I am OUTTA HERE

Out on vacation until further notice!

 

 

(further notice to be provided in at least 10 days.)

The Glorious Workers Paradise of Junior High

I had always heard that junior high is where the social clamps come down over here, and I’d seen a bit of it in class, but it had never really bothered me so much.  It just seemed like slightly authoritarian teaching.  The teacher lectures the information for 40 minutes, a worksheet is done, and little room is left for expression and creativity on the part of the students.  (English class isn’t like this, but sitting through social studies/math/and science, I can see why some of the kids hate school).

But, now that summer vacation has started, the time when students are SUPPOSED to be at their MOST free… I’ve come to understand the gulag that is junior high discipline.  Last week there was a fireworks festival in Noshiro (the more urban (?) location that I teach).  I was with a large gaggle of gaijin, but there were plenty of my students there.  I ran into the bad (and perhaps my favorite) kids from the ghetto school, all hanging around the main entrance.  They were happy to see me, but the skipped the “Hello’s” and instead greeted me with, “Andy, #$%##-sensei is here.”

“I see.”

We chatted for a bit and I moved on.  I ran into #$%##-sensei at the end of the night. #$%##-sensei is ghetto school’s ‘bad cop.’  It seems that every school has one enforcer who job is to appear emotionally unstable, easily angered, and just downright scary.  Despite the fact that in real life he’s funny as hell, #$%##-sensei is ghetto school’s enforcer.  He caught some guy students who had shaved their eyebrows (why?), and consequently gave them new eyebrows with magic marker.  He told the students not to play soccer during lunch time because it would make them stupid.  And, when somebody threw a students’ bike into the river (it is ghetto school, remember), it was his job to yell at the entire student body for it.  And now, here he was at the festival.

“Hi, #$%##-sensei!” I said, “Enjoying the fireworks?”

“Yeah, they’re great!” he says.

“… you here by yourself?” I ask, noticing that he is, in fact, alone.

“Yeah, I’m working.  I’m here to spy on the kids.”

“…“

I looked around at the end of the festival and that not only was #$%##-sensei there, but there were ‘enforcers’ from my other schools present too, making sure the students weren’t out having too much fun.

And now, this week, my table tennis kids are forbidden from practicing for seven days (at school anyway), because two of the 8th graders were spotted…. at the supermarket! The horror, the horror.  The punishment for spending some time in the only air-conditioned building in Futatsui: jogging for two hours, and spending the rest of the week in the work room studying.  The only thing the supermarket has to offer junior high kids is cheap french fries and one UFO Catcher.  So, in short, they’re being punished for having fun, and really really lame fun at that.

It’s all so silly and trivial, it makes me glad I’m not equated to being a real Japanese teacher.  If it involves being the fun police, I definitely don’t want to be a Japanese teacher.

Third Time’s a Charm

And so the time has come– the guy who thought he was just going to stay one year in the Japanese boonies, especially after having the heavens dump an ungodly amount of snow on him one winter, has now entered his third year in the Japanese boonies.  I must say, I’ve gotten it down to a science.  With a simple fax I’ve enabled myself to escape the mind-numbing boredome of the Futatsui office for the summer, and will be going around to my other schools to help with the speech contest in September.  This’ll make for not only a less wasted summer, but also less uber-greasy bowls of Futatsui ramen consumed, which can only be good for cardio.

With the application only out for a week I’ve signed up a small group of ALTs for the local marathon in October.

I managed to bicycle to the farthest ‘village’ that makes up Futatsui, Tashiro, 15km away.  While there I bumped into a guy who wants to teach me how to use the nunchukus… haven’t decided what to do with that yet.  The place is a village in the true sense of the word– a small collection of houses engaged solely in agriculture and resource gathering with no mom & pop store operations.  Half the residents also have the same last name…  hmm.

The new water balloon launchers are complete, and not a moment too soon.  Last year’s model is getting a small tear in the tubing which is only going to get bigger with subsequent uses.  Regardless, I used the old one with the baseball team yesterday to entertaining results.  I love it when the students vastly underestimate my inventions.  I love it even more to see their jaws drop as I launch a balloon over the fence and into the large field by the nursing home 100meters away.

Today is going to be spent helping the kindergarten take some tikes to a festival in Tomine, the second farthest village in Futatsui (and the only one I have yet to bike to).  I was at this particular kindy a month ago and some kid was trying really hard to be my friend.  I left to go get a drink, thinking the kid was fine playing tag with his friends and come back to find him in tears and a teacher consoling him.  Apparently he’s an oversensitive loner– but for some reason really likes me.

