Take That Sea Shepherd

I had a kind of goofy night at the yakitori with some of my students last night. One of them lives in the same town I do, and the other halfway between where we work and where I live. They wanted to go out for some beers and once out of the classroom we switched to a blend of English, Japanese and Chinese, the latter because one of the students just got back from Tsing Tao and is on a Chinese kick.

The food at the place was pretty good – more of an izakaya than a yakitori, actually. The menu was filled with a lot of different things, and we kept the dishes coming. They had whale on the menu, so they ordered that based on all the news stories recently about the Sea Shepherd group’s activities. The annual craziness that goes on with the lasers, ramming ships and pirate flags tend to make most Japanese people think that the group has no ground to stand on – and to me seems to solidify at least Japanese minds against any kind of logical argument against whaling. As my dinner companions said, it’s not like the whale meat is actually that delicious. To prove the point we ate the grilled whale meat, and sure enough – not so exciting. Give me beef instead.

We talked for a few hours and then called it a night – it is a school night after all. On the way out they apologized for scoring low on a standardized English test recently, and it looks like their English scores actually decreased in the time period that they have taken my class. There is a serious blow to my confidence. Actually, the test measures vocab, grammar and listening skills, but has no conversation/speaking section and I think that is where the students have made progress. As one student said to me the other day – his customers have noticed that he is speaking more smoothly and have told him so, but apparently this fact isn’t reflected in the scores (yet?). Depressing, though, and it put a mild damper on the evening. I’d like to see the rest of my students’ scores to get an idea of the overall picture.

Huge buckets of rain came down last night, but this morning it seems to have cleared enough to allow me to get to work and back without an umbrella. I’m getting a little tired of the rain and the rainy season hasn’t even started yet.


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