Tests and transfers

The next few weeks are nothing more than an elaborate chess game, and The Sensei are all worried which science teacher will be swapped for a calculus rook, which English queen will be traded for a Chinese-speaking pawn. The Big Kahuna and K-town’s principal have closed door meetings in the afternoon with the teachers’ pictures spread before them like playing cards. They’re deciding how many teachers they will transfer, and from which subjects. What will the panoply look like without Gregory Peck Sensei’s famous face, Gonzo Sensei’s debate finesse? Where should we send these teachers? A commercial school? An art school? North to the city hub of Japanese gangsters?

In theory they’re looking at the yearly evaluations, students’ comments from class, colleague opinions as they make these decisions. In practicality no one knows how these decisions are made–or why. O Sensei has been at K-town’s school for 20 years, an obscenely long time in one place by Japanese standards. Ms. Delicious and Mount Fuji Sensei were both new last April. They turned up at school freshly scrubbed with cardboard boxes of textbooks and tapes. On average, teachers stay at a school for three years before they’re transfered, so they can follow the students from one year to the next, although there are clearly exceptions. T-Rex Sensei has been teaching the third year students for the last seven years. Ms. Delicious says no one is safe, even her. Gonzo Sensei, her back problems finally under control, wants to move with the Superhero class when they become third year students.

But no one will know anything until March 21st, next Friday.

After next Friday they have ten days to pack their desks, say their good-byes and slip in a quick vacation before they report to their new schools for the start of the year. Curriculum meetings have already begun, and preliminary plans are being drawn. The reality that we could lose O Sensei, our undisputed leader and mastermind, makes these attempts half-hearted at best. We could do this, we could do that, we could have these lessons or not. Next Friday O Sensei will sit at her desk, waiting to see if she’s called for a private meeting in the principal’s office–it can only mean one thing.

The Big Kahuna not only decides who stays at school, but he decides what they will do here. The Sensei are told which grade they will teach, if they will be homeroom teachers, and what extra duties they might have. O Sensei, the tea ceremony supervisor for over a dozen years, may have to turn over the keys and the Sado Sensei’s phone number. Gonzo Sensei, the swim leader, will get rid of the pool keys. Ms. Delicious, the English club leader, will no longer approve masks and markers as expenses for our Halloween party.

It’s nail-biting time, and makes everyone feel a unique kinship with the third year students still waiting on results from University entrance exams. The third year students trickle into the staff room during the sunny afternoons. They whisper something in their homeroom teacher’s ear, and then an announcement is made and the whole room erupts in applause. In the next few days their name and the name of their university is typed onto a plastic strip and hung in the hallway.

The peach blossoms are out, the plum blossoms are about to fall, and in two weeks, when it’s cherry blossom time, everything will have been decided. It’s just that now we keep seeing shots of pink as the buds begin to open and our hearts beat a little faster, thinking the results are in. We’re still a week away, and in the meantime The Sensei are correcting entrance examinations, deciding which junior high school students will be first year students next year. They spend all morning and afternoon wielding red pens, their seconds sitting behind them waiting to give them a sip of water, a fresh red marker, a pat on the back. Everyone wants to admit the best and brightest students. They may or may not be teaching here next year, but if they are they don’t want to deal with the guilt of admitting a less than stellar student–of exam sabotage.

I wasn’t really aware what was happening last year, with the transfers. I was told the results a week after the fact and honestly, they didn’t affect me that much. I like the new teachers we’ve gotten this year as a result. But this year I’ve built bonds with some of the teachers. Gonzo Sensei and I crafted arguments and spent late nights eating smoked almonds and going over rebuttal speeches with the debate teams. One of the front office workers has just brought paperwork for me to stamp. I will be paid $200 for all my debate overtime this fall. And if Gonzo Sensei has to come into the teacher’s room next Friday and whisper in my ear that she’s headed off into the rice fields, I will probably not react with wild applause. I can tell you this: The Sense work way more overtime than I do, and don’t get paid for it. You’d think they’d want to keep these teachers around as long as possible.

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A certain painter who is famous in Paris treated me at a well-known restaurant ten years ago

I communicate with Saki, the reluctant English Club leader, through a small plastic box outside the teacher’s room door. There are 21 boxes in total, one for each homeroom, and in the mornings and afternoons one pre-selected student troops down, squeals it open, picks up corrected papers and announcements, and distributes them in class. It’s terribly efficient. Monday, after waiting for an hour for someone to get me for our first English Club of the New Year, I scribbled Saki a note (Did we have club Monday? Should we have a Valentine’s Party February 7th?) and slid it into the 2-1 box on my way to change my shoes. The next morning a bright purple-markered note was waiting for me on my desk. We’re so sorry Sensei! We had to study. Yes please let’s party! From, Saki

I’d consider conducting all of my lessons this way, by correspondence. Giving advice to a 30-year-old single woman? Telling us about an embarrassing incident? Recounting the tale of your first love? I’ll place sheaves of assignments in their little receptacles, they’ll be whisked up to 2-1, 3-1, 1-7 and fanned out. And then, at the appointed time, my desk will be flooded with brightly colored notes and homework(s). Papers, folded into airplanes, will sail across the room. I’ll open my drawers and green-markered letters will glow back at me. This is how I will know them–by their handwriting.

