I Am Completely Serious

While you read this, please imagine an eleven-year-old girl with huge teased hair in gigantic purple clip, lying on the floor with her eyes closed, me standing grumpily over her holding up a textbook from which I have been attempting to induce her to read.

ME: Goody Proctor.

GOODY PROCTOR: …pineapple.

ME: Pineapple?

GOODY PROCTOR: <Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Do you know?>

ME: …that would be Spongebob, Goody Proctor.

GOODY PROCTOR: <Ding ding ding.>

ME: Why Spongebob, Goody Proctor?

GOODY PROCTOR: <Because I love him.> I love Spongebob!

ME: Will you get married?

GOODY PROCTOR: <He’s cute!>

ME: I’m very happy for both of you.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

I made another kid cry today.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Yesterday Mr. Wow didn’t show up for class. This is a first for him! Instead, he came in two hours later for Miss Dolphin, Mr. Hypochondriac, and Mr. Bug’s class. I was informed after this class that this was going to be a permanent alteration in the schedule. I wasn’t consulted, and would have argued if I had been. They’re at least all in the same textbook, but Mr. Wow is way ahead of the other three. And thanks to Mr. Bug’s entrance into the class last month, that group - which used to be really good! - is already pretty chaotic.

I really wanted Mr. Bug in a class of his own, because he’s three years older than the others and, as I predicted to the manager when he suggested this idea, has some self-esteem issues about being stuck in with younger kids. Especially younger kids who are more advanced than he is. I really wish I’d been wrong about that prediction, but no, Mr. Bug is really rebellious about this. I have no goddamn idea why they wouldn’t let me put him in a private class - it’s not like my schedule’s all that busy, and I didn’t get the idea his parents had a really tight schedule to fit. It’s going to be even worse with Mr. Wow in the class, getting absolutely everything right on his first try. Mr. Bug already hates him, and I don’t think Mr. Wow likes Mr. Bug, either. I didn’t think Mr. Wow ever disliked anyone…

So this was not a great way to come back from vacation.

Also, I made Zoh cry. Zoh is pretty delicate - she’s a major hypochondriac, she gets upset if it even looks like she’s losing a game, and she’s not very good at memorizing stuff. Luckily Zip is her best friend in the world, and is good about throwing games she’s winning when Zoh starts getting upset, and helping her with stuff. (Though it may be that some of Zoh’s problems come from Zip’s constant mothering.) So Zoh gets upset sometimes, but I’d never actually seen her cry before.

Yesterday she was playing with this packet of Pokemon tissues and not paying attention, so I took the tissues and sat on them. The younger girls like playing with anime tissue packets - I use this maneuver a lot, and usually they laugh and try to fight me for them, and I hold the tissues for ransom either until they’ve answered two or three questions or until the end of class. Zoh, however, just burst into tears. I had to take a time-out and let her calm down. Fortunately, Zip had her giggling again in a few minutes. I hope she was just tired, and I didn’t make a scary jet-lag face at her or anything.

Goody Proctor and the Devil were Goody Proctor and the Devil, and Mr. K was absent. He’s been missing a lot of classes recently - I hope his parents aren’t having major scheduling problems. I’d hate it if he quit.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

(Leo is the Russian kid.)

Peter Pan, Jack’o'Lantern, and an as-yet non-nicknamed cohort came over to my desk and prevented me from working for a while again today, so I decided to make them practice some non-lying-related English. One of my questions was, “How old are you?” They didn’t understand the question. I did the example sentence for them, “How old are you? I’m twenty-three.” This works on grade-schoolers most of the time, but did not work on this set of high-schoolers.

Manager, who was standing nearby showing Leo something, said to them, “Why don’t you have Leo help you? He’s fluent in English, you know!”

Leo gets extremely annoyed when Manager tells people he speaks English, which I don’t think Manager has noticed - I’m sure he and Lucca get really sick of people assuming they do - but in this case, he actually did know. He told Peter Pan haughtily in Japanese, “She’s asking how old you are. She’s twenty-two - I mean, no, twenty-three!”

“Oh!” said Peter Pan. “You’re good!”

“Okay, so how old are you?” I asked Peter Pan.

“Anooo… juu-san-sai.”

“English! English! You’re thirteen.”

“Sah-teen.”

“No! That’s bedsheets! Thir-teen! Thir-teen!”

The word “bedsheets” was apparently too much for Peter Pan, for I had lost her again. Leo said, “Thirteen. It means juu-san-sai.” Kagura-sensei had come over to look for something, and he pointed to her and said to me in English, “She’s four hundred.”

Manager and I both made threatening gestures at him. (Kagura-sensei, who was doing actual work, did not bother.) “Sorry, sorry,” he said. “I don’t think you’re actually sorry,” I told him. I don’t know if he understood this, but he nodded solemnly in agreement.

“Wow!” said Peter Pan and Jack’o'Lantern. “You really are good at English!”

