The grind

I got my first complaint at work the other day. Someone said I was talking too fast and they couldn't understand me.

No shit.

I actually can't believe that someone hasn't said that earlier. Sometimes I get carried away in the classroom and it occurs to me that I'm going WAY too fast. I'm used to blank stares so I miss the cues when I start to do this.

So my quasi-boss had a heart-to-heart with me that I thought was in bad taste. Maybe its just Nova policy to let the teachers know every time something negative is said, but by his own admission this is the first bad comment in a sea of good ones. Why did anyone find it necessary to tell me then? They couldn't just cut me some slack? Everyone has bad days. Why did they need to rub it in my face when they almost never tell me when good things are said? Maybe this isn't the first comment about my speed that they've received or maybe it was just an excuse to talk to me about the second issue. I asked for a transfer form a few days ago. My quasi-boss tossed in at the end of his speech that I was doing a great job and everyone hoped that I would stay around for a long time. Regardless, they're all assholes. Not my quasi-boss, who's quasi-alright, but everyone else. He doesn't get off the hook completely because it was still him I had to deal with and he's just on his way to becoming a spitting image of everyone else in the company who sucks dick proper.

Also, I've started to introduce language into the lessons that I think is more appropriate for everyday usage. For example, in a lower-level lesson, someone might get asked 'how is your job?' to which they are given a veritable galaxy of suggested responses: 'its ok,' 'its good,' and 'it's pretty good.' Cutting edge stuff. So I added 'It sucks' and encouraged everyone to use it. They understood that I was giving them something that Nova might not approve of because everytime someone said it I cracked up. In a lesson about pets, students are encouraged to use adjectives to defend their pet preferences.

Automaton 1: 'Do you like dogs?'
Automaton 2: 'yes'
1: 'why?'
2: 'because they're cute.'

Suggested adjectives include interesting, quiet, cute, ugly, and clever. So I added tasty, evil, and a few others. Every time someone said they liked cats because they were tasty, again, I got a kick out of it.

The trick is to keep yourself interested in the lessons because if you're interested then the students feed off of your energy and everything goes really smooth. I even have fun in some lessons. I'm just worried that when the laughs from this innocent stuff wear off I'm going to find it necessary to start being innappropriate.

Oh yeah, and the other day I had my first Topic Voice lesson. This is where for two consecutive 40-minute blocks you need to keep up to 15 Japanese students talking about something. Thanks to the limited vocabulary of most students, this is actually quite hard. Teachers have to put some serious thought into what to talk about for an hour and a half. So I brought in my iPod and incomplete lists of the lyrics to about 8 songs. So I had the students sit around and try to fill in the blanks and then try to guess the title of the song at the end. I was really disppointed when only three students showed up, but it was genius. The songs included:

The Beatles 'With a Little Help From My Friends'
Oasis 'Wonderwall'
Sublime 'Summertime'
Akon 'Mr. Lonely'
Johnny Cash 'A Boy Named Sue'

and three others that now I can7t remember. We only got through 5 songs in an hour and a half because I had to keep repeating parts of the songs. I had a lot of fun doing it but I wish I could have brought in better music. I picked those songs because I hoped they were familiar with them (at least a little bit) and because I thought the spoken English was clear enough where they could pick out the words. My first list included 'CREAM' by Wu-Tang and 'Stan' by Eminem and Dido, but after actually listening to the songs and the words I decided against it. Since I was handing everyone in the room the words to the songs, if just one person was offended, they had all the proof they needed to hand to the Japanese staff downstairs. I imagine a song about letting your pregnant girlfriend suffocate to death in the trunk of your car while you drive it over a bridge is not what my empoyers would consider appropriate.