Sometimes the smallest little things provoke the strangest reactions here. Today I brought in some leftover pizza to eat for lunch. No problem – no big deal. Then I pulled out the carrot sticks that I cut up at home and got an amazing reaction from teachers and students alike. They couldn’t believe that I was eating a raw carrot. No spices? Not cooked? Mr. Komuri said that “I must be a horse”. Other teachers gathered around to watch me eat the carrots, and oohhed and aaaahed when I chomped one down. <\/p>\n
Some students were asking about the bag of carrots that I had on my desk, so the teachers asked me to go out into the hallway to show them. They were laughing hysterically as I ate the carrots. I felt like charging admission and taking my show on the road. <\/p>\n
I had my last official Valentine’s class today, and it was with my rowdy group of kids. They were a little better today, because the lesson was a little more interesting, but they were pretty much ignoring most of the lesson. Mr. Kimura was extremely frustrated, but he couldn’t really do anything about it. I went into a zen-like state – I taught the lesson, but without getting worked up about whether the kids were “getting it” or not. No frustration that way.<\/p>\n
Mr. Hayashi was going through some kind of guilt trip today and so he said that I should leave early. I took him up on it and left about an hour early from school. As I walked by the outside of the school grounds, I passed a group of three schoolgirls from another school. The giggles started up, and then I could hear running behind me. One brave girl said “Hello”, and I turned and smiled and said “hello” back. Her friend said something in Japanese that I didn’t catch, and then she said “I love you” in English. I said “thanks” and kept walking – I guess it was a successful intercultural exchange. <\/p>\n
One of my male students rode by and his bike and gave me a big grin – he had overheard what happened and wanted to see my reaction. About two blocks later I heard running behind me again and got worried, but it was two female students from my school this time. They asked me to pose with them for some pictures, so I posed with each of them as they snapped photos. They were very polite and it was nice to talk to them.<\/p>\n
The attention I get is a lot of fun, and I have to admit that I enjoy it quite a bit. It is dangerously inflating my ego, but on a more positive note it’s a great opportunity to show a positive foreign face to people. This morning as I walked to school, three people on my route said good morning to me first – all my smiles, bows, and good mornings of the past have been paying off. I feel like I’m making a positive impact on my little corner of Japan, even if it’s only in the smallest of ways. It’s been a while since I’ve made an impact on something other than some company’s bottom line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sometimes the smallest little things provoke the strangest reactions here. Today I brought in some leftover pizza to eat for lunch. No problem – no big deal. Then I pulled out the carrot sticks that I cut up at home and got an amazing reaction from teachers and students alike. They couldn’t believe that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-46","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}