Rumble

Recently, I've been doing a lot of essay correction work for one of my students. This is relatively unusual as most lessons are spent actually speaking with one another rather than my staring down at a paper scribbling corrections in silence. During these corrections, it's so quiet that I can hear the clock tick.

As of late, my student's stomach has been loudly rumbling during these periods of quiet correction. While she's very embarrassed, I reassure her that it's not a problem at all and it happens to everyone. She feels obliged to tell me it's because she eats lunch just before coming over and I continue to tell her that it neither troubles nor offends me. In fact, I've become adept at ignoring all sorts of bodily noises after years in Japan including the sort which are accompanied by less than rosy odors. The human body doesn't obey the will of its owner, and this is more often so as you get older.

In an effort to hopefully make my student feel more at ease, I told her a story of an incident at my former job about 12 years ago. In addition to making textbooks, my former company made CDs of various types of content to accompany the books. For one of the books devoted to improving TOEIC (Test of English for International Communication) scores, my company decided it'd save some money by making a male coworker and I do the voice acting in the recording studio.

On the surface, voice acting may not seem like much of a chore, but it's actually quite difficult. Voice actors in Japan ask for anything between 10,000-25,000 yen an hour ($97-$242) (or at least they did at that time, rates may have changed by now). In fact, I believe the woman they hired for the Japanese voice acting chores may have been on the upper end of that range. Since my coworker and I were both North American (and therefore had the "right" accent for such work in the opinions of the Japanese), had reasonably nice voices, and, most importantly of all, were only being paid 2,000 yen ($19) an hour, we were pressed into service.

The sessions were held in a ramshackle studio in the armpit areas of Shinjuku. We sweat because using the air conditioning in the small, tightly-sealed space caused too much noise and would be picked up by the mics. What's worse, certain heavy traffic nearby would shake the room and the vibrations could be heard. It was hardly the ideal set-up for recording, but I'm guessing it had the same benefit that my coworker and I did. That is, it was cheap.

We would have to record for hours on end and we were not up to the task. Neither of us had any experience and there are certain "tricks of the trade" we weren't aware of like making sure you don't blow air out of your lips too strongly when you pronounce a "f" or a "p" sound as it'll make a strange noise on the recording. It also seemed that we never had enough "acting" skill and were both constantly told we sounded too "flat" and had to infuse our speaking about things like exchanging business cards or buying a pair of pants with more life and energy. They also expected us to time the pauses between dialogs and sentences by counting in our heads rather than offering us a watch, clock or timer, and I was always starting too fast or slow and being chastised for not waiting long enough. It was hard enough to focus on the script and not flubbing up or losing my place, not puffing out too much air on my "f's" and "p's" without having to silently count between each sentence.

After sitting in that small room for hours on end with the oxygen running out and the heat building up and being constantly criticized, it was rather difficult to build up much of an energetic vibe. Some sessions lasted 3-4 hours and we were pretty wrecked by the end of the first one. If all the various inadequacies of the soundproofing of the studio weren't enough to frustrate our progress, my coworker started to have serious empty stomach rumblings. They were so loud that the mics were clearly picking them up and we had to keep stopping and doing things over. Eventually, someone ran out and bought a bunch of bananas at a "Mom and Pop" fruit shop near the studio and he crammed a few down to try and quiet his disruptive digestive system.

After these experiences, I never wanted to set foot in a recording studio again and believe voice actors who are good at what they do deserve every yen of their high fees. Getting back to my student though, I told her this story mainly to let her know that it happens to everyone, and that it's clearly out of one's control. Even when you desperately need to stop it like in the situation we were in, there's nothing you can do.

Student Roster - February 2008

About a year or so ago, I wrote out my student roster for the sake of my own future recollection, knowing it was of little interest to anyone but me. However, this is my blog and I'll bore if I want to. ;-) I am posting this on a weekend day when most folks are outside enjoying their real lives (and I'm busy working) and less likely to read this blog, so I'm trying to exercise a little consideration here, but those of you who aren't interested in profiles of people you don't know and never will might want to find something good on T.V.

Looking back at my previous post, I'm surprised to see that I had 12 students at that time as I didn't think I had so many at that time. That being said, one was a "temporary" who was never meant to attend more than 3 lessons and one of the ones who appeared in that list showed up for one lesson then vanished not only from contact with me but the agency that sent her to me. Sometimes I wish I knew a little more about the types of agreements the agency makes with students as it's not uncommon to get a student or two who will seem to be "dabbling" and then go away after a one to six lessons lessons or after sampling several "demonstration" lessons with 2 or 3 different teachers. I have a feeling there may be some system whereby the demos or a limited number of lessons at the beginning may be cheaper than long-term lesson contracts. It could be they offer such lessons as "bait", but I can't be sure. The inner workings of the business and financial situation are often not explained to teachers.

At the moment, I have 11 students and 6 of them have been with me for over a year and appeared in my former post. Here is the current roster:

Wednesday:

(5:15 pm) 20-year-old university student who is studying French as her major. She works at a clothing retailer known for cheap casual clothing part-time and likes watching "Lost" and Disney sitcoms like "Hannah Montana". She's one of my 5 "survivors" from last year and one of my favorites. She tends to pick new vocabulary up quickly though she doesn't study much outside of the class because she's so busy at university. She's been studying and taking the TOEFL test and recently got accepted into an exchange student program. She'll be headed to Montana to attend university there for one school year starting from August and I'll be losing her at that point, unfortunately.

(7:45 pm) A woman in her early 30's who works at a bank doing accounting work. I seem to get a lot of female accounting workers for some reason. This student enjoys surfing and used to live by the sea, but recently bought her own condo in central Tokyo (with a hefty 30-year mortgage). She's unusual looking for a Japanese person because she's got very Western-looking eyes and you wouldn't necessarily conclude she was Asian by looking at her face. She's also had more of her share of being followed around by weirdos than my other students, though I don't know if these facts are related. She also goes to Costco more regularly than anyone I know and buys food which is always more than she can actually eat.

Thursday:

(4:00 pm) A 61-year old man who used to be a government bureaucrat then worked for an insurance company and is now retired. He has traveled all over the world and has a great interest in politics, social issues, and news. His vocabulary is advanced and he's very liberal and open-minded. He has lessons not only to improve his speaking for travel but also for the stimulation of discussing things with a foreign person. He has lamented to me on several occasions that he believes he cannot have such discussions with his friends because they think he's weird both for his viewpoints and for wanting to talk about them. His main goal is travel, particularly to world heritage sites, but his elderly mother is ill and he can't do what he'd like. I often sense he feels a bit trapped by his situation and once he asked me if I thought he was selfish for wanting his mother to get better mainly so he could pursue his dreams. I told him that I didn't think it was selfish at all to work hard your whole life then want to fulfill your dreams after retiring.

(7:00 pm) I haven't taught the student who will be in this time slot yet. I've only been told that she's a beginner and a nurse. In my experience with beginners, they don't tend to last as long as intermediate to advanced students. I think that the one-to-one lessons are a bit intense for them at their level and, when they don't experience rapid improvement, they tend to move on to give up. However, I remain optimistic!

Friday:

(6:00 pm) A 64-year old semi-retired man who is my second "survivor" from last year. This older gentleman is a dynamo for his age. He works part-time teaching people at community centers how to use computers and cell phones as well as proctors insurance exams for certification. He takes social dancing classes and has been on adult homestays in America. Though his level isn't particularly high, he's easy to teach because he plans for the lesson himself by choosing a grammar point or phrase he wants to practice and he's very self-motivating in carrying out the practice. I don't have to light a fire under his ass to get him to talk and that's rare. He's one of only two of my students who are married. He's also the student who holds the record for having taken the most lessons with me to date. Last Friday was his 100th lesson.

