2014/05/26

Pride, Prejudice, and a Surprising Amount of Apathy

Okay, so I am not in Japan, anymore. I came back to the US of A and found a job teaching English to foreign expats, tourists, and students who find themselves washed up on the shores of the Bay Area. It's not such a bad place to get stuck, except that it is criminally expensive and life-prohibitively unaffordable. And it ain't cheap.

But it's not so bad to visit, I suppose. My school works to take kids with elementary and middle school English, learned from non-native speakers, and provide them with some accent polishing, vocabulary expanding, and grammar brush-ups before they jump out into the world of American high schools and universities, where they will undoubtedly have to compare themselves to their native-English speaking peers, and probably show them up. We take some adults too, folks from China, Russia, and India who live and work here and want more confidence in their business English skills. In general, everybody wants to be there, at the school. The teachers like teaching and the students like learning, they know it to be useful, and they suck it up and make do.

There are always exceptions, however, who make things difficult for everyone.

Right now, I have a set of private students, all lovely, among whom one stands out as being a pain in the backside. Not to me, actually. He's pretty decent, polite, and engaged in lessons, when he is in my classroom. Apparently, he doesn't like one of his other classes and is locked in a battle of wills with the teacher of said class.

Now, there are very few kids who really enjoy misbehaving. Most kids like testing boundaries and being reassured that consequences exist and are consistently applied, so they can rely on the powers that be to enforce rules and protections for everybody at all times. Some kids get a kick out of breaking rules, but very few (in my experience) really like stonewalling their teachers. For one thing, in a private lesson, it gets hella boring. Sitting silently staring at each other for twenty minutes is pretty grating on the nerves of all involved parties. I have had kids sit through the last ten minutes of lessons like that - mostly seven-year-olds who didn't believe me when I said I would do that. And they didn't do whatever they were doing to piss me off very often after that. No one likes being bored.

There are older kids who will be rebellious just because they feel like it, but they usually react by pushing the envelope and contradicting everything you say. They don't like being quiet, they don't like sitting still, and they are trying to get a rise out of you.

So when a kid sits in his classroom, across the table from a teacher, staring down at a closed textbook, with an empty quiz sheet on the table, looking miserable, I figure it isn't because he likes the silence. I think it's because he either hates the subject or can't get along with the teacher, neither of which are things he would prefer in a perfect state of affairs.

All of us have subjects we hate, maybe because we innately despise it, maybe because we don't understand it in the slightest. I didn't pass geometry, although I went to class and sat through it. I literally cannot recall a single sensical idea from that class. I am sure I sat in my tiny desk, holding onto the pencil and tracing the shapes on the tests, wondering when I would be free from what I can only describe as a nightmarish experience. I remember that the teacher was a patient guy and that I cried every day over my homework.

But had it been a private class, I know I would have tried just as hard and understood just as little.
Basically if you hate a subject, you just have to suck it up and get through it. There isn't another choice - personal preferences rarely change. You know. Unless it's about wine. Cuz three cups in, and that $9.99 bottle from Chile suddenly has become your favorite merlot.

So it's probably a personal problem.

And this is tricky territory.

For one thing, teachers like to play god. The more atheistic the teacher, generally the more absolute the classroom rule. Go against the official opinion and you'll find yourself slapped with an extra essay, additional homework, and a request that the principal comes to have a chat with you, your mom, and the teacher to discuss your problem with authority. It's like living in a communist dictatorship, except with detention instead of Siberia as the constant looming threat to happiness.

It's way more difficult if there are no other students to balance things out. In such circumstances, the student decides that the only way to avoid active antagonism, especially if they are a more or less well-behaved kid, is to just shut up. And I understand that completely. If everything I say is wrong, why talk anymore? Just sit there and wait for the clock to strike 10:00.

Which is a miserable way to get through a miserable subject.

I don't know how to help these situations, because fault is almost always laid at the feet of the kid. I don't entirely disagree with this. No one is asking you to compromise your values so just sit back, smile and nod, write an essay spewing back the bare facts (avoid parroting the teacher's personal opinions - that just encourages them), and get through it. This is the least of your life's worries. At least here, in the classroom, you're technically safe. No one is going to haul your ass to jail or put you on the chain gang because you give less than your supreme effort. Save your zeal for the subjects you love. Somebody else will come along and stoke that teacher's ego, and hopefully actually like the topic.

It's unfortunate, however, that the above statement is the best way to go. I meet and have met a great number of teachers. They work with big classes, they are underpaid, overworked, and extremely under-appreciated members of the working class. So I understand when they decide that it's their way or the highway and this is the method that works for 70% of the students in the past, so they aren't going to change anything. Change is exhausting, it involves research and study (on your private time - you don't get paid to prepare lesson plans), and you have to test it out in real-life situations, which means some of your classes just became laboratories and if trial day happens to be the same day that the principal comes to sit in - and things don't work out the way you hoped - suddenly you look like a total fuck-up.

