since then (although so, so tired). First I had to make a game board for my 3rd and 4th graders to use for a time-telling game I'd come up with: the board is a long, half-height sheet of paper with 24 clock faces on it, and by rolling a D6 with its sides marked either +3 or -2, you and the other kids you're playing with move one game piece from midnight of one day to midnight of the next. The difference is that you start on midnight the day before the full moon, and you FINISH on midnight of the full moon itself, whereupon you turn instantly into a werewolf, howl into the night sky, and chase the other kids to the blackboard. Also, you have to ask each other "what time is it?" and answer "it's blahblahblah" when you roll the die. I had a lot of fun drawing my game board; it's all spooky and grim on the midnights and all sunny and cheerful in the middle, with transitions from black clouds to grey clouds to puffy friendly white ones and then back down to black again; pine trees become flowers become headstones; bats become birds become bats; rocks become dirt becomes grass become dirt becomes skeletons. I think it should go over great. Also your gamepiece starts out as a smiling handsome dude until you flip it over on Midnight and he changes into what is, if I may say so, a crazy flipped out awesome scary werewolf man. I'm pretty excited for this one. I'll try to scan some pictures of the stuff I make to post up soon. Of course speaking of time I remember that I'm completely short on it. to bed~

Teach Your Children Well

So a class's teacher makes a big difference in how genki or how crappily difficult the kids are. Surprising, huh? I guess we all remember having crappy teachers: the burn-outs, the block-heads, the dead-zones, the tyrants, the basketcases, the buffoons, the pushovers. It takes all kinds I guess. But classes are pretty closed systems in general, and you really only think about 'you the students' and--or versus--him or her the teacher. In my job now I'm a visitor and come-again assistant teacher to about forty-five different classes across five schools, and I see classes with very different kinds of character and a lot of different kinds of teachers at their helms. I can't complain; I make out pretty well in general, and most of the school-related folks here are pretty great to teach with. They seem for the most part a real fondness for their jobs, and despite being worked for rediculous hours and forced into the schizophrenic heirarchicies and compromises of any Japanese bureacracy, they seem to have a lot of job satisfaction and they're all really dedicated to their kids.

Teaching works very differently here; a teacher is often seen as one of a child's primary caregivers, on par with and sometimes above a child's parents. I met a teacher at a conference recently (this is it must be said a whole nother story ... "there's nothing more romantic than a doomed romance," my sister tells me) who was called back to her hometown across the prefecture because a boy in her school--not even in her class, but in a differet homeroom in her grade--had been caught trying to shoplift manga (had been caught, to be specific, trying to shoplift an enormous sachel of 142 seperate paperbacks, of all the idiot reasons for the universe to find to deny me a chance at new love), and she as well as all the other teachers in the grade had to be in school to receive him when the police turned him over to his own homeroom teacher, who was the first one they notified after his detainment; it was up to the teacher to then inform the parents. There's a lot of shit like this here; I'm told that hospital patients might not be told about severe or even terminal conditions, but that their families or teachers will be told instead. Scary to think.

Today I'm at Hidaka Sho, with the ichinensei--meaning first graders--whom I think I completely and unconditionally love. They are so cute and wonderful. Their teachers, on the other hand, can make things difficult. There are three different teachers for the ichinensei at this school, one for each class. The first is young, the next middle aged, the third a bit on the older side (this is like witches in Shakespeare, neh?), and each is very different from the other two.

The young one, Michi, I had a crush on for a while and we kind of dated for a bit, wayyyyyy back when I'd more or less just started out here. She speaks a decent amount of English and although not a great kisser, she was kind of fun. But she's just so scatterbrained and not-with-it in the classroom that my crush totally evaporated after only a few times of teaching with her. As of this writing I've just gotten done her class, and while I really like the kids I can never help feeling like their lack of general intuition and charisma is actually her general lack of intuition and charisma; it's like she's infected them with some mild form of idiocy. I know it's not at all so cut and dry: it's hard being a teacher, and the little little ones can run you pretty ragged. Also, groups of kids do acquire a kind of natural character to them like any other ghestalt. At Becket there were always the harder or smoother, younger or older, fightier or more creative cabins; sometimes my kids were the same age as another cabin but so much less far along emotionally and rationally that they might have been years younger. It just means that within your group stuff you have to work things out to their best interest, at and just beyond their level so you can all get the most out of everything and so your activities and games can help them grow a bit.