“Oh, I’m not that great,” he said, spinning around impressively on his roller-skate shoes.

“Those are good shoes,” said the third girl, eyeing them covetously. And Leo, though his ego is quite healthy, is nonetheless still twelve - slightly too fragile to handle all this at once, he was forced to skate away for a second. Aww.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Today some of the juku kids practiced their English on me. Not much actual communication took place. I still can’t figure out why they kept saying “a lot of sheep.” I asked Kagura-sensei, “Why are they talking about sheep!? Are they studying animals? Are they studying irregular plural forms?” She either could not or was unwilling to explain the significance of the sheep. I drew one sheep on the whiteboard, then a lot of sheep, and they said, “Ohhh!” indicating that they had not previously known what a lot of sheep looked like. (Maybe they were studying “a lot,” “a few,” and “some”?)

Mostly what they did was claim to be people and things which they were not. “I’m Madonna! I’m Michael Jackson! I’m a jack’o'lantern! I’m a lot of sheep!” I said, “Nice to meet you, a lot of sheep.”

At one point one girl said, “I’m Peter Pan! This is my sister, uhh… she’s…”

On the theme of “male characters generally played by women,” and because I’d been thinking about Saiyuki, I said, “Are you Sanzo Houshi?”

“Yes! I’m Sanzo Houshi!”

“Oh! Nice to meet you, Sanzo Houshi!”

Later another girl said of another, “This is my sister, monkey” (I do not think any of these girls were actually sisters), and I said, “Oh, are you Son Goku?”

“No, no! I’m Madonna!” And then in Japanese, “You really like the Saiyuki, huh…”

“I like Minekura Kazuya’s Saiyuki.”

“Me, too!”

Surely Japan’s future is in good hands.

Relatedly, when I draw a monkey, none of the kids recognize it as such unless I put the Monkey King’s curly diadem on it. My monkey totally looks like a monkey! It’s not a skinny bear! Shut up, Zuzu!

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

There are some little windows in the classroom so the parents can watch classes from the waiting area. Obviously, when there are other kids out there, they come over to the windows and wave and pop up and down like prairie dogs and so forth.

So the other day Mr. Yodeler was in the classroom, and Mr. Weepy was outside waiting for the teacher for his other class to show up. Mr. Weepy came over and knocked on the window. Mr. Yodeler walked over to it, looking very solemn. They both pressed their noses up to it and kissed through the glass. Then they giggled, and loudly proclaimed one another to be “baragumi.”

I know that “bara,” which means “rose,” is used as a term for gay guys - I mean, that part of the whole interaction seems pretty clear - but I’m not sure about the “gumi” part. According to my dictionary it just means “group,” but I think I’ve only ever heard it used referring to military and police units. When I google for this in romaji I get stuff about the anime Sakura Taisen, which does, in fact, use the term to describe a (deeply offensive-sounding) all-gay military unit. But I don’t think a couple of four-year-olds are likely to have seen this show, since 1) the art makes it look kind of porny, and 2) Sleep-san liked it, which probably means it’s both kind of porny and too complicated for little kids. I could be wrong? Anyway, I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to ask the manager to clarify this one for me. His sense of humor can be somewhat lacking.

(The first google result in Japanese is somebody’s Second Life store, and I am deeply unimpressed by those dresses.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Tonight, on my way home, I found a bunch of trading cards - Pokemon, Something Something Battle, and other franchises unknown to me - scattered on the sidewalk by the traffic light closest to the school. I was in a hurry to get back because I had received an urgent summons from the chili in the fridge, but, you know. I work at a school. Some kid’s mom might well call up in the morning saying that Taro’s all crying because he lost his foil Bulbasaur.

So I gathered them all up and took them up to Kagura-sensei (named for her love of Fruits Basket), who rushed them over to Manager and engaged him in an intense discussion of which kid liked both Pokemon and Something Something Battle. They didn’t come to any conclusions, but the cards are in the lost-and-found now.

I hope they actually belong to one of the kids who goes here - it’s a busy intersection. It’s just that of the establishments on that block, we’re the one with the most Pokemon-card intensive traffic, so I figured odds were good they belonged to one of our students. Some of them had already gotten torn up from being on the ground, so I didn’t want to just leave them there.

Mr. Weepy is a little creep. As predicted, today he got all broody when I wouldn’t let him play with blocks instead of studying English, so he started crying, to try and make his Mom think I was being mean to him. But it’s better than that. I had tapped him on the forehead to get his attention, and he pretended I had poked him in the eye. Jesus, sweetie. Regrettably for Mr. Weepy, his mom was talking to Mr. Clown’s mom when this went down, so this masterful performance went entirely to waste.

We have a new girl in Mr. Weepy and Mr. Clown’s class as of last week - a two-year-old, who absolutely should not be in this class - and of course, Mr. Weepy was obnoxious to her. “She’s a baby! She’s just a baby! Go back to mama, baby!” Luckily, Miss Foo doesn’t have the attention span necessary to recognize Mr. Weepy’s extremely subtle brand of harassment.