Saturday:

(10:45 am) A sales support staff person in her early 30's who works for a major computer hardware and services company. She looks about 8 years younger than her age and presents herself with a sense of energy and vitality that I envy. She really enjoys sports and golf in particular and is very dedicated to her job. I believe she studies English because her company is a foreign one, but also for travel. She has studied Italian cooking both in Japan and on a culinary tour of Italy.

(12:00 pm) An office worker at a major fashion designer's Japanese branch in her late 20's who is mainly studying English for doing business in Italy. In fact, as I write this post, she's in Italy now 3/4 of the way through a month-long business trip. Though this woman is a bit reserved, she's my kind of person on many levels. She's thoughtful, analytical, and candid. She's never frivolous or giggly, but is forthcoming and friendly in a way which isn't put on or overdone. She's also quite serious about improving her English and does work on her own in addition to coming to lessons.

(3:30 pm) A 24-year-old insurance company worker who would like to learn English for travel abroad. As I write this, she's in Hawaii for a vacation and she is another of my "survivors". She's a classic example of a well-rounded young woman in Japan. She takes flower arranging classes, works full-time, has an interest in live shows and performances of many types, travels, and reads a variety of books on politics, art, travel, and culture. When she first came to me, she had problems making sentences or having a basic conversation, but now can express herself much more freely, though not necessarily quickly. I've seen concrete improvement in her ability and that's a rare treat for a teacher in Japan since students tend to either bug out before you see improvement or they don't tend to take it seriously enough to get much better.

Sunday:

(10:45 am) A marketing representative for a pharmaceutical company who is in her mid 20's, this student is the younger sister of the woman who works for the fashion designer. She's the person who has been trying to break into journalism, but so far has only managed to get work doing freelance transcribing. I've only taught her about a half dozen times and don't have a good handle on her yet. She's nice and a bit more outgoing than her sister, though not nearly as hard-working when it comes to independent study. She mainly wants to improve her English skills as a means of selling herself to a publication company.

(12:00 pm) A 41-year-old company worker who was new to me when I wrote about her last year (when she came at 3:00 pm). She continues to work in the accounting section of an architectural firm and still hates her job rather passionately. Ironically, she was recently promoted but was completely indifferent to her elevation in status. She's been talking about quitting for the entire year or so that I've been teaching her, but hasn't found the kind of job she feels is ideal. She doesn't want to job hop frequently so she isn't keen on leaving her current job for an interim job. Her goal for study, career advancement, remains the same. She likes to attend Japanese puppet shows (bunraku) and live performances of artists who might be considered "has beens" in the West because they were popular in the 80's or 70's.

Random days and times:

A 32-year-old freelance translator who makes subtitles for mostly English (sometimes other languages) movies for the Japanese audience. Though she has been officially "with me" as a student for about two years, I've actually only seen her about 25 times because of the sporadic nature of her work. She only schedules lessons when she has a project which she needs help with. Her goal isn't to build her overall level but to make sure she does the best work she can when she makes subtitles. She took a part-time job at an office (doing subtitling) for better financial security so she could move into her own place last year. I don't tend to spend much time doing free conversation with her because of the nature of her lessons, but I do know she enjoys beading and travels to resort areas in Japan several times a year.

A 44-year old former pharmacist who currently attends a U.S. college on a military base. She's the second of two of my students who is married. At present, I'm seeing her 2-3 times a week to help her complete a copious number of assignments for a distance course she's taking. Among my current crop of students, she's probably the person with the highest level ability and definitely spends the most time doing independent study. She's very dependent on me in getting her college work under control and tells me sometimes that she's afraid I'll leave Japan and she won't know how to cope.

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Comparing last year's list to this years, I'd say I've gotten a better crop of people through time. I have more people who are easier to engage in conversation and are earnest about improving. I'm also pleased to have retained about 50% of them as it's always a better experience if you know each other well. I'm a bit saddened that I'm going to lose the young woman who is headed for Montana in August. It's always a bit difficult losing students who you've taught for a long time and gotten to know pretty well.

One of the interesting things about their departures is that they almost always ask for my e-mail address and ask if I'd mind if they write me. I always give it to them, but I never hear from them again. I figure they're sincere in their desire to keep in touch, but since the vast majority of them leave me under circumstances where they are having a major life change, they find themselves too busy and preoccupied to take the time to compose messages to me. I'm not exactly broken-hearted about it, mind you. I'd be happy to hear from them if they wrote, but I don't mistake a friendly business-based relationship for a friendship.

A Peck of Pickled Plums

When I was a child, I was sleeping over at my grandmother's house and had been relegated to the sofa for lack of any other space to sleep in. My grandfather, who was bedridden, was set up in an adjacent room. As I slept, I had a dream in which a vicious raccoon-like animal was growling at me and considering attacking me. I woke up and continued to hear the "growling" sound. This noise was the hum of a clunky and old-fashioned humidifier being used in my grandfather's room and it had insinuated itself into my dream.

Last night, I did a lesson with a student about sleep which included the topic of dreams and particular types of dreams including those where ambient stimuli insert themselves into the dream as a part of it. She told me that she had had a dream where a phone was ringing, but she couldn't reach it to answer it and, when she awoke, the phone was actually ringing (within arm's reach). We also talked about sleepwalking and, though she never had such an experience, she had a friend who had and she told me his story.

When her friend was a child, he adored Japanese pickled plums (umeboshi). His mother only allowed him to have two of them at dinner, but he wanted more. During the night, he went to the kitchen and consumed the entire contents of a jar of pickled plums from the refrigerator and had no recollection of having done so the next morning. However, his mother, upon opening the fridge, discovered a jar with nothing but brine in it and her son was incredibly thirsty and his mouth was stained red. It turns out the jar contained about 50 pickled plums and he got so sick from the salt in them that he had to go to the hospital. From that day forth, his mother let him eat as many umeboshi as he liked at meals to try and forestall any sleep-induced wanderings to fulfill a craving.

After she told this story, I asked if she had any recurring dreams. Interestingly, she said she did not. I mentioned to her that it's common in the U.S. for people to dream that they have to take a test for a class they didn't know they'd signed up for and hadn't taken any of the classes for. I told her that it's also common for people to dream they are in front of a crowd and either need to go to the bathroom (but can't because of the audience) or aren't wearing any clothes. She told me that she never had any of these sorts of dreams and that she wasn't aware of any shared dreaming experiences among Japanese folks. Mind you, this was just one student, so I can't say she is representative in any way, but I found this lack of similar and recurring dreams interesting.

The student then volunteered that, while she didn't have the types of dreams I mentioned, she did sometimes dream of mundane experiences before they happened. For instance, she mentioned that she dreamed of playing with her friends in the yard in front of a school, but she had never been to that school or seen that play area. Awhile later, she passed an entrance test and entered a school where she found herself playing on the lawn just as she'd dreamed.

On more than one occasion, I've had the same sort of dream which was a premonition of something relatively unimportant. About a month ago, I had a very striking and memorable one where I dreamed that I had broken a black coffee cup (which we only have one of) and the next day, I broke a clear water glass (I hit it on the side of a dinner plate in the dish drainer as I was attempting to add it to the drainer) while the black coffee cup was the only thing that remained to be washed in the sink. This was very striking because the dream was slightly inaccurate yet the elements were similar enough to carry a heavy implication of prognostication with a slight misalignment.

I don't know if either my student or I are having premonitions. Since I don't believe in time except as a necessary and illusory construct in this reality, I tend to think that this is not so much telling the future as having moments where we can see through the walls that block off our access to seeing all that has happened, is happening or will happen. If you think of your life as a movie that exists in its entirety as a completed work, but has to be experienced from beginning to end by watching it through time, you can sort of get the idea of what I mean. The fact that you don't know what happens later in the movie until you get to that point doesn't mean that portion doesn't exist. It just means you can't access it yet because you are forced to experience it in a linear fashion.