In reality, things have been juggled up as of late. I began the year teaching with Mount Fuji, was shuffled over to O Sensei for variety, and am now back with the indomitable mountain. He’s not a bad guy, let’s get that clear up front, but I’m just not sure how someone becomes an English teacher without actually speaking any English. I know he has some secret abilities (he translates everything I say and, from what I can tell, he’s accurate), but the most I get out of him is a: Good Morning! Hey, let’s go! Okkkaaay… The compact, logical solution to this problem is just to tell him we want him to speak more English, but so far neither Praju nor I have summoned up the courage. We understand how nerve-wracking it is to be forced to speak in another language, and we feel encouragement is better than criticism. That, and we privately appealed to O Sensei and Green Tea Sensei to intervene on our behalf. The results have been mediocre.

I’d wanted to continue teaching The Class Who Never Speaks (times 2) with O Sensei, to try and cajole a reaction out of them. I get more head nods in the 3rd year class T-Rex Sensei twists my arm into attending; with them, I’ll explain they should try and shorten “a certain artist who is famous” to “a famous artist” and they’ll hold their pens up thoughtfully, smile at me, and when T-Rex Sensei asks what I’ve said they’ll shrug their shoulders. Then there are the three girls from the English Course who sit to the far right of the room and smile at me when I glance at them out of the corner of my eye. Rika, the girl who first welcomed me to tea ceremony club, catches me by my elbows before class and we swing around in the hallway. “Some of the girls have already complained,” she says, “to you. About him.” I nod my head, trying to play the part of a stoic teacher. “Why does he explain everything, all the English? I understand,” she says. And that’s because she’s had a year and a half of me muddling my way through grammar explanation using only English. I use yellow chalk to correct their sentences on the blackboard, and then T-Rex Sensei stomps over and I’m forced to either teeter on the very edge of the teacher-stage or take a backwards step off it, while all six feet of him flings orange chalk particles in my wake.

O Sensei is a very exacting teacher. She cares about her students’ learning, and so teaching with her meant checking extra essays and having students do re-writes. Mount Fuji is much more lacksadaisical, willing to move on if the student’s don’t quite understand. He teases them if they don’t do their homework. In O Sensei’s class their answers are all block written, hard-pressed, deep. And now Praju is the one checking their extra homework, reading 80 more pages this week on why birds or fish make better pets. Mount Fuji and I occasionally smile at each other over the top of our desks, but there’s no paper-shuffling between us; neither of us is rushing into the hallway to line the students’ boxes with extra assignments. Instead I focus on getting him to address me in English, and take it as a big step forward when I pass him in the hallway carrying his ordered-in lunchbox and I say, delicious! and he responds with, yes, I know.

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Identity wheedling

I’m not usually in the teacher’s room for cleaning time. I have my own fish to fry and desks to casually lean against and rain to contemplate in the English room. I’ve trained those students so well that they don’t even snap to attention when I rattle the key and open the door. Instead they lazily go to the whiteboard, pick up markers, and start doodling. Then, when Green Tea Sensei pops her head in to ask us a question or ask for some late homework, we all look around with our scared eyes and elbow each other, and I pretend like I’m doing something besides talking to Kanako about the latest Harry Potter movie. But today the PTA is setting up for a combo Christmas party/farewell party for our German exchange student, and so I leisurely ate my lunch and watched the students empty the teacher’s garbage cans and halfheartedly sweep between our desks. Then, one of the vice-vice principals lifted the top off the shredder and three boys rushed over with garbage sacks and they filled them to the brim. I’ve occasionally seen the tail-end of this operation, and it always amazes me that we shred three full Peaquah-sized bags of paper in a day.

After cleaning time we were requested to make a visit to the Superhero class where we accidentally sprang on them the fact that they have English listening winter homework. “Surprise!” I yelled and everyone laughed. “Come and do it with us!” we sang, because DEBATE SEASON is over and I’m having a hard time trudging to my car everyday past the students who are now back at clubs. “Please,” Gonzo Sensei said, “don’t tell them it was my idea. Or they’ll just think I’m the dragon lady telling them what to do.” But it slipped out that it wasn’t our idea, exactly, to assign them 12 listening exercises, that we were just the medium to alleviate their madness. “Please don’t wait until the night before and listen for three hours,” I said. And when I asked, “do you understand?” as we stepped off the stage and out the door, the Superhero class sucked in a deep breath and yelled, “yes!” so loudly they had enough sound for themselves and enough to share with 1-2, The Class Who Never Speaks.

Back in the teacher’s room the students are lined up behind O Sensei’s desk, waiting for her to cut and paste and check off their names for grammar assignments. One girl with a birthmark the shape and color of a black eye gives me a three-fingered wave. Two boys lean over O Sensei’s desk and stare at me. “Oh!” they say. “Hi boys,” I say, and they do a bobble-headed bow. I think the students aren’t quite sure where I live–in the teacher’s room, in the small closet off the English room, in the 1-1 classroom, and so it’s a surprise to see me in the halls, on my way to the bathroom, getting my shoes after school. It’s as though I’m a partially invisible ghost who wanders through the halls mostly undetected unless you’re looking right at me, and then I’m quite surprising, like “oh, I forgot you lived here”.

