steal this japanese kid

ok, so kids classes scared the bejebus out of me before i had a few. now that im a veteran, i have to say kids classes rock. they rock hard. especially kinders - 4 to 6 year olds to the layman. the first or second kid i had was ryusei, who is surprisingly smart and so he gets bored in no time. i still havent figured out how to keep him interested but now when he decides to do something else, i roll with it. he wanted to bend all the cards i had in half and then throw them on the floor. cool man. i dig it. then we went over to the window and watched pedestrians and he taught me some japanese swears.

i have this adorable little girl named hinata with no teeth in her damned head. she easily gets into the top 5 cutest kids ive ever seen. she doesnt like the games that nova suggests so she just makes up her own and they rarely have a point. she had me close my eyes while she hid blue poker chips under eight flash cards. i then had to find the chips by flipping over the cards. sounds like a pretty straight forward game, but she put a chip under every card so i couldnt lose. also, instead of keeping score, she took the chips back and put them in her pocket. today i had her again, and we were coloring pictures of giraffes. i really got into it and then she got into it too. we must have spent 10 minutes coloring and i was just asking her for relationship advice like she was fluent. she would look up and smile whenever i paused, so i would just continue: 'yeah, so the problem is that i dont speak any japanese so im really shy around the girls here. i bought a book the other day and im learning mad fast, so i should rub my face in it soon enough.' i sing random songs and sometimes the kids catch on. today hinata recognized the wedding march so we just sang that together until the bell rang. kids rock.

the group lessons are much more challenging. with eight kids at once the problem becomes keeping the one kid who doesnt want to be there from dragging everyone down with him. today it was akira. these guys are always like cancer in the class: their bad attitude spreads to every other student as they eventually get bored and want to punch others in the crotch. im not opposed to crotch punching but a lot of the time someones parent is right outside and keeping an eye on things. a girl named midori in my class is either the class suck up or has a crush on me, because she helped me keep all of the boys from running around and yelling shit in japanese. shes nice to have around but if it is a crush it creeps me out a little bit.

there was a kid who used to work at our branch named marc. so, to set this story up you need to know we have something called a 'kids log book.' whenever anyone cries, gets hurt, or misbehaves, we're supposed to write it down. so this kid marc used to write ridiculous shit in it. while hillarious to read, it was pretty dumb of him to provide a written confession of what he does in class. some entries were like: 'today haruki punched another student in the crotch when he wasnt looking. i tried, unsuccessfully, to hide from the students how funny i found this. another student ran into the wall and his nose started to bleed. it bled on his book and all over the carpet. no action taken.' when someone got wise to what was going on, he was sent to the toyohashi branch to get disciplined. my boss, cathryn, was really lame about it too. she lied to him about why he was going to toyohashi. he only found out what was going on when once he got there.

anyway, so the kids are awesome and as long as you dont get caught you can basically just fuck around with them and play games. and if anyone back home wants a japanese kid, they're running around practically unsupervised over here. it would be so easy to pop one in a box and first class it back to you guys. just let me know.