When I hear about premonitions and past lives, I always think that it's not so much about remembering or prognosticating, but more about accessing, like skipping ahead or behind to other chapters on the DVD, but not being aware that you can do it or quite knowing that that's what is being done. I think people do this more in dreaming than at other times because that's the only time their minds aren't completely occupied by the realities of daily life.

Reflections

A home-style design on the 1959 book.

Teaching students privately is a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, you tend to get a better quality of student who is diligent, more personable, and more goal-oriented. Teaching such students is several cuts above the dead-eyed, lifeless experience of teaching in fast food English conversation schools which are quite often catch-alls for people who have to study rather than a large group of people who really want to.

One of the two books my student has (from 1961), with whimsical artwork.

On the other hand, there's a lot more time spent in preparation for such students which is off the clock. While you don't have to do extra work for such students, depending on their specific needs, you really should if you want to give them a good lesson. However, there's often something in this extra preparation for the teacher if she approaches it with the attitude that learning for the sake of the student is also a form of learning for the teacher.

As I mentioned in a previous post, one of my students wants to be a journalist and she wants to write about Betty Crocker for a lifestyle magazine. To that end, I've been investigating Betty Crocker cookbooks so that I can help her (hopefully) develop an article that will be accepted at some point. Since she's particularly interested in the '60s books because of their style, I've also been researching what are considered the hallmarks of 1960s style.

A book from 1972 with rather funky text (reflecting '60s psychedelic style).

Doing this has actually been more difficult than one might imagine since the focal point of most articles is on the psychedelic and drug-based counterculture of the late '60s and not on more mundane aspects of domestic life among the non-hippie generation. While those elements were certainly a big part of the '60s, there was also a strong thread of transition from the '50s leading into the early '60s that tends not to get any attention, but you can see it reflected in the items targeted at housewives throughout the decade. Also, a lot of what is considered '60s style is actually early '70s style.

A book from 1980 which is starting to see a cleaner look, but still using relative bold text elements.

Most interestingly though, by looking at the covers of the cookbooks and the titles, you can actually make a very good guess as to when they were made. The style of the era is reflected not only in the artwork, the photographic style, and types of dishes, but also in the fonts used. You can see a definite trend from somewhat plain with country or home-style designs with a bit of a flourish to overly-stylized to sophisticated in the text styling and layout. There's also a transition from a focus on entertaining and catering to guests in the book's titles to a focus on faster meal preparation for the family that reflects the changing roles of women from the '50s to the '90s.

White tends to be used more in the most modern layout styles as it has been accepted as more of a use of space for design purposes rather than a byproduct of not wanting to do full color printing. This book from 1996 reflects that.

I'd like to persuade my student to make the article she's writing about either the way the books reflect their times in terms of food, style, and women's roles, but I believe she's fixated on the two cookbooks she has and the artwork in them. The main problem with this is that I'm not sure there's enough to say in this regard, especially after I had to disabuse her of the notion that those two books represented the entirety of "Betty Crocker" styling throughout the decades of the company's release of cookbooks. If nothing else, I now have a deeper understanding of why her original article was rejected. The suppositions she made and the claims she asserted were simply based on too little research and a lot of erroneous conclusions.

Dominant and Recessive

My family by blood consists of 4 people, my mother, father, and older sister. All of them have black or dark brown hair and brown eyes, but me. I am the lone redhead with blue eyes in the family. That means there were plenty of jokes about my real father being the milkman from people who either didn't study or remember junior high-level human biology, or who simply thought that the joke was just too funny to let knowledge interfere with the potential guffaws as they displayed their sparkling wit via cliché humor.

For those who have blocked out the knowledge of rudimentary genetics which explains my family's physical disposition (or who just slept through it all to begin with), I'll mention that there are dominant and recessive genes. How these things work is rather complicated, but the way in which the concept is introduced to us in school is by talking about things like hair and eye color and explaining why there are more brown-haired and brown-eyed people in the world and fewer blonds, redheads, and green and blue-eyed people. Light hair and eyes are recessive traits (or so I was told) and if the genes for both light and dark hair and/or eyes genes are present, the dark characteristics will manifest.

In order to have a progeny with blue eyes or red hair, each parent must have a recessive trait's gene (such as red hair) and only pass on the recessive ones. So, my parents had the genes for both types of characteristics and passed the dominant ones on to my sister, but the recessive ones on to me. If the child has brown hair and blond hair genes, the child will have brown hair. So, the formula works out such that there's a greater probability of any person having dark hair and dark eyes, though the entire situation is probably about a thousand times more complex in the real world, but, trust me that the milkman did not have to be my father in order for me to be the lone person with light hair and eyes.

Lest you think this post has to do with educating you with my crude understanding of genotypes and phenotypes (and yes, I remembered those words from decades ago when I originally learned them and didn't pick them up from current research - hooray for the American education system), let me reassure you that my intention is to raise what I felt was an interesting cross-cultural difference.

This morning I was discussing blood type and personality with a student and asking her if she felt things like hair and eye color influence personality. For those who don't know, the Japanese believe blood type has a role in shaping character. It's always been my opinion that Japanese people hang personality traits on blood type because they are physically so much more similar than western folks. We can say a blond is dumb or a redhead temperamental, but they've all got dark hair. They have to go deeper than the surface to form their theories.

During the course of our discussion, my student asked me if there were more blond-haired, blue-eyed people than dark-haired people back home. I told her there were not and explained to her the whole dominant-recessive lesson we were taught in biology as the reason for this. At first, she was a little puzzled but then she had a moment of total understanding. She told me that Japanese kids learn the exact same lesson about dominant and recessive characteristics, but that they are taught that information using a different example as the basis for that information...can you guess what that might be?

To me, this is a fascinating reflection of each culture's residents' physical composition and the effect it has on their personality theories and educational methods. To you, well, perhaps it's just an interesting bit of trivia.


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If you couldn't guess, the answer was: Blood type.

Kernel Thunders

The picture that launched many entertaining descriptions.

Back when I was working in a Japanese office and correcting student (correspondence-based) homework as part of my daily duties, there was a lesson in which students were presented with a drawing of an older gentleman and asked to describe him (shown above). It was not the least bit rare for students when describing this man to say variations on several rather entertaining things:

1. "He is the Uncle of Kentucky."
2. "He is a dandy."
3. "He is kernel thunders."
   

As a further clue, I can tell you that it is often noted that "he has been on a diet" and "he has lost weight."

People who have lived in Japan and especially those who have been English teachers, probably have a clue what these statements are about. For those who don't know, the answer is in the picture below.

Click this picture to see a larger, more detailed picture. Note the poster of a Japan-only KFC food monstrosity to the right of the statue. It's a "mince nan sandwich" (a breaded, deep-fried cutlet full of fatty minced meat served on Indian-style bread). Note the proud display on the burger of the 4th Japanese food group, mayonnaise.

In front of most KFCs in Japan, there is a statue of the Colonel so nearly every Japanese person is familiar with his likeness, though they aren't necessarily all that clear on his name if the reports I corrected are any reflection of reality. It's my guess that Colonel Saunders's visage is so well-known that any older-looking foreign man with glasses, a suit, white hair and a mustache may bring him to mind.

Yes, there is vandalism in Japan.

The statues of the Colonel that I've seen are always clean and very well-kept. The one in the previous picture is so clean that it's super shiny. I imagine that these same sorts of statues would be vandalized rather badly if they were in the U.S. and left out in front of shops overnight. Mind you, it's not that there's no vandalism in Japan, but either the Colonel is not a big target for it or he is quickly cleaned up if it occurs (or they block access to him through gates that they pull down after closing).

I'm not sure why the Japanese franchise owners decided to put statues of the Colonel in front of nearly every shop, but, if I had to guess, I'd think it had something to do with the fact that Ronald McDonald statues used to be in front of a lot of McDonald's. It could be that they felt KFC needed a similar, easily recognizable icon associated with its food.