I’m racked with regret that I didn’t take the five minutes in the Superhero class to congratulate the debate team for their 4th place at All-Kyushu. I spent that stressful, weepy day with them, and I’ve been sifting through my thoughts with a pinch in an email, a pound in my journal, and I’m just not quite ready to explain more than that. When I stop crying when I go home and can watch the track and field team without a nostalgic buzzer going off in my head, then I will write, dear Internet, about the three students who have forever welded themselves to my heart. Until then, you can know my heart has been turned into a gold star, and I wear it on my sleeve, so proud am I of how much they worked and what our teamwork accomplished. I’m in the throes of planning a debate closing ceremony complete with certificates and pictures and three hand-written letters, and maybe then I can express to them that this is my best memory of Japan, that they’re the first students to make me cry, that I’m so sorry the dark late nights and dictionary conversations are over. But most of all that I found out at the Saturday tournament that Ryosuke likes a second year girl, but now we no longer have the time together or the joking relationship for me to wheedle her identity out of him.

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Mouse debacle

I’m trying to do the noble traveler’s thing–to really get into the groove and quirk of Japan in the 8 months or so we have left–and as my first full-scale venture I decided to buy and send out New Year’s cards. I’ve picked out postcards in six varieties, with pre-stamped Japanese backs and without, with elaborate Japanese kanji, and mice in predicaments I didn’t know they could get themselves into: riding boats, inside a round red moon, on the creaky limb of a psychedelic hot pink tree. I pulled them out today and spread them across my desk to begin the process of choosing which card my grandparents would like–the mouse etched in gold or the mouse under the cherry blossoms? and as I was doing so I pulled out two paper envelopes I’d bought to send to the two special teachers in my life who also share the Year of the Mouse with me; although they’ve both sworn me to secrecy, as this will announce their ages (36 and 48 respectively) to the world. I opened the wrappers and pulled out not an envelope, but an elaborately folded piece of handmade paper with a tiny envelope inside. “What is this?” I asked O Sensei, looking for a way to seal it into an envelop. “This,” O Sensei said, taking it out of my hands, “is for grandparents to give their grandchildren money.”

“So I can’t put it in the mail?” I asked, thinking I’d just spent $4 on a useless, yet beautiful piece of paper.

“No,” she said, “of course not.”

“What about if I put money in it and gave it as a wedding gift?”

“See this mouse on the front,” she said, pointing at the cute paper mouse with fuzzy edges holding a bowl of rice. “This means it’s only useful for this year.”

“Then I guess it’s lucky no one in America knows that,” I said.

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Year of the Mouse

The cat and the rat were the worst swimmers in the animal kingdom. Although bad swimmers, they were both intelligent. They decided that the best and fastest way to cross the river was to hop on the back of the ox. The ox, being a naïve and good-natured animal, agreed to carry them across. However, overcome with a fierce competitiveness, the rat decided that in order to win, it must do something and promptly pushed the cat into the river. Because of this, the cat has never forgiven the rat, and hates the water as well. After the ox had crossed the river, the rat jumped ahead and reached the shore first, and it claimed first place in the competition.

We’re in The Big City for a meeting, and Hana and I are scavanging for New Year’s cards. These are big business in Japan. The post office across the country has an elaborate system and hires extra staff specifically to deliver cards on New Year’s day. In fact, if you stamp your postcard or envelope with a specific kanji and mail it within a designated time period, the post office will not only guarantee it will arrive on New Year’s day, but it will hold it in its inky clutches and deliver it exactly on New Year’s day. Grandparents send their grandchildren envelopes of money, my Sensei send me glossy pictures of their families dressed up in kimono, the JET organization sends me a bulky white envelope full of calendars. So this year I decided to join in all the red-pen fun and get my hands on some postcards to send to the family across the ocean.

A new branch of the Japan-famous chain LOFT has opened in the heart of The Big City, and so Hana and I waded through throngs of shoppers puffed out to twice their normal size from their fluorescent winter coats and paper shopping bags to the sixth and seventh floors which were labeled, simply, STATIONARY. I’d known last year was the year of the boar because Green Tea Sensei left me a little Hello Kitty charm dressed up in a boar’s costume. But other than the charm, I hadn’t seen any real evidence that we were celebrating 2007 with a spiky tusked mammal as the mascot. Now I realize I just didn’t know where to look.

This year, every single card had a mouse on it. The spiked angry boar has moved off center stage and instead we have gold mice leaning off the bow of a ship, or a mouse flying a kite above a watercolor Mt. Fuji. There are mice under the cherry blossoms, mice frolicking in the snow, a mouse in a red moon. Their wickedly long tails swoop down to write the Japanese hiragana for “ne” which is the beginning of nezumi, mouse. There’s a whole series of mice in gold relief, of mice biting a Japanese turnip, the sign for good luck. And the color red, the favorite color of this mouse child, is everywhere. It’s the good luck color in Japan, and with the combination of the happy red and the beautiful gold mice and the cheerful kanji, anyone who gets one of my postcards will be sure to have a lucky year.