Now, this natural character business all understood, it becomes slightly dissapointing with first graders. These kids are like 6. Maybe 5. They really reeeeally want to have fun with you. They want to have pretty much whatever kind of fun you look like you want to have with them. Like, you know what can constitute ten minutes of seriously exhiliating playtime with first graders? Jumping. That's right: Jumping! You hold their hand and you jump! And they jump. And you jump! And they jump. And you pretendtojump! And they jump. And then everybody screams with delight and surprise. It's like, they're perfect. Today when things didn't go terribly well with activities it just felt like the other teacher in the class, Michi, was the only one not on board with the "let's all have fun" program that I felt I had tacitly outlined at the beginning of the lesson by bringing a ukulele and colored magnets into the room with me and tickling the kids as I went around to say hello to them. And it's just like, Try. Please try. Just stay with us. The activities aren't difficult. It's essentially, "repeat after me and we'll sing a song and look at pictures!" All it would take to work is for you--you're the ACTUAL teacher remember, I'm the ASSISTANT teacher--for you to put in a normal application of normal teachery stuff to make the class run smoothly around the "repeat after Josh, jump up and down" game plan. It's not after all like I speak Japanese. My ability to do the behavior management stuff is incredibly slim, limited mainly to some stern eyebrow raising and several ways of standing with my arms folded that are supposed to convey slightly different degrees of teacherly, stoic exasperation. Help me out some, lady, huh?

Really the most crucial thing to any of my classes is that there's some energy--mine and the kids' both--that makes things work. I mean I can't speak Japanese and they can't speak English, so the only option is pretty much to try to have some fun together and orient it around using English words and phrases and to avoid translating them so that the kids don't just think in Japanese the whole time. At first grade especially, anything ESL revolves around energy, intuition, some charity and a lot of kindness, and honestly very little else. In today's class with Michi the only thing I really needed was some linguistic teamwork and energy, and instead she managed to manifest the ability to disperse every watt of energy we could try to build up and work with. It was nearly impossible to retain the kids' attention and interest. And it just shouldn't be that hard. Intuit a bit for goodness sakes. Look:

We warm up every class--and I mean every class, every school, but also every class I've taught with you--with the same series of big cartooney faces that represent tiered answers to the all important English language opener, "How are you today?" The answers we've practiced are, in order, "I'm great / I'm good / I'm OK / I'm not so good / I'm sick / I'm grumpy (alternately, 'I'm in a bad mood,' depending on the grade level)." Every class. Often we'll do activities with this. Often as in, every class. The littler kids can't get enough of it, and it's great because they practice saying a lot of English sounds in what gets to be a very natural and conversational voice, and it makes them feel really special to communicate with me and with each other (they also really like roaring "I'M GRUMPYYYAAAAA!!!!!" and running after each other, and I always feign fear and cower until they pounce on me and I tickle them and pull on their pigtails). So today we start with the faces on the board and everybody warms up together call-response style, answering me with whatever face's signified I'm holding up in front of the class. Michi has gone to the back of the class. And clicked her brain off. I can see it. Nothing spinning behind the eyes. So we finish the faces, and I try to beckon Michi up to the front.

To be fair, lots of teachers go to the back of the room when it's my turn at the plate. But most of them, or, well many of them anyway stay involved in the class and blanket-monitor the kids and help the ones who get lost or stray out, and they'll help me in Japanese when I flounder. It's usually pretty obvious when I need one of them to come help me. But this time Michi has spaced out and I have to super super beckon her up. "Eh, atashi?" "Huh, me," she asks from the back of the room. Well, yes, yes you. First of all I'm beckoning someone exactly where you're standing who's got to be about five and a half feet taller than the tiny munchkin children over whose heads I'm trying to get your attention, and second of all YES YOU, you're the teacher who I'm supposed to be Team-Teaching with. This, is the beginning of the end. Once the kids sense a lack of harmony amongst you the teachers, they snap right out of your spell. It's how it goes with any audience. You break that fourth wall, you lose the magic.

