Sexy Americans

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 9

I didn't get up any earlier than normal today, despite having to leave 20 minutes earlier, but having done everything the night before certainly helped.

I got to Koko, parked my bike out front and took my laptop with me as I ran in, changed shoes, photocopied some papers off my desk, said “hello” to Mama (I figured it'd be good if ONE teacher knew that I was only there temporarily as half the staff room had already said good morning and they seem to worry about me) and changed my shoes and rushed back out the door and over to Kogyo.

I made it on time for the staff meeting, then started preparing for lessons. I worked with the teachers to do a bunch of photocopying. Then wen went to class.

At the time of writing this, I've now taught this exact same lesson six times, so individual classes are now a blur. The lesson started off with me introducing myself, then a game where students think of words that they associate with America. Some classes had really good words like “big apple” “yes we can!” and “Utah.” Every class had at least one Bush, everyone always had “hamburger” although it was usually misspelled. I especially enjoyed watching students copy the wrong spelling off another team's list. New York was also common, as was Hawaii, also misspelled. I learned to tell the students to keep their books shut after one class sat at their desks looking up words rather than writing.

In my last class of the day, the boys (the classes average 33 boys and 3 girls) was quite giggley as I was going through the words and correcting spelling on the board. I fnally come across why when I see that someone had written “sexy.” Knowing they were testing me, I merely turned around and in my normal teaching voice said, “yes, Americans are sexy... two points” and moved on. They were much quieter after not having gotten a reaction from me. Oh, sweet boys. I'm taking it as a personal compliment, intended or not.

Then came a PowerPoint presentation about ME! For some reason, I find myself much more interesting than the students do. As the day went on, I adjusted it, making it both shorter, and highlighting more the points that the students were most interested in. I have a few props that I hand around. The first and most popular is a beanie Bucky Badger. In my last class, I looked down shortly after handing Bucky out to see that students were passing around a small stuffed monkey instead. Class was stopped until my “Where is Bucky?” unearthed the poor guy from a boy's pocket. I also handed around a Packer jersey (Donald Driver) and the manga MARS, which has Rei wearing a Packer jersey on the first page of book 2. After one boy sniffed the jersey, I started telling future classes that it was clean.

After the introduction was a quiz, all about me! I had gone to the hyaku-en store to buy giant metalic fans and decorated each with an X on one side. Teams were then to vote True or False. This game didn't completely work and it wouldn't be until the following day that I had a truly successful round. Students were much more interested in peeking at others' votes before voting themselves, even as I added in a count-down and such.

It's amazing how you can run the same class and it goes so differently with different students. My biggest problem was that I underestimated the amount of time I'd need to do everything or get all of the boys organized. (The girls tend to be quiet and look, frankly, shell-shocked.) So, we didn't get through everything ever, but we got farther sometimes than others.

I messed up and bought onions this week when I already had some, so I need to use up onions! I made a marinara sauce (except it wasn't really... saucy....) for dinner, which was delicious, although hot enough that I honestly couldn't taste anything. Which defeats the purpose. I added tofu, which made no taste difference. Leftovers became lunch for Friday.