Memoirs of a School Teacher

I just wanted to share a few interesting things about the first few days of my life as a bona fide teacher. Up until now, I've been going to the beach, wandering around my town aimlessly, finding some really good bars/restaurants to go to, and spending hours sitting naked in my apartment in wanton abandon because its simply too hot for clothes.

On my first day, I pretty much had nothing to do at work, so I busied myself with learning some Japanese, checking the latest soccer reports, keeping up with the U.S. Open, etc.. The entire day was pretty much uneventful. One thing that blew my mind was that after 6th period, a gong went off, and the entire staff room cleared. "Where is everyone going," I thought, as I followed the mass exodus, and I was stunned to see the entire school, students, faculty, administration, principal and vice principal, collecting brooms and rags from closets in the hallway. Apparently, mostly everyday there is designated clean-up time, and no one is exempt. I thought to myself how you would never see this at a school back home. I thought about how lazy we are, and how responsible these young kids must be to live in a place where everyone contributes. Don't be fooled like I was, although they do set aside a regemented time slot for cleaning, there usually isn't much cleaning going on. It was more like standing around with brooms and occasionaly sweeping some dust from one side of the hall to the other, while chit-chatting with the students, but I still think the idea is what counts.

As a side note, I've also noticed that all the soccer fields I've played happen to be of the dirt/sand hybrid types, and at the end of each practice, all the players grab these rake-like tools and cover the entire field, leaving not even a cleat mark as a reminder that somone once played there. Again, I believe this sort of conscientousness would go a long way in America, if we ever had the discipline and the will to do so.

My First Assignment

I've been given several semi-important tasks, but the one I want to share is very special. I was given a stack of 400 essays written by every 2nd and 3rd year student entitled "My Memories of Summer Vacation." Let me pause here so you can reflect on how riveting of an experience it was for me. The English was decent, but there were a few gems in here that I would like to share. The first was an essay written by a young man, and they're all pretty much one page but sometimes there are a few more
sentences on the back.

One student was describing his experience when tasting shaved ice, and at the end of the first page, the student wrote, "The shaved ice was terribly....." As I turned the page over, I read, "dericious!" So the complete sentence read, "The shaved ice was terribly dericious." Say it once in your head to let it soak in. Its not the fact that he replaced the L with an R. Its the fact that he used two completely
contrasting words to describe his reaction to tasting the shaved ice. I was completely expecting it to be terribly awful, or terribly cold, but terribly dericious completely caught me by surprise. I laughed out loud when I read it, and I can only hope my supervisor sitting next to me doesn't think I'm making fun of some of the student's terribly humorous command of English.

I've also noticed that the Japanese curriculum employs many aggressive fighting words when describing certain activites. I'm convinced whoever's in charge of planning how the students are taught English is an ex-warlord. I've heard from colleagues about how students always want "English power", or about how they
have to "overcome the opponent." For instance, another student's essay was describing a tennis match with someone from a rival school. I couldn't find the essay when I went back to look for it, but it pretty much went as follows...

"He was mighty and strong.
I could not overcome his tennis power.
I will train very hard so that I can conquer the fierce opponent next time."

The last essay I'm referencing was both my favorite, and the one that made me a little weary. This student went with his/her family during Obon (Japanese holiday) to the Nagasaki peace park. For those of you who may be unaware, its the site of where the U.S. deployed Fat Man, thus killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, and ultimately forcing the Japanese to surrender WWII. The following excerpt is taken verbatim from the essay I was grading:

"Peace park moved me more than anything else.
Many people were killed in the atom.
I looked picture and it felt said.
I found it that war is very afraid.
I can't forgive they who dropped a atom."

The last line is a little eerie don't you think? Should I be afraid that this student is planning a hostile takeover of the classroom one day, demanding my life in order to avenge the deaths of the hundreds of thousands of souls that perished on that terrible day? Maybe not, but I do think that people back home don't think too often about what we actually did.

At our official contract signing ceremony in the capitol of the prefecture, it was coincidentally the anniversary of the day that we dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima. To honor those fallen, we had to stand for 1 minute and reflect in complete
silence. As I stood there thinking about the things you think about when recognizing a moment of silence, an airhorn started up in the distance. After a few seconds, it grew into a howl, and I'm not sure if it was the same for everyone, but an image flashed into my mind of thousands of people hearing the same thing I was hearing, waiting for what should've been a normal airstrike, one bomb going off
somewhere in the distance, with many more sure to follow. If you were prepared, you had a good chance of surviving. This time however, there would've been only a single flash of bright light, and everything within sight would've disappeared as if it had never existed in the first place.

Just as quickly, the flashback was erased from my mind as I was brought back to reality when the airhorn faded out, and the minute was over. The ceremony commenced, and afterwords we had a nice meal at a nearby French restaurant, and took buses back to our respective towns. I just hope that the young student who wrote that essay doesn't hold anything against me.