This papier mache "Hello Kitty" stays in front of this tea shop year round. The owners just change her wardrobe to reflect the changing seasons and holidays. In summer, she wears a bikini and it's frankly a little creepy.

It could also be that the Japanese, in general, have a habit of putting out statues of their corporate mascots in front of shops to attract attention or raise brand awareness. There used to be a Fujiya sweets shop near one of our local stations and a statue of the Fujiya girl ("Peko-chan") licking her upper lip in anticipation of a tasty Fujiya-made treat was placed in front of it. I've also seen statues of various lesser-known mascots in front of other miscellaneous establishments such as a cutesy elephant in front of a drug store and, of course, the omnipresent "Hello Kitty" often shows up in an unofficial capacity.

I wouldn't be surprised if the Colonel, in all his overly-stylized glory, is rather rare as a mascot in Japan that is based on a real (or even fake) person. In fact, I had a discussion with a student last week about Betty Crocker and how a fair number of American mascots resemble real people (or are based on real people) whereas almost all Japanese ones are based on cartoons or cartoon-like images. It's a difference that we don't tend to notice because corporate mascots are part of the background noise of marketing to which we're exposed, though we are all quite aware of and familiar with them in our respective cultures.

Cultural Limits

One of my students works creating subtitles for whatever television shows and movies come her way. Sometimes she works with bad B-movies (or worse) which go straight to DVD and are of extremely dubious quality. At others, she works with American television shows or documentaries. In her most recent lesson, she was working on subtitles for an episode of a BBC series for the first time.

My job when working with her is to take the parts of the script which she can't understand due to the obscurity of the reference or the cultural connotations. In most cases, this isn't much of a problem for me. However, dealing with a British-made show brings more challenges to the experience as there ultimately are references to things I'm not familiar with like the names of specific establishments that have not been popularized in America (or Japan). As one example, I can say that before this lesson, I'd never heard of "The Baron of Beef."

I'm actually quite a great fan of British television and these days spend more hours watching British drama than American thanks in large part to the Mystery Channel (for which, not so coincidentally, my student was subtitling the show we discussed) and the fact that I'm not keen on much current American drama aside from House and Lost. I'm particularly keen on A Touch of Frost (which I recommend strongly to anyone who can find it in their T.V. listings) and Poirot, though both of these are rather old now. It does take awhile for things to make their way to Japan from any country.

Despite a fair amount of viewing experience with both drama and comedy made in England, I can't say that I'm very well-versed in some of the jokes and their references. At times, the only thing I can do is guess then turn to Google during the lesson to confirm my suspicion. I'd say I'm correct about 90% of the time. For instance, I'm still not sure why someone would say "hello, sailor" when encountering a drowned dead body in the water except that being in the water is connected with sailing. My only exposure to the phrase "hello, sailor" has been through Monty Python and the context for the joke was quite different.

I think my students figure that we all speak English so we all understand anything said in English, but there are clear cultural differences. Actually, I'm pretty sure my British friends wouldn't even agree that "we all speak English" in regards to Americans. If you watch enough of another country's popular media, you can start to see some of the threads which commonly run through their collective consciousness to which they can relate and to which you may not. One of the biggest examples of this that I've noticed is that Oscar Wilde's life or quotes make an appearance far more often in British shows than an American might expect. He was mentioned in the crime drama I just saw a bit of in my students's lesson and also in The Thin Blue Line which I saw last week (and, of course, is in a Monty Python sketch and mentioned in Black Adder). I'm not sure that I've ever heard him mentioned or quoted in an American show except obliquely as a reference to The Picture of Dorian Gray. I imagine similar references to politicians and presidential peccadilloes which run through many U.S. shows in particular may be a little obtuse for some.

In Japanese job advertisements for teachers, some schools will request a "North American native English speaker" or a "British native English speaker" and this can get feathers ruffled amongst those who want to apply for the job and don't fit this seemingly arbitrary criteria. While I'll grant that some of these preferences are a bit frivolous, I can also see where sometimes a particular person or group of people may be better served by someone who grew up in one particular cultural environment or another. In the case of my student and for this one lesson, she may have been served a little better by a British teacher, but only this one time. ;-)

The Mind of a Student (My Speculation)

It's Sunday morning and I've slept in until 9:20 when I scheduled an English lesson for 10:00 am with my English teacher. I rescheduled this lesson from my usual Saturday at 11:00 pm lesson time and insisted on this earlier time because I told my teacher I just had to finish the lesson and be back home by noon. My teacher may have had to get up earlier than usual and prepare for my early arrival, but she said it was OK.

Now that I can't make the scheduled time, I think I'll call within minutes of rolling out of bed, still in a daze and with a cracked voice, and see if I can subtly pressure my teacher into changing my lesson to a later time, so I don't lose any money. Oh, sure, I could cancel the lesson because I can't make it in time or I could come late and take part of the hour, but if I call and state that I just woke up and then remain silent, the teacher might feel obliged to say it'll be alright if I start late. As long as I don't make any suggestions or overtly state what I want to do, the ball is in her court. As long as I don't take responsibility, perhaps I'll get everything I want and my teacher won't mind the fact that I asked her to rearrange her schedule around my needs once and am now asking her to do it again on extremely short notice. Though I know she has another student after me, I don't care about her need to prepare for that student or plans to do anything else in between my lesson and the other student's.

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I honestly don't mind if my students reschedule, cancel or are late. This troubles me not at all. I also don't mind occasionally rearranging my morning schedule to accommodate their needs and then having them be late or cancel. The only thing that drives me crazy is when they call me and when I ask, "would you like to cancel or just have a shorter lesson," they respond with absolute silence. The very act of just saying, "I woke up late" and then not stating any course of action (or answering any questions when given options) is a form of passive coercion in Japan which I don't think I'll ever be able to pry my mind open wide enough to accept with good grace.

And this wasn't the first time this has happened, but I'm sure it won't be the last.

Gifts For Students

For many people who work as teachers, gift-giving in Japan is largely a one-way street. The students give and the teacher receives. The biggest reason for this is that the Japanese are in the habit of giving gifts as a means of building relationships and they particularly have the habit of giving gifts to people who offer services.

Further, it is also the case that each student has one teacher and each teacher has many students so it’s very impractical for the teacher to be giving gifts to students on a regular basis, at least if the teacher wants to be relatively egalitarian about it. Nonetheless, when my husband visited home last May, he spent a large amount of money on souvenir See’s Candy for the students who he saw repeatedly and who he felt a good emotional connection with. He wanted to indicate to them that he enjoyed the time he spent with them in lessons.

Since this is the season where people traditionally show their appreciation and affection, he wanted to work out a way to offer up a Christmas “gift” that would express this sentiment again to those people who he’d be encountering in mid to late December. For this, we decided to go back to doing something I used to do for my coworkers when I worked in a Japanese office. We assembled “goodie bags”.

In the past, my goodie bags were mainly a boatload of homemade baking goods including pumpkin cake, brownies, sugar cookies, and peanut butter cookies with a candy cane or maybe some peanut butter cup miniatures thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately, I don’t have the energy or time to do all that baking. Also, while I delivered my goodies on one day and distributed them to the entire office at once, he needs to string out is gifts over 2 weeks as he sometimes sees students once every few weeks. This made timing everything rather complex and made it imperative that we mainly use items that would keep without freezing or loss of freshness.

My husband bought a vast quantity of imported chocolates and I made peanut butter cookies which we packaged up in craft bags. I drew a Calvin & Hobbes Christmas scene in Adobe Illustrator and we sealed them with a commercial Christmas sticker. As individual packs, they may not really be much of a big deal but assembling so many of them has taken a lot of time, effort, and expense. Fortunately, the students’ responses have been worth it. They have been unfailingly gracious and happy with the bags of treats.

