June 23, 2011
some of my daily notes from January to March, when I neglected this blog (which I do not regret)
I am an elementary school English teacher in a town called Okegawa in Japan. My students are pretty interesting people and they always have a lot to say about things. Some people might say my methods are “unorthodox”, but I do not think so. I try not to think too much in general.
January 11th
Today I taught my fourth graders how to jump over sweep kicks. This is not directly related to learning the English language but it’s still very important, because what if they were to get sweep kicked and they didn’t jump in time and they fell? What if they hit their heads and could no longer speak or read? Then what good would all that English language education be? I’m sure you can see where I’m coming from.
I really think they should be learning these things at home but clearly they are not. They are terrible at it. So even if their parents leave them unprepared for sweep kicks, I will not. I will make sure they are ready. Ready to jump. I guess I just love too much. My therapist says that’s my problem. He says my biggest problems are 1) loving too much and 2) excessive martial arts skills. I guess that’s just my cross to bear.
January 16th
A kid asks: “So your real first name is Christopher, but everyone calls you Chris?”
“Yes. It’s a shorter version. My parents call me Chris, too.”
“Christopher is too hard to remember.”
“I guess it’s a little hard to remember.”
“You should just go by ‘Foreigner’. It will be easier for everyone.”
“That’s the name of a famous band. You should Google it.”
“What’s a Google?”
January 18th
I am pretty strong compared to a 4th grader. I lift up one of their little desks with one hand and they gasp and then cheer. They ask me if I am the strongest man in the world, and I tell them yes, it is me, I am the strongest. So then we begin the process of lifting things. First it is desks, then bigger desks. Then cabinets. Children next, from smallest to biggest. At pianos I start to struggle but I am careful not to make a face like I’m struggling. That would break the illusion. I am not at all muscular.
Recently on a date a girl asked me to flex my bicep for her, and I did it and she couldn’t tell that I’d done it and she laughed. Then she flexed, and I must say she had pretty killer guns. My muscles are dwarfed by the muscles of 90-pound Japanese girls. But when the 4th graders ask me to flex, they gasp in unison and talk about how it’s true, they have visual confirmation now, I am in fact the strongest man in the world.
Sometimes they tell the school nurse about how I’m good at lifting things, and then she asks me to come in and help her change a light bulb that is hard to reach but not for me, because I’m also tall. Being tall and also the strongest man in the world makes me very useful for a variety of everyday chores, like changing light bulbs, hanging posters in hard to reach places, and moving cabinets. The school nurse is absolutely beautiful. If I were not as poor as I am I would buy her a very nice beach house with hundreds of light fixtures, but put very cheap light bulbs in all of them so that they were always burning out. She would have to call me over all the time to change them. That way I would never outlive my usefulness.
January 21st
Ayano asks me: “What did you eat for breakfast this morning?”
“Eggs,” I tell her, which is true.
“Chicken eggs?” she asks.
“No, penguin eggs.”
“Penguins?!”
“Yes, I have two penguins.”
“Do they live in your apartment?”
“Yes, in the bathtub. I refill it with fresh ice each day. I feed them fresh fish. You have to, or they’ll get sick.”
“Isn’t that expensive?”
“Yes, it is. So what I do is I let people play with the penguins and charge 100 yen for it. Then I use that money to buy the fish.”
“So you’re breaking even then?”
“Just barely.”
Ayano was howling with laughter at this so I figured she knew I was kidding, but then after school she knocked on my door with a few other kids and they asked if they could come in and see the penguins.
February 8th
Sometimes, maybe once a month, I visit the special education class and do English language activities with them. They are the best. They get so pumped up and it’s hard to keep them in their chairs, they’re so excited. Today a kid ran up to me during class and charged up like he was going to hit me with a kamehameha energy blast attack from Dragonball. I was going to fall back and feign being blasted even though actually that kid’s combat rating is way, way lower than mine. But, at the last second, he changed techniques and kicked me in the groin. His mother apologized to me after school but I told her it’s cool, it’s my own fault for letting my combat skills slip and not training hard enough in preparation for this battle. I asked her if she thought I’d lost my edge, but she said she wouldn’t know and to please take care of myself.
February 15th
At recess, over the loudspeakers, they play a music box playing “Let It Be” sometimes and honestly I almost did not include this in this reflection. I said to myself, how profound, another anecdote that appeals to the reader’s potential connection to The Beatles. But give me this one. It is perfect. It is so perfect and so pleasant that occasionally I just about lose it.
