Lets Enjoying Engrish

So it's our last night on this fine island of Hokkaido.  Tomorrow Tokyo.  Goodbye snow, goodbye Rooters, goodbye Oktoberfest, goodbye my snowboard (gunna toss it - always was a useless piece of crap and now it's a battered, old, useless piece of crap), goodbye snowboarding pants (which are so tight up my fanny, I believe I will never be able to have another baby).  I'm really going to miss it here.  However, I remember the last night I had in Hokkaido, before I left after my 15 month hiatus in the world of English teaching.  Jesus I was glad to go.  I think I wept tears of joy.  There was no way in the world I ever thought I would miss it here.

I was mainly happy to get away from my soul sucking job.  I had a small calendar on my wall in my fluorescent bulb lit classroom, and after I finished work at 9pm every night,  I put a big X in that day's box.  I think it made the days crawl slower doing that, but I couldn't help it.  I had to feel like I was inching closer to the end.   That's how desperate I was to walk out the door of that school, and never go back.  I actually never could go back now, even if I went mentally insane and decided to reapply.  GEOS has gone bust.  Apparently it happened about two years ago, but I never found out until I was making small talk with a dude I met in the cafeteria last week.  He'd worked for NOVA the once largest English teaching company in Japan.  That one went supernova in a giant balls up in 2007.

Yep, the old Eikaiwa (English conversation school) bubble has pretty much burst here in Japan.  Sounds like the collapse of GEOS was the nail in the coffin.  Can I just say though, I'm not surprised.  Firstly, what a rip off.  Poor bloody students are paying an absolute fortune to sit in a stuffy, badly lit room with a foreign loser who can't get a proper job anywhere else.   And who, by the way, can't teach English for shit.  Then they have to embarrassingly stumble through inane conversations about their hobbies and what they did last summer vacation.  It's pathetic.  And I should know.  I was one of those losers.  The only reason I was there in the first place is because I'd just finished the season at Hotham, heard there was ace snow in Nippon from a Japanese ski instructor, and was sick of being a waitress in Byron.  I was a really bad teacher in those days.  Often I would have the lesson preparation book open on my knee under the table, trying to blunder my way through grammar I knew zilch about.  When a student would ask me a question, I would throw it back to the rest of the class thinking I was being really crafty.  They would have known I had no idea what the present continuous from of the verb was.  Just embarrassing.  I cringe at the memory.

What do you mean, you've run out of Easter Eggs????

I taught a lot of kids.  Another rip off.  No wonder the poor parents were so strung out all the time.  Paying a fortune, and all their kid could do was count to twenty, and say "Mon-die, Tues-die" (I taught them my accent).  Before I worked there, one of the mother's had gone so psycho, that a security guard had to be called to take her away.  It's a cut throat business.  I actually had a student who was eighteen months old.  His Mum thought he's be at an advantage if he started early.  Early? The kid couldn't even speak Japanese.  There was no way he was going to progress to talking about the weather anytime soon.  I really did feel sorry for some of those primary school aged kids though.  They would be up at the crack of dawn to travel to school.  Then they would have school all day, six days a week.  After school they would go straight to 'cram schools' so that they could eventually get into the best high schools.  And in the evening they would have English lessons, or ballet lessons, or music lessons.  Sometimes it was all I could do to keep them awake.  When asked what they most wanted to do on the weekend, the overwhelming majority would reply with longing in their voices..."Sleep!"  It's tough to be a child in the Japanese school system.

Little did Tsubasa's mother know that she'd already carved out a future for her antisocial son

Sometimes this sleeping tendency could be used to my advantage for the under fives.  Young Japanese children have a reputation for being maniacs.  They aren't disciplined by their parents, and they eat a lot of sugar.  As suggested by my brother, I would often turn up the classroom heating to a toasty 30 degrees.  Then I would lead the rat pack in a few vigorous rounds of "Head Shoulders Knees and Toes".  Then, like magic they would start to get all hot and sleepy.  So I would get out the pillows and we would all have a little lie down while sensei would get on her mobile and write a few texts to her buddies back home.  Worked like a charm.

It's not an exciting job.  Although once I nearly had a baby born in my class.  My student, who was eight months pregnant was in the middle of telling me how she was the boss and 'wore pants' in her household.  Suddenly she got up from her chair - looking really embarrassed and said that she had to go.  And bolted.   The other students then alerted me to the fact that there was liquid all over the floor.  "What is it?" I asked.  One of the students got out her translator - typed a few words in and then announced "Maybe it's urine".  All the other students nodded in agreement.  It wasn't.  It was amniotic fluid, and baby Masahiro was born 4 hours later.

My hobbies are eating, howling and shitting

I also had a very unusual man called Kouichi who would have a private lesson once a week.  One of my lowest points over that entire year, was sitting in his lesson on Christmas day while he did the action of how I should soap my body up with the shower gel he'd just given me.   I requested he have group lessons after that.  I don't think any of the other women he shared a class with really appreciated his presence either, but it sure took the pressure off me.  He was pretty excited to be in a room with 5 females.  He got extra twitchy.  The gifts kept coming.  One night he presented all of us with large branches from his tree.  We just all sat their holding them trying to go on with the lesson.  It was like a trip to the Black Forest in there.  Another night, I sat absentmindedly eating a bag of cherries he'd given me that evening while I was filling out my daily record.  Suddenly I looked down, and saw to my horror that there were maggots on the page.  The bag was infested.  I think I may have eaten several.

It's that centre crunch that gives the extra flavour burst

At least nobody crapped their daks in my class.  That guy from the cafeteria was telling me that NOVA had a contract with a halfway house for mental patients.  Now HE had some good stories.  Probably the most revolting was the one about the lady who shat her pants in the middle of the class in the tiny hot cubical that passes for a NOVA classroom.  She pretended it hadn't happened, the other students pretended it hadn't happened, so my new friend pretended it hadn't happened.

This is Japanese way of dealing with the majority of embarrassing and socially awkward situations.  Try it sometime, it's a lot easier than cleaning up poo.