If you're happy and you know it...

So, this morning as I was brushing my teeth, I heard another song tinkling by the window. Once again, it sounded a bit like an ice cream truck. It was the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands…” I was tempted to clap my hands with a foamy toothbrush hanging out of my mouth, but I refrained seeing as it’s a shared bathroom space.

Another strange phenomenon I’ve encountered is that sometimes a truck will drive through town with a very serious male voice blaring from a loudspeaker. Of course, I have no idea what they’re saying, so to me it could be anything: a bomb threat alert telling us to take cover, or “we know you’re in there, come out with your hands up!” The first time I heard it I had no idea, but it sounded like this guy meant business. So my first instinct was, oh no hide under the table! This happened during the first week of training and everyone else was going along their merry way, prancing around pretending to teach non-existent Japanese kids English. There I was cowering in the corner, wondering what they wanted from us. I was sure we were in a police state or something. It was a very “Big Brother” moment. It was only until a few days later when another truck came by emitting a loud, but very cute Japanese female voice that I decided maybe these voices weren’t meant to be threatening.

Now on to the teaching. Oh teaching is fine. I am almost done with my second week as a bonafide English teacher. The Free Time Lessons (FTLs), where the students are high school age and up, are going pretty well. The students can be housewives, breadwinners, college students, you name it. The lessons can get kind of formulaic, but at least you have the slight thrill of not knowing what lesson you’re teaching until you look at the students’ “passports” and figure out what lessons they haven’t done. The lower levels are a little frustrating because the point of the class is to get them to have conversations in English, but these people are beginners and can’t say much more than “My name Mariko. I am office worker.” Before I came to Japan, whenever I asked someone what they did for a living, no one ever replied, “I am an office worker” and left it at that. As if that’s a satisfying, complete answer. Great, where does the conversation go now. I guess I better ask you what office you work at. But every time I ask a student “what do you do?” they reply “I am office worker.” Why not just say, I work at so and so company? I’m guessing this is something they’ve learned in English classes.

You also spend most of the lesson trying to work on their pronunciation. But it must work somehow, cause when I go into a higher level class, the pronunciation is so much better. It's amazing. Something just finally clicks I guess. Suddenly the r's are no longer l's, they can pronounce F, their V's don't sound like B's anymore, and their t's aren't unnecessarily over-pronounced. I'm not sure what makes them eventually get over that final hurdle, but I am duly impressed. In those lower level classes, it's a struggle.

The higher-level adult classes are pretty nice though. You do a quick vocab or grammar lesson from the book with them, and then you have a conversation with them for like 20 minutes. It can be extremely painful if they just don’t want to talk, cause they’re too shy or whatever, but often the students are eager to chat and it can get interesting.

Kids classes. Oh man. The first few kinda sucked. I didn’t know what I was doing, and the kids just sat there and stared at me. I thought they could tell that I had no idea what I was doing, but turns out they didn’t understand a word I was saying. They kept trying to talk to me in Japanese and I was like, um… you do realize I don’t know a word of Japanese? That’s the point, I know English, I teach you English. We’re not supposed to speak Japanese in this classroom. Turns out, the classes I was taking over for the month of March were all usually taught by this one guy who just speaks Japanese to his students all the time (which he isn't really supposed to do). So when I came in there, they were like…. Um, why doesn’t she know Japanese? What the heck is she saying? They were also unbelievably shy and wouldn’t say anything. So you can imagine that we didn’t get very much done in those first lessons.

The next few lessons I taught were much better. I still need some work figuring out how to discipline, cause when there are just one or two naughty kids they can really disrupt a lesson. In other classes, the kids are just angels and play all the games I tell them to and learn the vocab. I think they actually have fun (woah). There was the class where I taught the kids how to say “brush your teeth” while jumping up and down and pretending to brush their teeth like a crazy person would. Everything must be exaggerated. For “wash your face," I had them rub their hands all over their face with a blissful smile on their face like they were REALLY enjoying it. For "brush your hair," I, of course, pretended to brush my hair and look in a mirror and go “ooh la la." Man, the kids just ate all this up. They loved it. They couldn’t stop falling over with laughter. That was probably the most fun I’ve had in a kid’s class so far. Sometimes I think we aren’t really educators, we’re entertainers. I heard one teacher call us "edu-tainers." That’s about right. Basically we play lots of games with the kids and try to make them laugh and have fun. Maybe throw in a few vocabulary words in there, maybe numbers, the alphabet.

Let’s see, what songs have I taught the kids… London Bridge is falling down, and Here we go round the Mulberry bush. Of course there’s always the alphabet song. Which by the way, they’ve changed to make it easier for the kids. It’s “ABCDEFG, HIJKLMN, OPQRSTU, VW, XYZ, I can sing my abc’s, next time won’t you sing with me?”

If you recall, back when we learned the alphabet in the U.S., we learned it as “ABCDEFG, HIJKLMNOP, QRS, TUV, WX, Yand Z, now I know my abc’s, next time won’t you sing with me?” Apparently, we native English speakers say the “LMNOP” way too fast and it confuses the Japanese students. Maybe it confuses American kids, too (it probably does). But anyways, because of this problem, they've changed the spacing of the pauses in the ABC song! It totally throws me every time I have to sing it with the kids.