I love coming up with the titles for these entries.
Anyway, today at school during my teacher-less class, one of the students decided to act up. All of the boys in my class were talking and pretty much ignoring me. I tried one of the tactics that I had seen Japanese teachers take – they pick some random students from within the group of talking students and move them to other seats.
I tried this today, and asked two boys to move. One got right up and moved, but the other one pretended not to understand. I explained it twice in English, and then when he still didn’t move, I asked him in Japanese. There was no going back then – if I backed down and let him stay, the students would totally ignore me. On the other hand, I’m not even really supposed to be teaching alone – a “real” teacher is supposed to handle situations like this. I was on shaky ground, but after several attempts, the student got up and moved. I wrote down his name, and just continued on with the class.
He was really ticked – he stared hard at his desk, attempting to burn a hole through it with his brain laser. I called on him just like any other student, and he seemed to come out of it after a while. Afterwards, I asked him to stick around and I apologized for picking on him. I tried to explain that it wasn’t something that he did in particular, he was unlucky enough to be talking right then. He didn’t quite understand my apology because of the language barrier, but I told one of the third year teachers and he said that he would relay the message. I have a feeling that instead they are going to lock this kid up and beat him with a rubber hose for disobeying. I hope things turn out OK. Anyway, it was the first really “bad” experience I’ve had in the classroom.
Yesterday I was idly daydreaming about roast beef. I hadn’t had roast beef since our welcome reception back in August. Mr. Hayashi casually said that it’s easy to find roast beef in the store. I have spent hours combing the stores for roast beef – carefully reading the complex Japanese kanji characters in the hopes of finding some juicy, barely cooked roast beef.
I asked him to join me in the store after school, and together we could not find any roast beef. He went home yesterday and asked his wife, and she gave him a store near my house that usually has it. Unfortunately, today he had a staff meeting and couldn’t join me. He talked Miss Kageyama into taking me there, and sure enough, within five minutes of entering the store I had about a quarter pound of roast beef. It was priced at about 500 yen (around $4.50). I went ahead and bought it, even though it was pricey. If I tastes terrible, then I’ll know that I’m not missing anything.
Since we were near my place anyway, Miss Kageyama offered to drop me off at my apartment. On the way over there we were talking about e-mails. I have been e-mailing Miss Kageyama every now and then on her phone, and she responds in English. She told me that it’s good practice for her English, but it turns out that it takes around thirty minutes for her to write me back, and some e-mails can take up to two hours! Here I was sending her goofy e-mails about this and that, and she’s on the other side sweating bullets trying to put things into English and get back to me. I felt so bad – I promised myself not to write so many in the future.