I agonized over my choices, I pawed through the collection of stamps, and only tore myself off the sixth floor after spending nearly $50 on stamps and postcards, a true record. But I justified it all by saying that I’m in Japan, fortuitously, in my 24th year, probably the only time when the fact I’m a mouse in the Chinese zodiac will have any more meaning than just being a picture on a Chinese menu. I, the mouse, am the start of the new zodiac cycle, the beginning, and not coincidentally, the kanji written for this year is the one commonly used to write “child”.

In class yesterday I share my excitement, my good news. It’s my year, I say. “So,” one of the boys whispers to another in Japanese, “she’s 36?”

“Guess again,” I say, and then I turn to O Sensei, “why is it a mouse and not a rat?”

She gets a knowing smile on her face. “A mouse is a cute animal. No one wants to be a rat.”

And this is the distinction I will be making in America for the rest of my life. We, in the year of the mouse, have the competitive edge of the rat, the desire to win, but the Japanese know we are also shockingly cute, cuddly, the kind of animal who not only stores the best and most cheese, but also stands under snow-covered cherry blossoms, asking happiness to rain down on their friends.

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Hiatus and Haiku

Well, I’m back from my hiatus of persimmon-picking and sumo-watching and visiting florescent Seoul, South Korea; today I’m in school for the first time in a week and already The Big Kahuna is up to his old sneaky tricks of refusing to think logically, and O Sensei, my supervisor, and I are figuring out how we both have thyroid problems and can’t sit backward on the train and need our backs rubbed at night. We’re skinny, pointy ladies O Sensei and I, and had she been born into abrasive confrontational America I suppose she’d have a lot more of the unmitigated rage I have roiling around in my head, and it would come out her ears like steam when The Big Kahuna asks her to entertain a guest during her only free period of the day. Instead she picks up a red maker, says, “I’ll tell you later,” to me, and grits her teeth. Later she brings me a chocolate pie. “Sorry for my behavior,” she says. And I’m all, “yeah, how childish of you,” and then I go off and write nasty emails to my family about how my “don’t take no for an answer” personality has been hiding behind a Japanese mask, and the face paint has been so thick I haven’t even been able to wiggle my eyebrows the way I want. O Sensei literally laughed outloud when I told her we often say we won’t take no for an answer. “No, I’m serious,” I said. She looked shocked. “I thought it was a joke.”

Now, Korea: Seoul had church crosses lit up in neon pink and giant yellow chrysanthemums painted on restaurant walls and original paintings of unicorns and donkeys carting bright red and orange flowers. And birds everywhere. On earrings. In shop windows. Pigeons walking so close to me on the sidewalk I trample their spiked orange feet. “They have to learn to stay out of my way,” I say to Johnathan and he flaps his arms, making a flock of them take off. The underside of their wings make rainbow sparks against the grey sky. The Koreans are also fond of circles. At a folk museum we find zodiac statues arranged in a circle. They’re about chest high and regal looking. I take a picture rubbing the rat’s chest and Johnathan perches his elbows on the dog’s head. Then we dare each other to stand next to the guards and squeeze through a fence. My chest padded with two shirts, a sweater, and a coat, almost couldn’t fit through the bars, but I’m proud to report that it did and now we have a strange picture where I’m being cut in half by a green metal bar.

Back at school: we have a Christmas tree in the hallway down by the teacher’s bathroom and all day it’s been sitting there decorated, but quiet and dark. Then during cleaning time someone plugged it in and the girls gathered around it and started at the glittering white balls, poking them with their fingers. They wiggled the branches timidly. “It’s so beautiful,” they breathed, and I felt like we were witnessing a Linus moment, all of them swaying around the tree in their navy skirts like a choir, the white balls bright against the orange and red leaves the boys were raking outside, the hallway suddenly much more friendly and familiar. If we had a tree last year I don’t remember it, but this year it has struck wonder in us all.

Also during cleaning time I peek out the second story window and in the courtyard a dozen boys are raking the fallen maple leaves. The trees swirl and sway above them, two or three stories tall. They’re surrounded on all sides by buildings and students peer out of all the windows, their cheeks pink. We watch the boys raking and sweeping, and then a gust of wind comes through and the leaves fly up to us, so close we could reach out and catch one if we were very, very fast. The boys pause for a minute, the red and orange like badges on their black uniforms, and then they heave the plastic sacks over their shoulders and shuffle off to the main garbage.

I walk downstairs and past the Christmas tree and when I’m almost to the staff room a second grade boy I vaguely recognize says, “Teacher!” in English. I pivot on my heel and he holds out a vocabulary list. “How pronounce?” he asks pointing to a word. “Ceiling,” I say, and the boy hi-fives his friend. I point up. “Ceiling.” Eight boys around repeat after me. “Ceiling,” they say, and then point up, mimicking me, “ceiling.” When I slip into the staff room I can hear all eight of them still heading down the hall, repeating “ceiling” over and over, occasionally looking up to make sure it’s still there.