What I want the kids to do is stand up, have the "How are you today" conversation with three other kids and then sit back down for another game. I try to pantomime this and draw it on the board, but they space out a little. Which is fine. They're 5, and I don't speak their language. So I super beckon Michi and drag her to the front and give the pantomime to her, and gesture/say "can you explain that to them?"

"Eh?"

Okay. Let's give it another go. I can feel the spell slipping away from the kids, their eyes clouding over, pencils entering mouths, drool pooling, snot forming. Okay. Let's give it a slightly different go, and with some Japanese: "kids ... talk with ... three people ... this conversation ... three people ... "how are you today" / "I'm blahblahblahblah" ... with three people ... finish and sit back down." Gesture speak: can you tell them to do that? And Michi looks at me and says loudly and clearly the Japanese colloquial, abrupt equivalent of, "I have no idea what you mean."

The spell snaps audibly. Crayons go in noses. One child stand up in his chair and shouts, "it's blue!" Sigh.

Still, it was fun overall. And I really like the "it's blue" kid. He knows his colors, that one! And shortly after the talk-to-three-people game finally got itself underway I gave my ukulele its first classroom debut, which was super exciting for, believe it or not, pretty much everybody. The admittedly lame "How's the Weather" song I'd fabricated (GGGGGGGGGGDCGGGGGGGGGDC...) was not by any means a blue ribbon winning lesson plan, and it too was frustrated by Michi sensei not catching on with the "see, you hold up these cards that have huge pictures of the weather that we've just been practicing with for the last ten minutes and the kids will sing along with 'it's sunny' when they're supposed to. Beleeeeeeive me. just hold them up. three times and then change to 'it's a beautiful day.' PLEASE." Exasperating, but my kids all were singing "it's a beautiful day" pretty accurately by the end of it (that's the GDC ... ooh yeah). Overall very happy-making but I'm not going to strike it back up with Michi. Also, she smelled distinctly of what I believe to be coriander.

Later on today I have the third ichinensei class, with the older of the teachers. She is a peach, and her class might be my favoritest of all favorite things in the entire world. They are just so so so so so so so so cute, and they're fun and lovey and enthusiastic and warm, and I love being in class with them: it always ends up a hundred times more successful and fun than I ever could plan it. Wonderful wonderful wonderful. One little girl has the cutest cheeks that any little girl has ever had ever in the history of human civilization, and it makes her giggle and blush when I pinch her cheeks or nose or tickle her and when she wants to escape she runs towards me and gives me an enormous hug, and is thereby wonderfully and completely safe. Playing with her and the others is almost always the best part of any day I can have. I go play with them honestly every time I come to this school, no matter what. They never get tired of "How are you today?" Never ever ever. They just LOVE us having that little conversation; it almost baffles me. I can say with complete conviction that with one or two exceptions this class of 5 year olds speaks better sounding English than any of my Junior High School students (the exceptions being among the five year olds, not the junior high kids). Their teacher is an incredibly sweet woman, very tender and fun. She's just a peach ... I hadn't ever even wanted to say that about anybody till I got to know her. A peach. Every single time I see her, even multiple times within a given day at this school, she tells me something nice about myself. From how well chosen my tie was to how she thinks my cowboy shirt makes me look very handsome and I'm always such a snappy dresser, to she's so impressed by my Japanese, to how fun my lesson was, or how good my drawing is, and on and on and on. And she's always so genuinely happy when I come to play with her class. It's like, Why am I not always around you and your love-inspiringly cute children? She's just a peach. I'm sure that part of her class's general wonderfulness is her fine example; she's just so kind to them and everyone else, and she's really supportive and patient and strong. It's nothing saccharine, it's totally a gentle strength this woman has. Of course hers is the class that's going to be patient and happy and kind and loving towards me (also, if you were in a class full of kids that cute, how could you not be wonderful towards everything in the world?). What a great class. For them I can't WAIT to pull out the ukulele for the weather song. So much love to ensue.