One thing which isn’t necessarily unique to Japanese culture, but is definitely more common is that people are happier with the effort you make more so than the content of the gift you give. Back home, most gifts seem to be received with higher expectations about the value of the contents than about the gesture itself. Sometimes I wonder if this relates to the fact that we have more occasions where people “expect” big gifts or gifts in larger quantities (Christmas and birthdays) and this anticipation has an effect on how gifts are viewed overall. The focus seems to be on what it is rather than why it’s given. While I’m certainly not concluding that the Japanese have no focus on what it is or that people back home never think about why it’s given, I think the heavier focus tends to be on why in Japan and what in the U.S.

French Goodies

One of the most common questions students ask me is, "have you ever been to a foreign country?" After informing them that I am already in a foreign country from my point of view, they usually ask me if I've been to other countries. The only country I've been to besides Japan (and the U.S.) is Canada, so I tend to get asked what other place I'm interested in visiting. Usually, I say Spain because Spanish is the only other language I have any experience with and some of my husband's family roots trace back there.

One of the places I have little interest in visiting is France. I know it's a very beautiful country and has a lot to offer culturally, but I also know they have no patience for Americans who can't speak French, and I can't speak it at all. I don't want to go somewhere and pay people to be rude to me and treat me like a second-class human being because I'm from a particular country and can't speak their language. Of course, these days, being American is pretty much enough to get you treated like the plague pretty much anywhere in the world. Hating Americans isn't considered a prejudice amongst most folks who are inclined to do so. However, the Japanese aren't quite as inclined to tar and feather us all because our current president is doing his best to completely destroy America on both the domestic and international fronts. I guess they feel as disconnected from the politicians who control their country as we do.

Some of my students have gone to France and told me that they were surprised that the French people were so polite and helpful (in most cases) even though they (my students) can't speak French. I always tell them that French people don't appear to have the same issues with non-native English speakers who can't speak their language as they do with people from other countries. Of course, I have no idea how valid these thoughts are as I have no first-hand experience. I can only say that the French reputation for rudeness is quite pervasive as reflected by both my conclusions and the preconceived notions of my traveling students, though it is certainly likely a lot of it is unfair as most negative generalizations about groups of people are.

One of my husband's students recently went to France and brought him back some incredibly nice goodies. One was a bag of cookies from La Cure Gourmande and the other was a canister of chocolate truffles from Jeff de Bruges. The cookies are a collection of very dense, crunchy, buttery biscuits in various flavors. They have a unique texture heavily influenced by what I'm guessing is the use of a grainy sugar. They have a unique smell which I can't quite pin down but is vaguely reminiscent of dill (of all things). Though there are various flavors, (e.g., coconut, orange with lemon) they all seem to smell the same. Because they are dense and hard, one approaches them with low expectations, but they are incredibly good in a way you don't often experience in cookies in either Japan or the U.S. I'd love to know the techniques and recipes for them.

The truffles have crispy, delicate chocolate shells with light, incredibly creamy fillings. They are clearly high quality and have rich, chocolate flavor without being overbearing. The student either bought very high quality souvenirs for my husband or French sweets live up to their high reputation (or both). They're so good it's almost worth considering going to France. ;-)

Politics

For those of you who are already stifling a yawn, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not actually going to be talking about politics. I'm going to talk about talking about politics. While that may not sound a great deal more promising, I'm hoping you'll bear with me.

When we first got married, my husband was a ravenously politically-interested sort while I was fairly indifferent. Since we live in the same domicile and we're both very talkative sorts of people, his political knowledge naturally trickled down to me (or, it may have been a process of osmosis since we sleep in the same bed and no one can really say what goes on while you sleep). While I am interested in larger issues, politics has been something which I cannot bear because it's one of those things which should be extremely important but is so full of manipulation, maneuvering and power playing that it's reduced to a game. Seeing so many rich people playing transparent verbal games in order to maintain or acquire positions of power leaves me rather heartsick.

This morning, nothing demonstrated how pointless political discourse can be better than the Democratic candidates debating on CNN. We were treated to the same usual parade of non-answers, attacks, empty promises, and posturing. In the back of your mind, you know that even the most genuine-sounding candidate isn't going to act on his or her convictions once the election is won. To be fair, this isn't entirely the candidates' fault. Issues that politicians have to deal with are actually very complex and the attention span and scope of interest of the average person are quite limited. Truth be told, people prefer simple answers to complex questions that fit in with their particular world-view. If you haven't decided I'm a big liar who has tricked you into listening to a talk about politics and turned away, I'm getting to the part where I'm talking about talking about politics and the aforementioned, while perhaps a bit boring, actually applies to what is to come.

Several months ago, I got a new student. He's my second retired gentleman who studies English and the first student I've had privately who has expressed an interest in discussing political and social issues. Since I'm not particularly politically minded, it's been a bit of challenge for me to keep digging up fresh material about which I can converse in a reasonable fashion given my limited knowledge of such things. Fortunately, the spillover from my husband's interest, which has actually waned quite a bit over the years as he's also grown a bit dispirited with the whole matter, keeps me at a level whereby, if I read an article, I can discuss the content adequately.

One thing that has happened on more than one occasion is that this student, who is a very nice fellow, has been emphatically critical of other Japanese folks for their relatively passive approach to politics. He has often lamented the fact that Japanese people forgive and forget (or at least forget) rapidly and keep the same corrupt people and parties in power. He's also disappointed that he cannot discuss serious topics with his friends and peers when they get together and that most people seem to be mainly interested in trivial matters.

On these occasions, he also says how much he admires foreign folks because they tend to discuss serious issues when groups of them congregate. I actually tried to mildly disabuse him of this notion as I'm not so sure this is true of all or most foreign people. I've known a lot of people who are equally obsessed with dumb little things as Japanese people. I think one of the main differences is that western folks are able to take a trivial matter and blow it up into a (supposedly) huge societally relevant one. For instance, in a recent Consumerist post, it was noted that Starbucks was rolling out Christmas-themed cups, music, and decorations very early. The average Japanese person probably wouldn't notice or care but the average American can take this tiny little bit of information and turn it into a rant about how the commercialization of Christmas is getting worse and worse and we're all being manipulated by corporations to extend our enhanced consumption around the holidays. It's amazing what sort of havoc a few cups, a few yuletide tunes and some tinsel can create if your mind is working overtime to justify your ire about such things making a premature entrance in your anything but humble opinion.

My student is not to be dissuaded from notions that Americans are all political animals, but that's really not the topic at hand. I merely lacked the focus to keep this topical car on the proper track. The issue is how we talk about politics and, when I say "we", I mean my student and I. While discussing the current relationship between Iran and the United States and remarks made by George Bush and Tony Blair, my student suggested that the U.S. should not have removed Saddam Hussein from power but sought to gradually limit his powers through sanctions. He and I have discussed before that sanctions tend mainly to harm the innocent and he's essentially indicated that war does much the same. However, when I mentioned that the other problem with sanctions is that no matter who imposes them, there will always be some other power that would be more than happy to undermine such sanctions in an act of opportunism thinly-veiled as political opposition. For example, if the U.S. placed sanctions on Iran, inevitably, some powers (I'm looking at you, France) would be sneaking up to the back door, knocking quietly, and offering to trade whatever it is that the U.S. was attempting to prevent entry of into the country in exchange for some nice, tasty oil.

This sort of point always stymies my student. All of his answers to political and social problems are relatively simplistic and show a limited understanding of the complexity of these sorts of problems. There's one problem. There's one solution. He's very much a reflection of the audience politicians tend to pander to. It's very gratifying to think that there's a workable, clear solution to world and national problems. Any candidate who muddies the picture with a series of hypothetical pitfalls to any potential solution isn't going to hold the listeners' attention for long and may be seen as avoiding making a decision.