March 3rd
Today the third graders learned how to play American football, sort of. We played on the soccer field and the soccer goals were the end zones. At first there were a lot of incidents with children throwing the balls into the nets and shouting “GOAL” but we got past that. They run everything out of a shotgun formation and there are about fifteen passes per play in various directions. Usually every other play is a Hail Mary and the receiver drops the ball, then picks it up and keeps running and we just let this slide because, come on, it’s pretty cute. Anyways, I guess that part is mostly my fault. I base most of my football knowledge on John Madden Football ‘95 for the Super Nintendo so I have told them that the best way to win is to run a Hail Mary each play and to spin around a lot when other people get close. They asked me why it was called a “Hail Mary” and I told them a little about Catholicism but when they asked me what that has to do with football I had to admit that I really don’t know. When I said that lots of NFL players cross themselves in the end zone and give props to God one of them said “that sounds stupid, they should be thanking the guys who blocked for them” and I had to admit that that was also a pretty good point.
March 28th
Lately a lot of new kids have been showing up at school. Since it’s the end of the school year anyways they are not joining classes, but they eat lunch with us and play outside on the playground. I swing with them on the monkey bars and play freeze tag and we don’t talk about why they’re here. Sometimes some of them will suddenly burst into tears and sit under a tree and stay there for a long time. The other kids will always fill me in. “His mom died last week,” they’ll say. So of course they’re sad. They are here because they have nowhere else to be, staying with relatives or family friends. They are earthquake and tsunami refugees, the lot of them, escaped a bit south down here where we were less touched by all of it.
When something a little kid doesn’t like happens, they often complain about how it’s unfair. Especially if it’s something dumb, like not letting them go to recess early on pretty days. “We have to do this quiz first,” I’ll tell them, and they’ll groan and say it’s unfair. I tell them sometimes life is unfair and you just gotta do what you gotta do. This week I keep seeing these tsunami kids and thinking a lot about fairness. Yesterday a woman accepted her children’s graduation certificates on behalf of her two missing daughters. I tremble when I think of how unfair that is. The kids carry on. They cry for a bit, then they dust themselves off and run back on to the dodgeball court. At least we’ve got our health. I am not a particularly nice man; I am sort of vile in the way a lot of us secretly are, but I love these children and seeing things like this feels like being struck by something very heavy and very dull. Some blunt instrument that should never have been created.
July 13, 2009
there’s a flowchart of sorts sitting on my desk on a sheet of notebook paper, courtesy of megumi. i shall reproduce it, because it’s very helpful:
hot day these days
|
|
|
heatstroke <------ be careful!!
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|
V
water <-------- I like it
^
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a necessity <3
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every day!
WHICH DO YOU LIKE WATER OR SPORTS DRINK?
The answer: WATER.
Scratch the Southeast Asia. It’s getting too hectic around here, and I don’t have time for the bittersweet reflection anymore. I don’t usually know what I’m talking about, anyways. So, without further ado, I’ll just begin posting student writing at random.
Takuma watched all of the Back to the Future trilogy after learning about Parkinson’s in class and wrote a review. See if this clears up some of the subtle plot issues for you:
The movies are Back to the Future 1, 2, 3.
The movies are story time travel Time machine. Main character Marty travel past. And Marty’s father and mother help. This is chapter one.
Chapter two travel future. Marty travel to help Marty child and the future change past to rob Time machine villain.
Chapter three travel went age. Time machine break and Marty went back future. This movie was opened twenty years ago. This movies was very interesting, because please watch teachers.
Grade: A++
February 5, 2009
I went to Cambodia recently, and for the next several days the posts will be concerning that, as I transcribe my journal entries from those weeks.
If you’ve never been to the Killing Fields, this is the part where I explain it to you, minus the statistics. We’re supposed to remember the numbers, because the numbers give us the scale. It makes it all easier to process. We need to remember the scale in order to understand why all of this matters. It’s important to label the actions of the Khmer Rouge with the word
genocide, because a genocide certainly took place. However, for too many of us, the word
genocide sets things apart from the natural flow of history, as if the deaths of a few million in a few short years are a bizarre abberation, some sort of glitch in humanity’s natural programming. Maybe they are. But, then again, maybe they aren’t.So, forget what you already know for just a moment. From the entrance, what you’ll see is a simple field, the kind covered in weeds and wildflowers that you’ve probably seen a thousand times before. In places, the landscape is dotted with wooden signs in English and Khmer displaying background information and, of course, statistics. A beaten path leads you to a wooden bridge, and then the path continues, the dirt trail bending in a slow circle towards a wooded area. In the center of it all is a stupa filled with fractured skulls (8,895 of them) and faded clothing. These skulls belong to many of those whose who were executed here, from infants to the elderly. They were typically blind-folded and placed on their knees. Occasionally they were shot. More often, to save bullets, they were bludgeoned, stabbed, beheaded, or suffocated with plastic bags. Infants were either smashed against trees or tossed into the air and caught on bayonets.It becomes more obvious as you continue along the path. Large craters that were once mass graves still contain scraps of clothing and shards of metal and bone; indeed, it’s not unusual to hear a crunch beneath you and look down to discover that you’ve stepped on a skull fragment. Further up the path is a glass case containing teeth pulled from the dirt, unbroken, yellow, looking deceptively canine. Soon, however, you’ve left the bones behind, and the path runs along a lily-covered pond. Trees bend outwards from its banks, forming a kind of canopy along its edges, and a gazebo is perched along one edge. Tourists stop and snap pictures. The thought hits you: This place is beautiful.
