Caramel Corn Fish

What follows is a series of four anecdotes, all relating to my past couple days of teaching at Momoishi Elementary School (百石小学校).

1.) Yesterday, I was walking down the stairs from one of my classes when the special ed. session let out. There are two special ed. students at the school and they get pulled out of their regular classes once a day for individual tutoring. I struck up a conversation with one of them as I walked down the stairs and he asked to look at the worksheets I was carrying. I explained that I would be using them when I teach his class next week and he seemed interested. Well, when we reached the entrance of the teacher's office, I was feeling pretty satisfied with how the conversation had gone. I'm starting to build relationships with a few of the kids at the school and I was glad to count him among them. I turned to say goodbye to the kid but instead of bidding me farewell he simply asked "Who are you?"

2.) At the end of the day yesterday, I had to teach the English Club. We now have one boy, who's a bit of a joker but the rest of the club consists of all girls, as can be expected. Well, we're sitting around playing a board-game when these two boys show up at the door. "We have presents for you," they announced, which (of course) sent the room into a frenzy. The girls lined up at the door to receive the "presents": two small, white squares of folded notebook paper. When they opened them up, they discovered little devices constructed from a rubber band, a piece of cardboard and a soda can tab. The tab was tied in the middle of the rubber band, which was strung between the edges of a square of cardboard and the band was all wound up. Perhaps you might even recall constructing such devices during your own elementary school days; they're supposed to jump out at whoever opens the letter and scare them. Unfortunately, these ones didn't work for some reason and just sat there. The girls pretended to be scared out of obligation but the boys soon lost interest and left, dejected at the failure of their elaborate prank. As one of the girls was disposing of the device, she somehow managed to cut herself on the soda tab. When I sat back down to continue the game, I heard a commotion going on at the other table and looked over to see that the girl's thumb was bleeding slightly. At the sight of this, the girl sitting directly across from me turned to me and with a completely deadpan look on her face said (in perfect English) "Oh my God." I don't think anyone in that room understood why I laughed so hard.

3.) There's a big difference between sixth graders and fourth graders. This week, I decided to design separate lessons for my older elementary schoolers and my younger ones. For the younger ones, I'm doing a Halloween lesson centering around trick-or-treating. The older guys get a Halloween word-search that I downloaded off of the internet. I figure, if they're going to put in a minimum of effort, so will I. Little did I know that I managed to tap into a secret Japanese passion for worksheets. In my sixth grade classes, the minute I handed them out, heads went down and the kids began to concentrate on solving the search-before I had even asked them to. This came as quite a pleasant surprise as instead of having to teach a usually rambunctious class, I was free to stroll around the room and daydream for half an hour. In one of the classes, the teacher got so into it that she sat down at a desk and solved it with the kids. When she finished, she pumped her fists in the air and exclaimed "I DID IT!" She then assigned the remainder of the word-search as homework for the class, resulting in a collective groan.

Now, the fourth graders were a completely different story. I couldn't decide if they were ready for the word search or not but I guess I figured that I would challenge them (or maybe I was feeling lazy) and decided to give it a shot. I spent the first half of class explaining all of the words to them in Japanese and even drew a word-seach on the board to show them how to look for the words. However, in all three fourth grade classes, approximately 30-50% of each class entered collective whine mode after I handed out the word-search. They slumped back in their chairs, their necks and limbs went limp, their eyes rolled-back in their heads and their mouths opened wide, releasing an extremely whiny chorus of 意味わかああない ("I don't understaaaand the meaning!"). I shudder just thinking about it.

4.) If you've managed to read this far then consider yourself duly rewarded, as I always save the best for last. I've been eating school lunch for the past two weeks or so and despite the fact that I once was the kind of kid who was so finicky about what I ate that I generally turned my nose up at the mere mention of school lunch, I have found the Japanese equivalent quite palatable. Each meal generally consists of five components: vegetable, meat, soup, rice or bread and milk. While there are occasionally rather questionable items included (yesterday's corn, spinach and sausage salad, anyone?), on the whole, it usually provides a satisfying afternoon meal. Today, one of the items was a piece of fish, breaded and fried in the delicious katsu ("cutlet") style. There was a little tube of tonkatsu sauce on the side, which is commonly eaten with katsu-style items. When the secretary of the school tried to put some on her fish, a whole bunch came gushing out and everyone laughed at her. "Here, have another one," said the teacher sitting across from me, as he served her one of the extras and put the soiled fish back in the box. After I had eaten most of the rest of my lunch, I decided to tackle the fish (I always save the best for last, remember?) and I made sure to apply the sauce very sparingly, so as not to be laughed at. When I looked up, the entire table was staring at me in amazement. "What are you doing?" the teacher across from me asked. I looked down at the tube in my hand, which I had not even bothered to read: "...coffee". "What is this?" I asked. "That's coffee flavoring for your milk!" he exclaimed, resulting in a eruption of laughter. He offered me another piece of fish but determined to pay for my own stupidity, I insisted on eating the coffee-flavored fish. Perhaps as a sign of solidarity, he then removed the discarded fish cutlet from the box (which was literally soaking in the coffee syrup) and began to eat it. "It's not that bad, it just tastes like caramel corn!" he exclaimed, adding, "It's really sweet, though". After that, he tried to trick every other teacher who entered the room into making the same mistake but none of them fell for it. Zanen deshita.