All this and 10 days abroad… and my summer is going to fly by.  I hope.

Alive and well…

… and hot as hell.  Lots of folks getting ready to go home from Japan, and in the meantime I’m teaching and quite busy getting ready for my trip, staying cool, and perfecting this years water balloon launchers before summer break.

Nothing has happened up here, and besides, if anything did it would certainly take more than an earthquake to kill Andy.  Later!

They turned me Japanese…

… I really think so.  No– this won’t be an entry gushing about how Japanese I feel.  I never feel Japanese.  I feel human.  I don’t think a foreigner can ever “feel Japanese,” as that would require a level of blind nationalism that no internationally traveled person is really capable of, nor could they ever want it.

However– it seems the upper echelons have taken it upon themselves to deem me Japanese on paper.  At my base school this week, some pamphlet on education in schools was being passed about that the teachers had to sign off and say they’d read.  Normally, I don’t have to sign off on these things as I’m not a Japanese teacher, don’t have the time to mull through a pamphlet with Japanese educational jargon, and am usually at one of my other 13 schools.  But, for some reason, one of the temp. teachers came by and dropped the clipboard with the pamphlet and a checklist of teachers’ names on my desk.

I checked, looking for my beatiful mother-given English name bastardized into ‘An-do-ryuu’ Japanese phonics (katakana) somewhere on the sheet.  Not there– clearly I don’t need to sign off on this, so why deliver it to me?  Figuring it’s just the temp. teachers’ misunderstanding, I took it back.

“Sorry, you’ll have to find someone else to pass this to, I’m not on here.”

“… yes you are.”

…?

He pointed to a line somewhere in the middle of the checklist with three kanji: “An-do-ryuu.”  Not the same kanji as I had been given by my calligraphy teacher, but An do ryuu nonetheless, thrown nonchalantly in the middle of the other Japanese names, as opposed to its former position, at the bottom of the page below the tea lady and school gardener.  When I figure out what exactly I did to get this to happen, I’ll get back to you.

Apologies Offered…

…to my folks.  Apparently I’m one of the few McCarthys out there to have their mostly exposed body exposed and plastered onto a nationally syndicated newspaper.  Blasted sumo tourney– at least they photographed the match that I won.  And we can hope it was only distributed in Akita.  Maybe.  Just another thing to check off the list I guess.

This weekend was the table tennis tournament in Hinai where I finally (actually) managed to win a few games against the folks in the intermediate bracket, proving that I’m at least a bit above playing one bracket lower with the elementary/Jr. high kids and the incompetent.  Whee!  We actually (there were 3 of us on the adult team) lost three matches in a row, got moved to a losers bracket, and THEN started winning.  But still, for my second tournament ever– it’s nice to have a few wins at the end of the day.

Aside from all the tournaments and having no free time on weekends… life has been normal.  I’m really looking forward to summer vacation and the chance to escape Futatsui, and I’m really glad to have Lan helping out with it… otherwise I’d be ripped off three times already.

It’s another hot day in the Futatch today, and natto day as well… meaning the stink of moldy soy beans hangs in the air long after it’s been consumed… it is the one day of school lunch where I seriously would rather eat by myself and not in a classroom.  But no mind…. now I simply can’t wait to get home and sit like a zombie in front of a fan for a few hours.

My Life in Numbers

5: number of hours I was awake in my home this weekend.

4: number of times I was in Noshiro this weekend.

3: number of burgers I ate yesterday.

6: number of children I had following me through Itoku on Friday watching me buy food.

24: the number of ALTs who took part in the International Sumo Tournament in Akita this weekend.

3: the number of fights I had in my short career as a sumo wrestler.

1: the number of my first fight– I was the first match of the day.

1: the number of fights I won.

0: the amount of blood and pain I shed at the tournament.

1: The amount of times I stubbed my toe at the beach shortly after the tournament.  Still hurts today.

165: My LSAT score from June, a ten point jump from 3 years ago.

92: my percentile.

still 0: my chances of getting into Harvard, Yale, Chicago, or Stanford.

0: my desire to study in any of the above mentioned places.

3: the number of law schools I have already picked I want to apply to.

12: the number of classless periods I will have over the next two days due to testing, though some would agrue I am indefinitely classless.