The problem isn't that my student lacks the knowledge to discuss such topics as world issues as I'm sure he has far more than I. If we were to take part in a pop quiz on current events, he'd likely run circles around me in a head-to-head factual competition. The problem is that most Japanese folks are not schooled to ask all the "what if" questions that western folks are educated to consider. The limits my student has and his resulting frustration that he cannot answer my questions or respond to my points is a direct result of growing up in an educational system which emphasizes rote learning and answering every question with one and only one correct reply rather than applying critical thinking and debating a variety of points.

Having discussions with students that show that they have thinking which often goes only one level deep is something both my husband and I have experienced time and again in our interactions with them. It makes discussing topics of any depth very hard when teaching because the students reach dead ends rather rapidly when offering their ideas and are at a loss for words when you bring up alternative issues. It's also one of the most important points that the Japanese educational system needs to address if they want to continue to compete with the rest of the world as they've long passed the point where working overtime and getting high test scores is going to be enough to keep up with other countries. Unfortunately, change is very slow in Japan and I don't see a generation of people with excellent critical and analytical thinking coming along any time soon.

Smells Like America

Last Friday, one of my regular students walked in and said that my apartment smelled good. This wasn't the first time this has happened but it was the first time it occurred when I wasn't baking bread in the bread machine or dinner in the slow cooker. The thing my student smelled was Downy fabric softener. She told me that, to her, it smells "like America."

I'm guessing the reason she associates the scent of Downy with the U.S. is that it's one of the most popular brands there and not necessarily because Japanese laundry isn't usually washed with fabric softener. I can't say for sure though since I don't tend to quiz my students about their clothes washing habits and it's not the sort of thing that comes up in casual conversation. I can say that fabric softener is quite expensive in Japan and that Downy is one of the most heavily stocked items at one of our local import shops.

I've always associated fabric softener use with dryers since they prevent static cling. Since most people line dry in Japan, they may not bother to use it so much. The truth is that, after my dryer broke, I stopped using it because of the price, but I recently grew tired of crispy clothes from line drying and had my husband pick up a big jug of Downy from Costco. I guess my student commented on the smell because she hadn't smelled it in my apartment before.

The fact that she associates the smell of Downy with the U.S. made me consider what scents I associate with Japan. One of them is most certainly the hay-like smell of tatami. This is a scent which is especially strong if you close off a room and leave the windows closed then return after half a day. You don't really notice it otherwise. I've been told, however, that our luggage has been infused with this somewhat musty smell and people back home can really pick it up when its used for travel. There are a lot of other smells in Japan, of course, but few are what I'd consider sufficiently unique to it that I'd draw a strong connection to Japan besides the wonderful fragrance of roasting sweet potatoes in autumn and winter and tatami.

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As of late, I've been reading a great deal of hateful commentary about the United States on other (Japan-related) sites that I can't help but make this post with the idea in the back of my mind that someone will drop by and make some sort of rude comment about how America or American people smell uniquely bad. I just wanted to take a moment to say that they need not bother to offer such thoughts here as any obviously prejudicial or ugly comments will be rejected in comment moderation.

Chemical Communication

Millions of kids everyday echo a sentiment which I can't recall ever having uttered during my 16 years in the American educational system. In regards to science, history and math classes in particular, you hear kids talk about how they can't understand why they're studying something that they will almost certainly never use. It's the constant struggle of teachers to convince their pupils that learning is about broadening their minds and expanding their ability to think analytically. To some extent, I bought into this idea and I always believed that it was more interesting to know more than what I immediately perceived with my limited senses. I was probably just too unpopular to occupy my thoughts otherwise but studying all the stuff which didn't directly apply to daily life was interesting to me and made me feel like life was more than my boring and often miserable rural existence.

One of the classes which I didn't like though was chemistry. It wasn't that I lacked an interest in chemistry itself but rather that I hated the teacher because he was none too fond of me. This became crystal clear when I was sick for about a week and returned to find a test on that very day of my return which I couldn't possibly have prepared for (because I hadn't been there when it was announced). As this jerk of a teacher passed out the tests, I told him I couldn't take it because I hadn't had time to prepare. He told me I had to anyway but I refused because it simply wasn't fair to spring a test on me like that. Rather than allow me to take the test later, he simply failed me.

Given the injustice of what had happened, and the fact that I was a straight "A" student up to that point, I told my mother and she complained bitterly to the principal. I never did take the test but the teacher gave me a "C" and my grade averaged out to a "B" for the semester. It was still unfair, but I guess he got to play his power game with a student he didn't like and come out with a draw rather than a loss. I didn't get the grade I would have gotten if I'd have had a chance to take the test under fair conditions but he also wasn't allowed to unfairly fail me.

To this day, I'm not sure why he disliked me so much. I wasn't some disruptive little snot nor an insufferable know-it-all. The only thing that ever occurred to me was that he was absolutely enthralled with my best friend at the time and I wonder if he had some warped sort of jealousy going on because she hung out with me so much. To this day, I think he had some sort of pervy lust for her. He certainly seemed to put her on a pedestal in classes all the time and pay a lot of undue attention to every experiment she did. I guess some lecherous old deviants had to have been the inspiration for Lolita.

At any rate, despite all the unpleasantness I endured from that mean-spirited bastard, I did study hard and enjoy the concepts behind chemistry. I'm guessing I'd have gotten a lot more out of it if my teacher had been less petty and neurotic, but one thing I did get out of it was a decent memory of the periodic table of the elements from having had to memorize it. While I can't say that I remember it all now, I do remember the more common elements. Strangely enough, this has actually come in handy from time to time during my English teaching in Japan.

While I've never been in a chemistry lesson in a Japanese school, my experiences lead me to believe they also have to study the periodic table with the same abbreviations in roman letters rather than with Japanese characters. On several occasions, including one this past evening, I've been able to explain an element to a student using its abbreviation on the periodic table. In the past, sodium and iron have come in handy and this evening I dug way back in my memory to remember that lead is Pb so I could help a student understand that "lead" was Pb and not the verb "lead" (as in acting as a leader).

While I realize that not many people are going to grow up and become English teachers in foreign countries where they may find the ability to convey ideas through universally-understood abbreviations helpful, my situation does show that you never know when something that seems esoteric at the time you learn it may actually prove useful. I've certainly found that all the sentence diagramming that was done in my English classes has been paying off.

Coincidences

Recently, I've experienced quite a few striking coincidences. For instance, I currently have two students who are in Italy. They don't know each other and work at entirely different jobs yet they both are there during the exact same two weeks, though they are in different cities and one is there for business and the other for pleasure. They also take lessons on Saturday morning one after the other. This situation is actually relatively fortuitous for me because it allows me to prepare information about travel to Italy and use it for both of them which cuts my work load in half. It also gives me my entire Saturday morning off for two weeks since they both canceled lessons during the same time period.

It's not so unusual for students to head off to the same destination and, if I had an entire school's worth of students and two were going to Italy rather than 2 of my crop of 12 students, this probably wouldn't stick out so much as an odd coincidence. It all may be explained though by the fact that Italy seems to be emerging as the travel "flavor of the month" in Japan if I follow the travel wishes of the students I speak with correctly.

One more coincidence piled on top of these onse a short time ago. I had just logged out of Skype after a chat with my sister and idly turned on the T.V. to find that the fashion show one of the students who had gone to Italy to be a part of (behind the scenes) was airing. It wasn't only that but the collection her particular employer was showing was the one that was showing at that very moment. Her employer is one of the lesser-known fashion designers amongst those who are not well-educated in the fashion world (though certainly known to those in fashion circles) so I wouldn't necessarily have expected their line to be shown on Fox Life.