When I enter the staff room a Sensei calls me over to the window. “Look,” he says, in English, “birds.” Out the window, across the arena, is a busty orange maple with crows dotting its branches thick as thieves. As we watch the crows hop from branch to branch and then, as if on cue, they all fly out of the branches which gives the tree the impression of a hairdo come undone, and they settle around the tree trunk where, from our view, it looks like they’re standing in a perfect sentinel line. “Amazing,” I say in Japanese. The teacher turns to me, “like Hitchcock,” he says, and I say, “scary.” O Sensei overhears us. “You’re getting so natural,” she says, “switching from Japanese to English,” and I turn away from the scary birds and head into the staff room where Praju and I set about to convince her a series of four haikus we’ve written were actually done by a famous American poet.

In conclusion: it’s fall, but we don’t yet have the thick layer of snow Seoul had on its streets. We have so many leaves and dark bark and it’s 5:22 and already dark. And now I’m heading up to practice being a mean debate coach because we have 8 days to get them to be the best in Kyushu and I’m not going to let the fact that two yakuza were killed last night in K-town keep me from staying late and doing my duty as a Sensei. Take that, Big Kahuna. Someday you’ll learn English and see how restrained and ladylike I was when what I really wanted to say was that you’ve become a bitter pill to swallow these days, and it’s mostly because of you that I’m quitting in August. Ta-Da!

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All the fun I want for awhile

Last Saturday, in the mad flurry of late nights that led up to November 2nd, our last official debate practice ever, I came into school as a coach. As a Sensei my hours are rigid and I hold to them with such inflexibility one would think I’d turn into a stone palm tree if I stayed at school a minute longer. I am out the door like a shot at 4:15, even on Tuesday and Wednesdays when cleaning time has not yet happened. This life in Japan requires extra work and all my mental energy reserves, and when I don’t have that free time in the late afternoon to leisurely ride home and watch all the little first-graders trundling along under their square laquered backpacks, it feels as though someone is taking the wires in my brain and purposefully crossing them, until before I know it I’ve dropped my phone in the toilet and am spending 5th period crying in my car.

For the last three weeks I have more or less been staying at school every night until eight o’clock, running practice debates with the team in which I am the mean ALT who asks them pointed and perfectly correct English questions, and they must fumble around with their pastel-colored evidence cards, looking at each other helplessly. I have earned some serious cache with The Big Kahuna who has seen me stumbling into the teacher’s room when the school song plays at seven o’clock, reminding all the students to vacate the premises immediately. Little vision remains after my hours of reading ink-speared newspaper copies, and so I grope around for my purse and then totter on my hungry legs out of the teacher’s room and home.

Last Saturday, during late afternoon practice, we shared the first floor with the band. It’s hard to really take an argument seriously when a question ending in, “don’t you agree?” is punctuated with the shrill taps of a trumpet. Or the long pauses during preparation time are serenaded by a quartet of flutes. The music was a bluesy/jazzy combination, and so it felt like our debate was taking place in the corner of a cocktail lounge, and all we were waiting for was the candid cameras to pop out of the fake plants like jack-in-the-boxes, to explain why the trombones were doing scales while we were trying to talk about morality in public schools these days. Whomp-whomp-whomp.

After Saturday’s rehearsal we met every day during the week, and my cold, while not a nasty, violent affair, faithfully reared its head each morning so I had to open the car door in full traffic at 8:17 to hawk up a mucus plug on the unsuspecting pavement. I came to school sounding like I had a scarf stuffed down my throat, and then by 10 o’clock I would be clear and fine, able to conjugate verbs in a single breath, my cold having decided it would lie dormant in my sinuses until the next staff meeting. Thursday, though, we had a truncated/abridged/curtailed schedule as the result of it being November 1st! and us having an all-school assembly in the drafty gym. So I took my wad of kleenexes and tried to not offend anyone by blowing my nose, but there were times when it was necessary, and the pomp and circumstance of my cold suddenly seemed so much bigger and more serious when my sneezes were echoing off the rafters and 900 heads kept glancing in my direction. The assembly finished just in time for the 10 o’clock time barrier to roll around, and so during first period I could be all, “what? that wasn’t me? Do I sound sick to you?”

Other than being sick, I really enjoyed the four hours of debate after school. We verbally romped all over that resolution, and even though the kids are in New Zealand this week, I think they will be able to put it all into practice this Saturday at the debate meet. I thought the stress of having no free time and spending all my extra periods during the day writing fake arguments was being incredibly well-handled by my brain who made no complaints up until last Thursday. It didn’t even hint that the wheels were getting worn down by the rocky road of sickness and debate stress. Had my brain clued me in to how I was feeling, I suppose I could have prevented what came next, but as it was it snuck up on me like a slobbering wet dog tongue and left me thinking how gross it was that I was making a pile of used kleenexes in the car and how noble it was that no one had seen me cry.

This is what happened: For a week and a half now, I have been carting in paper and paper to appease the front office ladies into signing my official “May drive to work” paper. They keep coming back for more, and I keep having to run out to the car to dig through our manilla folder, pulling out insurance! repair cards! Name change forms! I have (secretly) been driving to work anyway because there are semi trucks on the road at eight o’clock at night, and Praju’s bike does not have a light. Which means we are being led through the dark streets of K-town with only my weak wheel-powered beam. It is unsafe! is my cry, but the real reason is it’s cold at eight o’clock in what is now November, and we’re tired.