Before you’ve completed walking the main path, the children are upon you. They’re not allowed inside, but this doesn’t stop them from begging outside the chain-link fence that forms a perimeter. Shoeless and shirtless, they slide bone-thin arms through the fence, palms upward, issuing a chorus of “money please?” And, if you’re like me, you think: Maybe things don’t change that much.
Everyone who writes about the Killing Fields, the S-21 prison camp, or any f the many other sites at which the Khmer Rouge committed startling atrocities wants you to remember that the executioners were largely children. Scan a few articles about these places and count how many times you see the phrase “ages 9 to 15”. Maybe the first time you read this, it was shocking to you. Probably, you don’t blame these writers for including this detail. Child soldiers! The inhumanity of it is enough to make any of us hate the regime a little more. I don’t blame these writers either. I am one of them, I suppose.I thought like this too, not more than a few weeks ago. And as I stood in front of that skull-filled stupa, I heard someone much smarter than myself say the following:
It is the most unremarkable thing in history to make someone kill someone else.
Evaluate this statement for yourself. Consider that the watchdog organization Human Rights Watch estimates between 200,000 and 300,000 children are currently being used by paramilitary and government forces in armed conflicts in over 20 countries. Consider the experiments of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo. Consider that, under the right circumstances, anyone can break, just like a heart — quietly and easily.
November 5, 2008
“I don’t get it. What do you mean, you’re afraid of animals?”
“I’m afraid of all animals. Definitely all of them.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re scary.”
Ayumi and Nana are walking to school beside me, and as is fairly normal, they’ve taken a break from attempting to speak English and have thus mostly forgotten I’m there. In the process they’ve also forgotten that I understand their Japanese. I didn’t know that Ayumi was afraid of all animals. Because I am bored, I keep listening:
“What about harmless animals, like birds?” Nana is incredulous.
“Unacceptable. If I see a bird on TV, it’s okay, but if the bird looks at the camera, I have to change the channel.”
“What about mice?”
“All girls hate mice.”
“Not me. I love mice. They’re cute.”
“Only Mickey is okay.”
“And Pokemon? They’re not really animals.”
“Pikachu is cute.”
“Is Pikachu supposed to be a boy or a girl?”
“Boy.”
“And what about Anpanman?”
“His name is Anpanman, not Anpanwoman.”
“His head is made of bread. What’s his body made of?”
“Plastic. Just a guess.”
High school students are high school students wherever you go. Not much changes as you cross oceans, and students still have the same wandering, pointless conversations they always do regardless of place. They speak for the sake of filling silence as much as anything else. There is no need for personal breakthroughs or deep meaning. The day before:
Risa: “Do foreigners get acne?”
Mika: “No.”
Shiho: “Of course they do. That’s why that weird Jessica Simpson lady is on those Proactive commercials.”
See? Mostly indistinguishable from American conversations, only with different cultural cues. That’s what makes today interesting. Today was the presidential election. Ayumi and Nana humored me about this and pretended (I think) to be interested, asking once an hour, “Obama win yet?”
When it was all said and done, they asked a more intriguing question: “Now, do you want to go back to America?” I told them I was here for now, then asked them if they wanted to visit sometime. Both shook their heads ‘no’, and when I asked them why, they made gun shapes with their hands and little gunshot sounds. “Don’t want to get shot,” said Ayumi, and the entire time that I was explaining that TV is sensationalist and that it’s perfectly safe to travel to the U.S., I was embarassed.
You can’t blame them, really. They have always known a country with a remarkably low violent crime rate. America’s murder rate is nearly 9 times higher than Japan’s, and it doesn’t help that some of the more popular American TV shows are things like 24, Prison Break, CSI, etc. It seems that the average person I talk to thinks we’re pretty bloodthirsty. They might be right.
A few times a week, strangers ask me where I’m from. I tell them I’m American, and every time I do I’m aware that I’m donning the fabric of these preconceptions. I say, “I’m from Tennessee, in the United States,” and I know that I’m simultaneously admitting to whatever preconceived notions they may have about us. This bothered me more a year ago than it does today, but I can’t say I like it.
The entire point of this is that an hour ago, a man waiting at the car shop beside me asked where I was from. I told him. He replied with: “I have hope for America. I think good days are ahead.”
I agree.
October 9, 2008
Oh man, things have gotten busy.
Believe it or not, I have plenty to write about. I just don’t have as much time as I’d like, nor the will.