These series of coincidences made me wonder at what point one's perception of a situation turns from "coincidence" to "fate" (provided one is inclined to embrace the latter concept). I've had plenty of situations in life where there have been statistically almost unbelievable coincidences but they didn't lead me to believe they were linked to fate because they were blips which lead to no greater experiences or purpose. For instance, I've ran into former co-workers in Shinjuku station. If you've ever been in Shinjuku station, you'll know that it is so huge and crowded that the chances you'll run into someone you know without carefully coordinating a location, day and time to meet is very low, particularly when your pool of former co-workers is relatively small as mine is and when you don't regularly pass through there.

Some people believe in fate and some simply feel that there are only just statistical improbabilities playing out in our daily lives. Generally speaking, when the sheer amount of coincidence in life defies belief, I think this is when notions of fate may enter the picture. However, it isn't only a matter of frequency of such experiences but also about where those experiences tend to lead. I'm pretty sure the coincidences I mentioned with my students really aren't amounting to much so it's hard to believe that it's "fate" whereas I feel meeting my husband was fate because it had such a great impact on the path my life took.

It seems some of us have a need to feel that the most important opportunities in our lives are being externally directed rather than simply random chances. Many of us like to believe that life is more than a lottery where we sometimes "win" or "lose" by chance because it lends credence to the notion that life is meaningful rather than something that just happens and then we die. I admit, I'm one of those people.

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On a side note that is related by a hair, I never watch fashion shows and surely would have turned away had my student's employer's collection not been on display. I mainly watched so I could talk to her about her company's new line when I see her in a week. The reason I have little interest in such things was brought home to me when the Moschino collection was shown to include a variety of dog-shaped handbags. :-p On the bright side, the designer my student's company sells for had the most wearable clothing from a real person's daily living point of view, provided you're slender enough to carry off really sleek and simple lines.

Goodbye, Student #1

On February 2, 2006, approximately 3 months after I quit my office job, I taught my first private lesson in about 10 years with student #1 from my referral agency. I went on to teach her 63 more times after that. I'll have my last lesson with her this evening.

As my first student after 12 years of working in a Japanese office, I'm sure she endured some of the bumpier roads of my teaching technique though I doubt she could tell. I can say that she was the person for whom the vast majority of the custom material I wrote for the Home Sensei was designed for and used. Her level was just the right mixture of passive competence coupled with assertive incompetence to require such types of structured discussion.

When you teach in your own home, teaching isn't just a matter of exchanging words and guiding a student toward better speaking. It's also someone coming into your place as a guest and, at 64 visits, this particular student has probably been in my home a great deal more than any friend I've ever had in Japan. We've shared a cup of tea or coffee and discussed her current life events every single time.

By it's nature though, a lesson isn't the same as a social visit. It carries all the trappings of one but it's a decidedly one-sided affair. While I tidy and clean the place, serve drinks, and give my guest the most comfortable place to sit and we chat amiably, I mainly ask her about her life and ask questions while she mainly answers questions and asks few of me. This is, of course, generally how it should be since the whole point is for her to practice English, not for me to jabber on about myself. This does, however, tend to be the reason why it's hard to develop sincere friendships with people who you meet as students. The experience, even when you encourage students to question you freely, is often quite one-sided.

This particular student's departure was one that I knew would come some day and I knew it was going to be sooner rather than later as the clock was running out. She told me long ago that her husband, who works for a very old and famous Japanese confectionery company, is transferred every two years. Since I taught her for one year and ten months, I've been with her for most of the tenure she's had in her current location. Her husband is often transferred on very short notice (two weeks) and she has to scramble to sever the ties she has to work, friends, and English teacher as well as pack and get ready to go.

I always tell students they can feel free to e-mail me or stay in touch when they've stopped taking lessons after we have been together for awhile but, they rarely contact me. I'm not sure if that's because the ties that bind a teacher and student are relatively transitory and weak or if it's because they lack confidence in their English writing skills or if they simply feel it'll put me out if they write.

My fancy teacups. R.I.P.

The odd thing is that I recently broke the tea cups that I started using regularly at the time that I started teaching privately after my prolonged absence. Prior to that, they had been collecting dust for the most part as they were too fancy for general purpose use. At the time that I broke them, I felt it was a bit of an omen of some change in continuity to come. Of course, it could just be a harbinger of increased clumsiness on my part. ;-)

Update: It turns out my student not only is moving but she's also pregnant so, even if her husband hadn't been transferred out of Tokyo, she would have had to stop taking lessons.

Illusion

One of my students just returned from a trip to England where she was lucky enough to experience the charm and beauty of some of the small villages within reach of London via public transportation. She brought back pictures that made me ache for home because the expansive and richly green farms, fields, and trees reminded me of Pennsylvania. She also brought me back a box of Cornish Fairings which are incredibly good. I must say that I've rarely had a bad or mundane pre-packaged cookie made in England and the vast majority of "biscuits" I've had from there seem to be perfect blends of flavor, sweetness, and just the right texture. If bad cookies are being made there, they aren't finding their way to Japanese shops or into the hands of souvenir-distributing students.

Getting back to the topic at hand though, which is my student's trip, she told me that she went with a friend and her sister. I asked her if either of them spoke English as well as her and she said that her friend hardly speaks it at all but her sister's ability is superior to hers. My student is no slouch in terms of her English abilities so I asked her why she had this impression of her sister. She said that, when they engaged in casual conversations with strangers in England, her sister always responded readily and fully while she felt rather uncertain about whether or not she fully understood the question.

My student said that she couldn't figure out how her sister managed to develop such talents because she hasn't studied for quite some time and her only English study experience was while studying for university entrance exams. While it's possible that her sister has a knack for languages and just took to English like a house on fire, it's also possible that her sister is simply offering an illusion of fluency that my student is unable to detect.

In part because I didn't want my student to feel inferior to her sister (or anyone else), I decided to tell her about a well-known fact among English teachers who work in Japan. The truth is that it is possible for a student to jabber on in a fashion which makes them appear quite conversant in a language to those who don't natively speak it when they really aren't understanding the question properly at all or giving an appropriate answer. Such people usually guess at the nature of a question based on various key words and then charge ahead with a long-winded reply which completely missed the gist of the question. I can't tell you how many times I've said "tell me about your company's business" and gotten the answer "I work in (accounting/sales/research)." The student hears "your" and "business" and ignores the rest.

This particular problem is probably more common among Japanese people because they often experience teachers who aren't fluent (Japanese teachers of English in their pre-college years) or who are native speakers of English who are more interested in entertainment than in improving their students' skills. A lot of teachers never insist that a student answer a question correctly or explain the nature of their misunderstanding. They just smile and pretend the answer was right and carry on. This is essentially the same thing that a stranger you'd meet on a train in London would do if a question he's asked is answered in an energetic but incorrect fashion. Natives who strike up conversations with tourists are unlikely in the extreme to do something that will embarrass the person to whom they're speaking.

While I have no way of knowing for sure, I'm pretty sure that my student's sister was giving the illusion of fluency she does not truly possess and my student, who can't judge the English skills of others just as she cannot correct her own mistakes, couldn't tell the difference.

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Incidentally, and tangentially-related to this story, my student told me that a nice young British fellow on a sleeper train they were on who struck up a conversation with these three obviously Asian young women broke the ice with "are you French?" She said that one of her friends was carrying a shopping bag from a famous French bakery but she was still baffled that he'd conclude from the bag that they might be French. It's my guess that he knew they were not but didn't want to guess at their nationality for fear of offending them should he guess wrong. While some Japanese people think they can distinguish between Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, etc., just by looking at their faces most of us westerners can't make such distinctions.

Root Beer

Like "Smashing Pumpkins", who are neither pumpkins nor do they smash things, "root beer" has one of those misleading names, particularly to those who are uninitiated in its carbonated delights. The Japanese, almost universally, are unaware (some might say blissfully so) of what root beer is.