Finally, Thursday, I was down in the office, huddled around an online Japanese/English translator while they tried to tell me “the required insurance person is not.” When I finally got across that I didn’t understand we trooped down to the English room where we comandeered an unsuspecting Gonzo Sensei and then O Sensei into translating, and what resulted was 30 minutes of paper shuffling, questions and fervent hand-throwing on the part of the office lady. It was finally explained that although we have “voluntary” insurance and the car in our name, we need to change the “compulsory” insurance slip over to Johnathan’s name. Normally I’m somewhat easy going about these things. The Japanese have a complicated bureaocracy and I just go along with all the name-stamping and chain-of-command because it’s no skin off my back. The trouble was that Johnathan has taken care of all these papers and stamping and talking to the right people, and so I felt like a helpless fifties housewife. “Well, my husband said…” kept slipping out of my mouth and when they asked me if we talked to so-and-so or did this-and-this I could only shrug helplessly. “These are all the papers I have,” I said, and O Sensei patted my arm.

And then I could fear the tears building up behind my eyes. Later, I suspected it was the car talk, that it brought back memories of this summer’s driving test, of the stress and fatigue and crying jags I had after all those failures. This felt like one more hurdle that my students, with their Japanese, could leap against the backdrop of a pink sunset, while I was still stretching near the soccer net, unsure my hamstrings wouldn’t snap. I gathered my books and waterbottle and trudged off to the bathroom where I planned to let myself cry until I realized with the tile it was echoing back on itself twenty times, and anyone walking by could hear my sniffling wailing coming from the third stall. So I pulled myself together, turned to flush my sopping kleenexes down the toilet, and as I bent to pick up my books I head a noticeable thud. I whipped around, and there in the throat of the toilet was my white cell phone, already being sucked down by the toilet’s whirlpool. I reached down and snatched it, and as I pulled it up I started crying again because not only did I now have to deal with more car problems, but now I’d waterlogged my phone.

So, like a sad person who lives in their car, I went out and sat in the driver’s seat and cried over my wet phone, and my sickness decided to try for a comeback so I blew my nose many times and drank water to soothe my sore throat. Then I got quite sleepy, as one does after such an emotional release, and I would have leaned back my seat and taken a little snooze, but my phone didn’t work after it’s bath, so I had no way to set an alarm to wake me up for sixth period. I cried a little more at the weird twist fate had twirled me into, and then I waited for the redness to leave my face and I went back into the teacher’s room to write more fake speeches.

What does it all mean? I was under debate’s thumb, but now that the students are safely flying across the Pacific Ocean I’m free to imagine other uses for my free time. Green Tea Sensei snuck my to my desk this morning to tell me the flower arranging club will meet this afternoon, but after three weeks of staying late, all I want to do is head home when 4:15 shows up on the clock, to climb into my warm bed and read a book or watch tv on my computer. I want my boring life back. So, in the interest of mundane afternoon tasks, Johnathan and I dumped out a 1,000 piece puzzle on our coffee table last night. We sorted the border pieces from the middles, pulled out of the four corners, and are planning to start a full-scale assembly tonight. That’s really all the excitement I want for awhile.

P.S. Call it a Great Pumpkin miracle, but these days the phone works swimmingly.

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School of fish class

About once a month the Sensei take out their blue whiteboard markers and march over to the glass-covered master schedule where they hover, nudging each other, drawing complicated spidery lines with pointed arrows. They’re changing the schedule. It’s not permanent and it usually doesn’t affect me too much–a second period class moved to sixth period, a third period class to first. They’re trying to pass back all the October mid-term exams before Praju and I see the inside of a classroom, which means that today instead of having only one oral communication lesson, I have three.

Usually each week I teach the same oral communication lesson to three 40-student homerooms; classes are spaced out over three days so there’s ample time for revision and essay corrections, but all three classes were moved back-to-back this morning. Which means tomorrow morning I’ll be looking at 120 hastily-written essays on volunteer work.

It should be the perfect case study for improvement, how I go from one classroom to the next improving my schpeel, explaining concepts more clearly. In some sense it does work like this. We’re reading two “articles” (penned by Praju and I) about volunteer work in Japan and abroad, but no amount of do you understands can coax the students into telling us that yes they do, it’s all quite clear, or no, and what is volunteer work anyway? I have them read the articles aloud, just under their breath, and O Sensei and I wander up and down the aisles, putting our ears up to their lips. “Just a little louder,” I keep saying, giving them a thumbs up. I’m a patient teacher, I smile a lot, and when there’s just one oral communication class in a day I come back to my desk and eat a few nuts, and the protein brings back the energy that they suck out of me with their refusal to answer any questions.

But the three classes wore me out. By the third class I’m set for a showdown. They have six true/false questions to answer about the two articles, and although I wandered through the row and saw almost everyone had not only a answer, but the right answer, no one will volunteer to answer the questions. I stand with my arms crossed at the front of class. I clap my hands together. In the past two classes I’ve picked up the seating chart and selected a “volunteer”, but I’m tired of them thinking they can get away with their collective passivism.

