Lunch out and Shooters

I just uploaded all of my pictures from Shooters. I went there a week ago with my co-workers and afterwards we went to Karaoke. I think I've already mentioned all of this, so enough said.

I heard back from Daniela, Starr, and my dad that the postcards went through alright. I sent them a little while after Valentine's Day, so I guess it takes three weeks for something I send to reach you guys. I got a postcard from my mom in Paris which was cool. That makes her the first person to send me something. Thanks by the way, mom.

I am completely ignorant of what's going on back home. I only come to this internet cafe once or twice a week, so I don't waste my time reading the Globe. If there's anything I should know about, don't hesitate.

I had one of those days at work where you question if you're terrible at your job or not. Before each session, we check this little board that tells us what room we're in and how many students are going to be there, etc; So the other day I walked into the wrong room and my co-worker Mark had to stand at the door and wait for me to realize that I had fucked up and leave. I brought the wrong student's folder into class with me but I was lucky and she hadn't done the lesson recently. I had a full kid's class and I let them all out about 4 minutes early. In the kid's room its hard to hear the bell, so when they all lined up with their backpacks at the door, I just assumed they were right and let them go. That's a pretty serious fuck-up I think. Then in my last class of the day I had two girls who just didn't understand a THING I said and it was mildly frustrating. I mean its usually them and not me, but if they go downstairs and complain to the Japanese staff that I was talking too fast or something, then I'm just guilty and that's all there is to it.

I'm caught between not giving a shit what happens at work and wanting to be good at my job. I mean, when it comes down to it, I don't imagine this is going to amount to anything on my resume. The only thing I'll be left with in a year is a letter of recommendation but I'm convinced that those are about as helpful as Hepatitis C. So why not just give up and do a job just good enough to not get fired (see Office Space)? I guess I'll try to get better at this because I feel bad for the students. We're a conversational school, which means we only talk to them and don't actually teach them anything. We don't review grammar rules or anything. If we do anything useful its vocabulary building, but even that would be better accomplished at home with a dictionary. I feel like these people really want to learn English and the company only has to create the illusion that they're learning. If any of these students (and I'm talking about the upper level ones) went to Boston they wouldn't be able to decipher a single word spoken to them. No one in the northeast talks as slowly as I do here, and no one uses such simple sentence structures with such easily understood words. They're not any better off than someone like me, here in Japan. So that's why I'll try to improve what I'm doing and not make so many dumb mistakes. The company can eat a dick though. It's comforting to know that if I get into serious trouble here, I can always jump ship and land another job with one of their competitors. There's a lot of money to be made teaching English here and these companies are habitually short-handed. That makes me marketable and being marketable means I don't have to deal with anyone's shit if I don't feel like it. Which is nice.