This fact was brought home rather strongly at my former office when one of the salesmen was foraging in the company refrigerator for a leftover summer gift beer to imbibe "after work". For those who don't know (or remember that I said it before), it's common for companies to receive cases of beer as summer gifts from other companies they do business with. The salesman tunneled his way past the dozen or so bottles of green tea, oolong tea, Coke, and whatnot with about 1/8 of their original contents placidly clinging to the bottom and merrily growing bacterial cultures (because they are certainly never finished off nor tossed out by their owners). After several minutes of brow-furrowing concentration and digging around aged, near empty containers everyone was too polite to throw out, he emerged triumphantly with a can of my husband's A&W root beer. The salesman saw the word "beer" and assumed that he'd found his prize. You can imagine how let down he was when we informed him that root beer was not beer but a soft drink. The "root" part always confuses them, as well, and explaining about sassafras doesn't tend to help matters in this regard as I think they can't conceptualize how something goes from being a root to being a carbonated beverage.

After a rather imprudently large order from the Foreign Buyer's Club, I had to leave two cases of root beer sitting near the entrance of the apartment on the kitchen floor for a few weeks. Almost every one of my students said upon seeing these cases, "is that beer?" I explained to them that it was a soda one could only get from the U.S. In fact, I gave two of them each a can to sample because I'd done a food lesson with each of them where we had talked about items you could not get in Japan. It was also rather timely as the day one of these two lucky students got a can, we'd been discussing different vocabulary for "good" and "bad" and I told her that she'd probably find the word "revolting" especially useful after sampling the root beer.

Both of my students hated the root beer and said that it tasted to them like unpleasant medicine. However, one of them had split her can with her brother and she said he really liked it and had consumed the remainder by himself. I believe my husband also has given root beer to his students (as well as another much disliked "treat", black licorice) and found that there are always a few who find such things tasty but most think they're disgusting. I tend to like this sort of sharing with students both because I think it's good for them to have first hand experience with the foods that are discussed with them and because they're so fond of asking foreigners about the more vile Japanese foods they know we're going to hate (natto, primarily). It's a little bit of table turning to give them something we know they'll hate.

In My Shoes

As I've mentioned before, one of my students is attending a U.S. college on a military base. In one of her recent lessons with me, she told me that she feels very isolated from others now despite the fact that she is encountering more new people than ever before. It's not that people aren't friendly with her on the base per se but rather that she finds herself in circumstances she wouldn't have anticipated.

On the one hand, she has Japanese friends who she feels she has less and less in common with. When they communicate with her (usually via e-mail), she doesn't have much to share with them because her experiences as a 44-year-old college student at a U.S. school are so different from theirs as Japanese housewives and mothers. When they invite her to go do things with her, she feels torn between wanting to do things with them and feeling that the fatigue and possible awkwardness in communication now that they've grown apart will not be worth whatever pleasure she gets from the experience.

Her family is also no comfort because her husband constantly criticizes her for failing to live up to his expectations of a Japanese wife. He tells her that she can't do anything right and they frequently quarrel. To me, this is ironic because she has taken 3 classes so far and gotten an "A" in each of them. Her husband once had me correct his English for an abstract for a medical paper he'd written and I daresay he could not cope nearly as well as her with the all-English instruction, essay-writing, and environment. All of this makes her feel as if she's drifting away from the other Japanese people in her life and can no longer relate to them as their values are increasingly different from hers. Unfortunately, she completely embraces her husband's assessment of her and gets depressed and feels like a failure.

When she's on the military base, she feels like a visitor in a foreign land which operates very differently from her expectations. She often complains to me about how the teachers don't answer her question in a timely fashion or how they fail to assist her when she needs help. Her expectation is that the teachers will behave like Japanese teachers, who are often expected to ensure their students pass and to spend their free time dealing with student problems. She also feels a lot of stress because she can't understand the way in which many of the military personnel she takes classes with speak because many of them are from the south and/or African American and she finds their cadences and accents difficult to follow since most of her exposure to English is to slower-speaking teachers (myself included) and those with measured voices that contain little accent on T.V. and in instructional materials.

My student is in a situation which is oddly similar to mine. She has a lot of her social activity centered in a "foreign land" and she feels disconnected from people in her own culture. For me, this is rather expected because I am far from my home but, for her, it's a bit of a hard experience to understand because she still lives in her home country. In fact, in many ways, she is worse off than I despite having the "support" of her family literally at her back-door (her parents live in the other half of a divided house with she and her husband) and her long-time friends a phone call away. Not only do I have an incredibly supportive husband where hers is always tearing her down but I expect my difficulties and actively work to understand and address them because I know they're a part of being in a foreign country.

I've tried to comfort her and boost her confidence but I don't think she understands where I'm coming from when I tell her things like she doesn't have to live according to her husband's expectations and that a lot of people discover their lifestyles and their friends' lifestyles are diverging as time goes by. In the end, I don't think she can break free from thinking that conformity to the expectations of those around her is more important than an objective analysis of her accomplishments (which would be a very positive one) or finding her self-worth within herself alone.

The Heat

Today has been the hottest day of the year so far in Tokyo and I had a chat about the weather with "little old man" (LOM) before he launched into a long talk about how he spent a sweaty but "exciting" time on the golf driving range. LOM loves his golf. He once spent three lessons getting through telling me about one game in minute detail.

Getting back to the weather though, LOM told me that one of the effects of all this heat is that he doesn't sleep very well. He said he has an air conditioner but he doesn't like to use it all night so he puts it on a 30-minute timer just before bed and when the heat inevitably wakes him up again and again, he runs it each time on a 30-minute timer because he thinks running it all night is going to cause him to freeze to death or get very sick.

After telling me about this drawback of the heat, he wanted to tell me about some other ill effect so he pulled out his electronic dictionary and started poking at the keys. He slowly said that the heat makes him "im-po-tience". I was pretty sure he didn't mean what it sounded like so I just smiled and said, "impo... what?" He repeated "impotience" and I asked to see his dictionary at which point I realized he meant, "impatient".

Sometimes I wonder what the students would think if they could read my mind when such little errors occur. Generally speaking, I'm rather glad they can't.

Postcards

Postcards are probably the last type of snail mail that people continue to send to one another on a semi-regular basis as part of social discourse. This is likely due to the fact that they are short, sent only from vacation spots at irregular intervals and have pictures which give one a feeling for what a locale is like. Substantial snail mail correspondence via snail mail has been largely supplanted by e-mail, chatting, and text messaging but postcards from exotic locales can't be replaced by e-cards (and everybody seems to hate them anyway).

The postcard above was sent to my husband from one of his regular students from Hawaii where she's on vacation for a little over a week. This particular student has been my husband's regular student for about a year and a half and shares an interest in Weird Al Yankovic with him. In fact, she mentions buying Twinkies in the U.S. to make a "Twinkie wiener sandwich" because it is part of the movie, UHF.

This student sent my husband this card because she likes him as a teacher but back when I was working at my former office, the president of the company used to ask the teachers to solicit postcards from students when they went on vacation. This was a rather awkward situation because the teachers were teaching six five-minute telephone lessons and never saw the students face-to-face. It is difficult to develop a rapport under those conditions and asking for postcards to be sent to you when you are little more than a disembodied voice speaking briefly with the student seems like an imposition.

The teachers, including myself, asked for these postcards anyway because the ability to generate large quantities of them was an indication of the teacher's popularity and tickled the president no end. He wasn't necessarily concerned with how well-liked the teacher was but rather he wanted the cards to stuff into an album which the salespeople would take around to potential clients to show how great an experience speaking with the teacher was. Since we solicited most of the cards, the cards were rarely a reflection of the affection a student held for a particular teacher but the president placed a lot of stock in this sort of phony PR.

Some students did send cards to their teachers spontaneously but it was relatively rare. Sometimes, even in a brief call, you would develop a rapport that was fairly strongly despite the brevity of contact but it often had more to do with the student's gregarious character than with the teacher. This part of the teaching experience in Japan was all part of the vast education you get in just how much of what you do is about sales and not about helping the students advance their capabilities.