Outside I can hear the P.E. classes either lapping the school with their “one, two” military song or the 2nd period boys hooting at baseball, the 4th period girls giggling during their soccer match. After one day of pouring rain, and and the freak cold snap of yesterday, today is pleasantly balmy. The light is a pale shade of yellow, just enough to be warm, but not the fluorescent strength of summer. A bat cracks against a ball. The boys with desks along the wall of windows whip their heads around, and stare down at their classmates running around small as chess pieces.

“The longer it takes to do this the shorter time you have to write your essays,” I say finally, with a half smile. O Sensei scrawls the sentences on the board. “They just learned that this morning,” she says, “it’s so nice that you used it.” I have no idea what they learn in their grammar classes–it’s a secret mishmash of sentences written alongside math equations to help them remember–but it pleases me to no end. In fact, we’ve had all sorts of these coincidences with our volunteer lesson. My article was about adopting children from other countries, and O Sensei informs me they’d just had a debate in Japanese about whether surrogacy should be made legal in Japan. I’d love to tell them about it, laugh about it together as a class, but I can’t even get them to take a chance on answering a question they have a 50% chance of getting right.

“Try, try!” I say over and over, and finally one boy raises his hand, and then a girl, and a third boy. We give them stamps on a card that boosts their OC grade, and I walk back to the front of the room. It takes us 20 minutes to extract all six answers, but I’m hoping this is the last time we have to play this game of chicken. My father once told me the average teacher wait time is three seconds, but I’ve found I’m willing to wait five minutes, seven, ten. O Sensei and I walk back to the teacher’s room laughing. “Japanese teachers are not that patient.”

I can tell how busy O Sensei is by how high her papers are stacked, and in the post-test days we almost can’t see each other when we’re both sitting down. She tilts her chin up to catch my eye during lunchtime and asks, “are you free next period?” I put my hands in my hair, stare at her, but no words come to mind. “Do you have class?” she asks again. I try to remember what day it is. I’m tired. My schedule comes to mind, but it’s been snipped and reassembled into something I don’t recognize. After a minute I shake my head, afraid she’s going to ask me to visit one of her classes. “Then we can talk,” she says. I nod.

In the afternoon the Senseis pull open the teacher’s room windows. It’s a beautiful day. The palm trees out front wave in the breeze and there’s a class on the soccer field shouting and laughing. Gonzo Sensei wanders over to my desk. “That’s my homeroom,” she says. I look outside and, sure enough, it’s the Superhero class throwing elbows and hip checks. We meander over to the window, put our elbows on the ledge and watch them. “They’re so excited,” she says. I hear the girls yelling to one another, the squeals as the ball gets close to the goal. They grab each others arms and swing around in circles. They’re the only homeroom that isn’t reshuffled each April, and so they’ve seen each other go from timid first years like their OC counterparts to people willing to dress in full-body American flag spandex suits. They’re a tight-knit group, and it shows in the third year English course during class match when the girls are cheering for each other, saying “drink it! drink it!” dancing up and down while the other third year homerooms are subdued, still feeling each other out.

A few weeks ago O Sensei confronted one of our OC classes, telling them it’s rude not to respond, that we’re only asking for a yes or no. “They said they understand,” she relayed. “They say they’re very sorry. They say they want to do better, that other Sensei tell them the same thing. They don’t understand how they’ve gotten like this.” I imagine them having this conversation with her, all of their faces blank and staring, and then suddenly together, like a school of fish, they find a voice. They’re not a class with a few stars, though O Sensei says this homeroom scores the highest on their English tests. They’re the kind of class that, when I ask a question, have to roll their eyes from side to side, checking the answers with their neighbors, and then the imperceptible wind of their collective thought will roll through the room and I’ll be able to snatch it from the air, like a wayward paper airplane. I don’t expect them to reach the Superhero class level who last Friday clapped wildly for one member after she gave an English speech in class. “It was amazing,” they told her over and over. “You’re really good.” She looked down at her desk shyly, fighting to keep a smile off her face.

All I need is a few of them to swim out of formation.

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Black faces and angry dinosaurs

When I get back from my two-week jaunt to Montana I find a small handwritten note on my desk: Peaquah Sensei, can you please find me the lyrics to the Sesame Street theme song before third period? Underneath it I find schedules for oral communication second term (my suggestion to teach the students superstitions and English haikus has been taken; my suggestion to have the students work at their own pace and monitor themselves has not). Gonzo Sensei, out with chronic back pain all summer, is now “out” indefinitely and she’s left cryptic outlines for the next six weeks. When I talk to Praju, the new ALT, and M&M Sensei, Gonzo’s replacement, they both shrug helplessly. We have a day and a half to choose six students to compete in the debate tournament this fall, record the speeches of two students hoping to move to the next round of an all-English speech contest, and an hour to find the Sesame Street theme song.

The internet is down. I try for twenty minutes to load google, only to come up with the error page, and then I call Jamie, who’s sitting in an office with The New People and the husband. She sings me the first verse over the phone and I press a scrap piece of paper against my thigh, trying to jot down the lines in the sweaty women’s locker room. In the end my writing blurs together and when I carry the fractured bits back to O Sensei she laughs and says: maybe you can just come sing it in class.