I will do better, I will do better. Videos to come as well:
Tomorrow in class I’m trying to bring Halloween to Japan by teaching the kids how to light dog crap in brown paper bags on fire and how to conduct prank phone calls.
September 12, 2008
I don’t really like you. You have made a select list of groups of people that I generally dislike by default, which is admirable in a way, but as I get older I find that people irritate me more often, so perhaps it’s me that needs to do a little soul searching. Either way, I find hypochondriacs to be a drain on society for two primary reasons: 1) The whole self-pity thing is a bit played. 2) It’s manipulative. It’s the domain of those who want to be fretted over, who want to be worried about. It’s a way for people to blame every little miscomfort on a dramatic health crisis, and it’s a waste of about 20 million dollars in unnecessary medical expenses each year.The advent of WebMD.com, Yahoo! Health, and other sites has given these people more misinformation to arm themselves with than I originally would ever have thought possible. Back in the day, the whining of hypochondriacs was mostly limited to the realm of ill-defined but terribly exaggerated phrases like “horrible, awful migraines”, which is not very specific, meaning they couldn’t take it much further than that. Now, those same headaches can chalked up to an arteriovascular malformation, one of the harsh realities of the technology age that fills me with sadness.Exhibit 1: A woman I worked with in an office who would complain of things like “lumbar-vertebrae displacement” brought on by her substandard office chair.
For research’s sake, I went to WebMD and decided to see what (if anything) is wrong with me. You’re given a picture of a human body to click “where it hurts” and a list of symptoms to choose from. It’s hot as hell this afternoon, so I immediately checked off “Excessive sweating”. No problem. I then moved on to “Hunger” and “Food cravings,” as I have almost an hour left until lunch. Because I’m doing this instead of working, I went ahead and added “Easily distracted” and “Poor concentration” as well, then rounded it out with “Difficulty staying awake during the day”. Finally, I realized how depressing and profoundly cynical it is that I’m doing this at all, so I finished with: “Inability to care for self”, “Low self-esteem”, and “Sense of impending doom”.
I would diagnose myself this afternoon as a workplace slacker with a poor attitude towards humanity, but imagine my surprise when WebMD broke the news to me: I have supraventricular tachycardia. Son of a bitch, a potentially fatal heart condition. I saw this on Dr. House.
This is going to be problematic.
August 19, 2008
This a compilation of my notes from the last week:
Monday, 10:42 PM
The Japan-to-Tennessee jet lag has decimated my biological clock. It is Monday evening, but I have been asleep for the past six hours, waking to a house empty aside from my father, sitting alone in a darkened living room, hands folded in his lap.
He’s waited to tell me that there’s been an accident, that my uncle was riding his motorcycle home when drag racers overtook him on a quiet stretch of highway, sending him flipping across the well-manicured lawn of a local church. He’s dead at 46. He is dead, and my mother has already gone ahead to be with her family. My mother has been mourning the loss of her brother for four hours while I have been asleep in the guest bedroom, dreaming of girls, beaches, and other things that suddenly seem less important.
“Can you believe it?” he asks me. “That it happened on a motorcycle?”
I can’t.
(more…)
July 31, 2008
To those who have recently left Nagasaki or are leaving in the upcoming days:
Thank you.
When the cold is awful or the heat is unbearable, the mosquitoes are out in full force, and all the vice principals of the world have teamed up to make things a problem, you’ve kept it worth it. Homesickness ain’t a damn thing when people make you feel at home, you know?
I don’t go out of my way to spend time with people I don’t like. I just don’t waste the effort on it. I spent time with you all because you have made life here better in innumerable ways.
Please keep doing what you’re doing. Good luck.
To those of you who have just arrived in Nagasaki:
You’ve got big shoes to fill.
Don’t blow it.
June 20, 2008
Fish are dying.
This, in and of itself, is not entirely special, but the specific circumstances are. In one Japanese river in particular, 2 tons of dead fish (including 2,000 eels, if I read it correctly) have washed up in the past few days, and nobody seems to have a great explanation for this. News channels are running footage of men with nets in rowboats shoveling fish carcasses into styrofoam containers and scratching their heads.
In other news, the Iwate-Miyagi Earthquake tore mountains apart and caused massive landslides, blocking the flow of rivers and causing lakes to rapidly form, resulting in extensive flooding.
In Akihabara, a man drove a truck into a crowd of people. Armed with a knife, he then set upon the crowd, killing 10 and injuring more, including one police officer. Another cop attempted to stop him with his baton before apparently remembering that police are armed. He eventually drew his gun, at which point the attacker surrendered. Too little, too late, isn’t it?
I’m hearing an awful lot of talk about why things like this keep happening. Kids spend too much time on their cell phones. Video games are violent. We’re too reliant on technology.
As if disasters ever needed a reason to occur.