2001-12-15 - 7:28 p.m.
Hard to believe, but in a week I’ll be on an airplane heading home. I remember how culture-shocked I was returning to the States after four months in Holland, but for some reason I can believe that I’m actually going to be culture shocked this time. On some level, I know that I will go through culture shock when I go home -- how could I not? But another part of me feels like I know that Japan and America are really different, so what’s the big shock? We’ll see. I’m looking forward to being able to read all the labels in the supermarket.
It’s been a while since I’ve written, so let me think back... Well, last Monday evening I was sulking about my house, contemplating the upcoming week, when the phone rang. It was an old JET friend I’d met back at orientation and really clicked with. I’d seen him in Tokyo in August, but we hadn’t spoken since then. He lives on Izu, the beautiful peninsula Lela and Izzy and I visited in September -- but when we were there I forgot that he lived there and didn’t look him up. So anyway, we talked for about an hour and our conversation really cheered me up. It was also really nice to know that someone had thought to call me out of the blue on a Monday night.
On Tuesday I had a fun night with my adult class, teaching Christmas and Hanukkah. They really enjoyed the dreidel game. But by far the highlight of the night was when one of my students, a 30-something school nurse, made an excited association between the Star of David on the vocabulary sheet and Andrea Zuckerman, the character from 90210. This lead to a lively discussion of “Kelly-chan,” “Brandon-san,” and the rest of the gang. (The school nurse contended that she liked “young Kelly,” while I argued the virtues of “old Kelly.”) Now that I know that my students and I share a mutual appreciation of 90210, obviously I will make a future class out of a viewing of the show.
I’m liking my new school more and more (as the previous ALT assured me I would). I quite enjoy the long bike ride, and on clear days, of which there have been many lately, I can see Mt. Fuji by morning light on the way to work, and by sunset on the way home. The one annoying thing about the bike ride are the other bikers, and in particular, the high school boys. The girls, who ride in pairs, will move over and ride single file to let me pass. But the boys like to take up the road, often causing me to pull over and stop to end the game of chicken. There’s this one threesome who the previous ALT warned me about -- she called them “the Mafia” because they always rode in a tight pack and never let her pass. On my second day coming home from school, the Mafia was approaching me, but one member was lagging behind the other two. As I approached him, he continued heading straight toward me. When I got closer, I could see that he was typing out an e-mail on his cell phone as he rode his bike, and was totally oblivious of me. I screeched my brakes to avoid hitting him, at which point he put on his brakes and swerved, narrowly avoiding a collision. I yelled out something profane in English (it was automatic) and he apologized profusely in Japanese. Now they always let me pass.
At school, I’ve grown to really like the 9th graders. They are a really smart and friendly class. Furthermore, their English teacher, a young woman in her twenties, is probably the best I’ve worked with since I’ve been here. She actually lets the kids think and write, which is very rare in English education here. A couple of times a week, she has me put a question on the board and then gives the kids dictionaries and lets them spend a majority of the class crafting their answers. I pose questions like “if you had 1 million yen, what would you do?” and “if you could meet anyone living or dead, who would it be?” In all of the classes I’ve taught, there’s always one kid who comes up with a smart-aleck remark about going to Afghanistan to find bin Ladin. And then there’s always one kid who writes something serious about the war -- “I would help the children in Afghanistan,” wrote one boy. A girl wrote, “I want to meet the U.S. President to talk to him about the war.” When I asked her yesterday at lunch time what she would say to Bush, she said that she would tell him to stop the war, and that it makes her very sad. The boy sitting across from her looked up from his lunch and said with a smirk, “bin Ladin is in the art room. The art teacher is bin Ladin!”