T-Rex Sensei storms around the staff room, blowing papers off desks as he clomps by. We must talk, he says, coming to a thudding halt beside my desk. I look down at my papers, shuffle them around a bit, and when I look up he’s gone–off to find a textbook, notes, I’m not sure, because he doesn’t re-materialize until the end of the day. Halfway between our desk he pauses, turns around, and as an afterthought yells: How was your vacation?

My students are tan from all their hours in the sun practicing for Sports Day, although when I see them they say: Sensei, look at how black we are! I know exactly how they got that black–from attending festivals like the Water Festival where old men in full-body fishnets and cardboard trains on their heads paraded up and down the main streets in K-Town waving pompoms in the air. Or from sitting through the afternoon sun to get good spots at the K-Town Fireworks where the explosions were so big we couldn’t see them with all our peripheral strength and so loud they echoed off the tin roofs of the food stalls. The students are horrified that I see this change in their coloring. It’s dangerous, they say, it’s unhealthy. And then, this morning in class, I tell them: Yes, it’s dangerous. Yes, it’s bad for you, but it’s just so cool. In America it is so cool. They shake their heads sadly, like I’m a cancerous cigarette salesman passing out “testers”. Then, tonight I know they’ll all bust out their face-whitening creams, and in a few months, in the midst of winter when I’m pasty and crusty and feeling colorless and unhealthy, they’ll think me my most beautiful.

When I’m traveling, up in the air with all those people, I tend to get the feeling that we’re all in it together, that we’re cut of the same cloth. Of course there’s a few outsiders–the Japanese couple in plaid shirts and khakis doing power squats outside the bathroom door, the angry flight attendants gossiping in the back of the plane, the children running willy-nilly up the aisles, pausing to point and laugh at my puffy oily face. And then, just as we’re landing, the older Japanese woman across the aisle from me presses a pillow to the side of her face and turns herself away from the window. The sun is streaming across the wing, and while the American sitting next to her looks down over Tokyo she squints her eyes shut and presses her cheek deeper in the blue gauze pillowcase. I crane my neck around her, trying to get a view of what all the fuss was about until suddenly I realize that it isn’t the landing, or the ear-popping, or a fear of heights that keeps her in the pinched position, but it’s the sun itself. The Great Big Sun coming up like a friendly dog to say hello, and she can’t even make eye contact, can’t even extend a limb to be lovingly bronzed. And I can’t help it–I’m American, I work in a place where finding the theme song to Sesame Street is my top priority of the day, I’m willing to “blacken” my skin for the sake of being cool–I lean out of my seat, into the aisle, and I let the sun hit me full-blast.

And that’s how I re-enter Japan.

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If I drew the line I wouldn’t have to blunder across it

It wasn’t until this school year, when my whole new cast of teachers peeled off their lesson plans like crisp bills, that I realized last year Larin and I had sort of cobbled together our plans from crazy glue and paper clips and, not surprisingly, they were falling apart. We’d stepped off the plane, in sticky August, to a crew of blank-faced teachers who handed us books and pretty much left us alone after that. This resulted in us attempting to lead the entire class in a complex game where they had to name 25 places on a map with only a handful of clues. Then we taught them about pumpkin seeds and potstickers. The year culminated in a two-day lesson we were forced to abruptly end after just one day, leaving the students with the English words for “I want to go to New Zealand” but no airport vocabulary.

Some of our other classes went better, granted, but I’m pretty sure the real grist in the wheel was that Larin and I had a difficult time teaching the same material to different classes. I’d get ahead of him and have to stall in the next class by playing a STAND UP SIT DOWN game that’s about as much fun as it sounds. Or he’d spend 20 minutes explaining the word purpose and the next week I’d have to give the truncated version.

But THIS term O Sensei had a thick manilla envelope sitting on my desk when I got back from Kyoto, and Gonzo Sensei, the former college debate champion, had in mind a six class plan of attack for the first debate. I’m scheduled to teach a lot with Mount Fuji, the new teacher from another high school, and he’s been pretty quiet so far, but I suppose only because the women on either side of him keep pushing paper onto his desk for him to sign. Green T Sensei, who I have mentioned a few times before, is the new 1-1 homeroom teacher, and she’s already laid out a comprehensive reading schedule for their classes with me. I teach the reading/writing class and Larin’s doing speech.

It’s nice to fall under somone’s wing, and let them worry about the three-year race the students are running. I’m already beginnning to feel more structured, like someone’s given me a skeleton, and by the power of my mind I can mold my scoliotic skeleton to match. While in the beginning I might have only gone along reluctantly with another teacher’s plans, all the while leaving a sparkly glitter trail to find my way back, I now find myself wanting to hand over the cheap construction paper diagrams and sloppily copied worksheets in favor of O Sensei’s plans of stickers and weekly essays.

Have I become the hard-nosed homework matron of K-town’s High School? Perhaps. But while I aquiesce to the stickers and stamps and rewards because I am just an assistant teacher, it feels like I’m slowly being pulled into a sloppy mudbath that will forever cling to my skin and taint what I do. Surely palm readers forevermore will see the grease in the lines of my palms and know I’m just a dirty extrinsic motivator. But I say to you now–know the truth. The stickered-up metal shell I’ll be clanking into the classroom next week hides the stifled intrinsic motivator who doesn’t believe stickers and stamps should be traded, like silver, for right answers.

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