"Fuji-san!"

9.20.07

Today was a long day. A very long day indeed. Since one of my students had a private make-up lesson, I had five, one hour lessons back to back. Normally, Thursdays are my hardest day because of the energetic children that often get out of hand. Today, the children were generally well behaved, but I still felt drained as I fought to constantly get their attention, stop them from chattering on in Japanese, and corrected their papers because they were not listening to my directions; they were doing things on their own accord. All that added up make one tuckered out Sheila at the end of the day (8pm). My last two lessons were a delight.

While teaching today there were a couple memorable events that occurred.
1. One of my students, who is supposed to come to my class on Mondays, came into class today. She has been on vacation since I arrived in Japan, and I haven’t really had the chance to judge her skill level. Anyways, we were going over adjectives like big/small, hot/cold, and up/down. On the “big” touch-and-feel adjective card there is a picture of a mountain. When I pointed to the picture of the mountain and asked, “What is this?”, most of the kids said “Fuji-san!” in their little Japanese voices. I corrected them and said “Yes, like Mt. Fuji. This is a mountain.” Well to my surprise one of my students, the one making-up her Monday lesson, goes “Do you know Mount Fuji?” in perfect English. Under any normal circumstance in the United States, I would not be surprised that this cute little girl was asking me a question, but here in Japan, I have become accustomed to my students both asking and answering me in incomplete sentences. To make a long story short. I was blown away by her question! I tried to compose my excitement while smiling and answering “Yes, I do know Mount Fuji!”.

Not only was I surprised, but other students became silent as if they were being graced with the last pinks, reds, and oranges of a beautiful sunset. They were just as speechless as I was. However, their speechlessness didn’t last more than a mere moment before their voices returned to their usual rowdiness.

2. One of my older students is studying to take the Pre Eiken 2 exam, which is an English proficiency exam for high school students. My student is in junior high school, but she lived in the United States for a few years, and as a result, her English level is higher than most Japanese children her age. Once a child passes the Pre Eiken 2 test they can take the Eiken 2 test and then on to Eiken 1. Eiken 1 is the most difficult of all the Eiken tests. Most Japanese tests are ranked like this; the lower the number the more difficult.

So we were going over review questions and I felt awfully self-conscious because there were several that I didn’t even know how to explain, and I’m an English speaker! I mean, who knows that the singular form of data was datum!? I knew data was plural, but I couldn’t think of a situation where you would talk about data as being singular. It was so odd. I also found that explaining idioms was very difficult. Which makes sense considering Wikipedia's definition of an idiom as "an expression, term, or phrase" that cannot be defined literally. How then do you explain to your student that the answer to a fill in the blank question should be “Anything will do.” and not “Something will do.”? Idioms must be memorized, but it is by no means satisfying for both teacher and student when the answer is “I'm sorry but that’s just the way it is.”

Besides teaching today, Lauren and I met her friend Yuriko (Yuri) for lunch. We went to the Indian lunch buffet and all of us really enjoyed spending the time together. Yuriko was very energetic and spoke English very well for not studying it.

Oh, I also wanted to mention that I made a comment in one of my lessons about a cat having nine lives, and my students looked at me like I was crazy. Evidently, Japanese cats do not have nine lives. Sorry Tom!