This week, Mr. Weepy had a change of heart. “You know,” he said consideringly to Mr. Clown as they were coloring, “Miss Foo is actually quite pretty. You’re a pretty girl, Miss Foo!” he told her, in a hilariously lecherous little voice. He obviously thought he sounded quite suave, and my laughter offended him deeply. Oh, Mr. Weepy, you’re such a lady’s man. (Miss Foo, very busy trying to figure out how to right the plastic chair she’d flipped over, remained completely unaware of Mr. Weepy’s advances.)

(Rest of the day is cut for length.)

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

Leo and Lucca, the two Russian kids, scared the crap out of me today. They have those shoes that have little wheels inset in them, so they can roll around like they’re on skates. They were using these right by the stairwell. This also upset Manager, who sent me out to keep an eye on them until their parents showed up. (Their parents, like most of the parents, are chronically late.)

Because it was cold out there and I wanted them away from the stairs, I subtly drew them back inside by means of 1) speaking English at them (they don’t know English), 2) playing Chrono Trigger on the DS (apparently fascinating), and 3) getting the laptop out and showing Lucca a picture of Dad putting my tiara on the St. Bernard. I told her, “This dog is really big. She’s bigger than you! Do you want her?” “Yes!” “Okay, you can have her.” “No, no, no.”

All the kids attending the juku have to make little signs with “mission statements” for their studies on them, which the juku teachers post up on the walls. Lucca’s says “I want to learn more about dogs!” Then she drew a little fluffy dog with a bow on it and a brush. Aww.

I asked her about this dog, and she got all shy and wouldn’t explain it to me. Leo haughtily explained that this was their family’s Maltese. Then he asked if the laptop had any games. I put the laptop on the front desk (no one ever sits there), and he sat there and played, with Lucca watching, until their step-dad came for them. So the extraction was a success.

Also, today I wore non-matching socks. This was intended to amuse the kids. What I did not count on was that most of the kids I had in class today - Zip, Zoh, and two new students - assumed I’d done it by accident and were too polite and Japanese to say anything. (I think Mr. Rat would have mentioned if he’d noticed, but we were sitting at the table today.) The same was true of my co-workers. No one wanted to say anything about the socks until Kitty, leaving her juku class, loudly pointed them out to the Devil.

You guys, I have to go out into the corridor to get to my classroom. I take my shoes on and off like thirty times a day. Did you really think I didn’t know my socks didn’t match?

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)

The Broodmaster quit today. I have not been posting about his classes because they’re infuriating for a wide variety of reasons, chiefly 1) his Dad, 2) my employers, and 3) himself. Basically, he was placed in way too high a level of a textbook, apparently at his Dad’s insistence, and my employers were reluctant to either move him into another book (which would require diplomacy with Obnoxious Dad) or buy me the supplementary materials I would need to try and keep him somewhere near okay in the current one. There’s a cheapness-induced level-gap in the kind of textbooks we’ve got around, and the Broodmaster is in it. We have literally nothing I can use with him. This meant I was spending three or four times longer preparing for him than for anyone else, and I still could never be sure when something I brought in was going to be too easy or too hard.

So, he quit. And I’d been expecting it, and I did what I could, and both he and his Dad are jerks anyway. And I know they’ve even got another student planned to slot into his place already. But I’m still in a bad mood.

Mee and Conan’s mom had a doctor’s appointment today and was going to be late picking up Conan, whose class is right before Mee’s. So I had Conan stay in the classroom with us while Mee had her lessons. She was playing Mario 64 on Mee’s DS, and kept making outraged little five-year-old sounds when Mario died. Mee decided Conan needed to come over and play with us when I brought out Go Fish, which I quickly realized I shouldn’t have allowed, because Mee spent more time explaining the rules to Conan than she did forming English sentences for me.

But they were very cute together, up until the moment at the end of class when Mee kicked Conan.

Argh, Mee! I had to yell at her and make her apologize, which she did not do very sincerely. I know this is perfectly in-character for her Moomin persona - tormenting sisters is what a Mee does - but it was massively disillusioning following their earlier adorability.

I met them on the elevator on my way back from lunch - I’d had to leave them with the other teacher to eat because their mom still wasn’t there - and Mee and Conan again grabbed me and tried to get me to go to eat with them. This was very cute, but I both had already eaten and didn’t have time. (And though their mom did not look horrified by the suggestion like their grandmother did, I’m not exactly going to take them up on this without her outright invitation.)

Conan at this juncture reported to her mother that I am 23 - she said it in both Japanese and English, very proud of herself for knowing double-digit numbers. Her mother was startled at this information. “But that’s so young!” How old do I look, exactly? Or is this in reaction to my teaching the kids? I know there are at least two teachers my age at the juku.

(Originally published at SarahPin.com. You can comment here or there.)