So you just stick to the same thing. And the 30% of the kids who don't get it, act out, act up, act like little jerks because they don't understand the relevance of geometry, history, anatomy, or physics. Or god forbid, English. So they just hunker down, praying for anonymity and daylight. Maybe the teacher will never call on them. Maybe they will just get through it if they ignore it long enough.

Hey. It worked for geometry.











2014/04/04

And Follow-Up

So the cab driver story isn't over. Because when I sat down, and we pulled into traffic, my cabbie looks in the rearview mirror - still on his phone - and says, in broken, but intelligble English, "What country you?"

"America."

He nods. In my travel book, any chat with your cabby is license to become buddies with your cabby. My driver in Kyoto was a good dude who had traveled more extensively than I have, albeit many years ago. We talked a lot, about teaching, foreign countries, tourists, and marriage. Everybody talks about marriage. I can't get around that one.

Anyway, I keep going. "California. San Francisco," I say, hoping he'll pick up the thread and sew something friendly. A tea-cozy, maybe...

He nods, then holds up his phone like, "Don't bother me, you rude whitey. I'm talking real words with a real person here."

"Oh." I make a gesture, hopefully an apologetic one. "Sorry."

He shakes his head at me, talks into the phone some more, than presently says, "Bye-bye. Bye-bye!"
He laughs at me in the mirror.

"How long Korea?"

How long have I been here? "3 hours." I point to my wrist, where my watch would be if Mickey hadn't split his leather the week before I left for Tano.

He laughs. "Speak Korean?"

"Nope!" He laughs again, looking a little surprised. Japanese are always surprised when I speak decent Japanese. Koreans always seem surprised that I don't speak Korean. I'm not sure which is the better reaction.

"Why Korea? Business? You working?"

"Visiting a friend."

He nods. "Boyfriend?" I shake my head. "Girlfriend?" I hesitate, then nod. "Girlfriend?!" His eyes get wide and he laughs.

No, no. "Friend, girl. Not girlfriend," I say, but he repeats, "Girlfriend?! Women?!" We go back and forth like this for a while, until I figure out how to be clear.

"I like men!" I declare.

"Oh, oh!" He laughs again and changes lanes, almost without looking. The cab behind us that was sneaking up like a shark slides smoothly into a parallel parking spot at precisely half a second before we smacked his right front bumper. "So how long Korea?"

"Hm, two weeks?"

He nods, sagely, wisely, and picks up the phone again. I swear I never even heard it ring.

Burst of Korean both distorted through satellites, phonelines, and receivers, and distorted by my uncomprehending ears. He hangs up. "My friend lives - " in the same apartment complex as my friend does.

"Your friend, girl, pretty?" He asks me. "Yes, of course," I reply. "Like me!" I strike a cute pose and he cracks up. I'm going to take that as agreement.

"Baek Suck" we both read off the traffic signs. We are getting closer. "I want study English," he confides patiently.

"Good. I want to study Korean." Which is always true for me when I am in Korea. "Now, your English is here," I illustrate by holding my hand at about waist height. "You study, you get good, then your English is here." Corresponding elevation of hand to level of grandiose learning capability. "My Korean is here," I stomp on the floor of the car.

"You're funny!" He is cracking up. "Married? Solo?"

"Solo." I never could get worked up over duets. "You married?"

Here there was a patch of completely unintelligble wordiness. I am not sure if he said he was married, or not, but somehow he got onto having two sons. One in high school and one in junior high. So I guess maybe? Or divorced? Cuz the simple answer would have been, yes.

"Hey! Straight?"

I thought we covered this.

"Left?"

Oh!

I stare out the window. We are in the right neighborhood, but like Japan, Korea doesn't really use street names for addresses (I think?). I recognize where we are, but all the towering apartment buildings surrounding us look alike (I am NOT racist).

"Um... Straight. Then left." I command.

He shakes his head. "No, no." Pointing his finger ahead and shaking it contrarily. "No, no." I try to show him the address I've got on my phone, but he can't read it and we can't magnify the printing. Never mind, he waves me back. We'll just go down every street until we figure it out.

So we pull a u-turn in the middle of the street.

And Mom wonders why I think she'd be a great Korean driver.

"Number?"

I tell him, but I'm sure now we are at the wrong complex. The mountain park place is directly in front of us and it should be on our left.

"No, no, no, no," I try to direct him.

"1-0-5," he replies, pointing left. There's the mountain. Forget the mountain, there's the apartment complex I've been looking for since 9 o'clock this morning when I left my hotel in Osaka.

"That's it, that's it! Okay, go left! Straight, straight! Left!" I am so good at directions.

He's cracking up again. In fact, I don't think he's stopped laughing for a full minute at a time during this drive. "I like you!" he tells me as we roar down the avenue, turning in at the correct complex, winding our way through the various towers, and finally stopping in front of the doors to my friend's apartment building. "Yes! No! Left! Straight! I like you!"

I'm laughing, he's laughing. Maybe he's laughing at me, and I'm laughing with him, but who cares? It's hilarious. As most of life is, when you're honest with yourself. Who really knows what we're doing anyway?

My confidence has been restored, for the moment at least. I still have to count out the correct cash to pay my fare.