Saturday, December 09, 2006
I need to remember to post on this blasted thing more often.
Yup, still alive.
Nothing eventful happening lately. Just work, hanging out, Japanese class, and church. I've also been told by an all-so-cheerful friend that, "No, the heater doesn't use much electricity! Why, I had it turned on 2 or 3 hours a day with no problems at all!" That thud you just heard was the sound of me falling off my chair. My roommates are never cold, so they don't mind only using the heater a few hours a day, and I don't want to drag their utility bills up by using the heat as much as I want. Nova gave us all space heaters, but they just aren't strong enough to beat the winter chill. So it's looking to be a very cold winter. Blah.
J watched "The Devil Wears Prada" a couple of weeks ago, and was highly impressed. Now, every time there's a new female student in Voice he asks her her opinion of high heels and designer brand goods. He demanded to know our exact reasons for wearing or not wearing high heels, and simply could not believe that some women don't want to wear tall heels because they don't want to be taller than their boyfriends/husbands. If he were a woman, he'd "want to be a model and walk down the catwalk," he said, as he flounced across the room in his best model imitation.
Today we were talking about middle names, and I asked the students what middle name they'd want if they had a middle name. J decided on Bond, because then he could write his name J. Bond.
I'm enjoying most of my kids' classes. Even the really rambunctious kids are really cute, just incapable of sitting still for more than thirty seconds. Sometimes the class turns into more of a wrestling game than an English lesson. I always win, of course, because I'm three times their size, I'm taller than them, and I'm not ticklish. It's relatively easy to hold the vocab cards above their heads and wait until they tire of trying to climb me like a tree.
Note to everyone who pushed Naruto on me: do you realize what unspeakable horror that anime has unleashed upon the world? Forget global warming, forget illegal immigration, forget third-world poverty: the greatest menace to the future of this planet is the great and awful kancho. To those of you that are fortunate enough to have never seen Naruto and been exposed to the kancho, it consists of these three steps:
1. Clasp your hands together.
2. Stick out your two pointer fingers.
3. Poke your fingers where the sun don't shine, all as a friendly gesture of affection, of course.
I'm so not making this up. This is how the Japanese version of folding little paper footballs and trying to score field goals through your friend's fingers--just an ordinary, hum-drum way of passing classtime when you're bored. Except it involves poking your friends, the teacher, and any innocent bystanders within range, in the unmentionable bits.
No, seriously.
I'm not making this up.
Ask any other English teacher in Japan--they'll have their own horror stories.
We can't WAIT for Naruto to finish airing over here, because maybe this stupid little game will die a quick death and be consigned to the dustbin of freakish trends that didn't pass fast enough, where it belongs.
Well, it only took two weeks of kids' lessons for my first kancho attempt. Fortunately, I've managed to hide from the kids that I can speak Japanese (my secret weapon!) and the kid was stupid enough to brag to his friends in Japanese about what he was about to do, so it was easy enough to fend him off.
Hey, at least it means my students like me...
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Nothing eventful happening lately. Just work, hanging out, Japanese class, and church. I've also been told by an all-so-cheerful friend that, "No, the heater doesn't use much electricity! Why, I had it turned on 2 or 3 hours a day with no problems at all!" That thud you just heard was the sound of me falling off my chair. My roommates are never cold, so they don't mind only using the heater a few hours a day, and I don't want to drag their utility bills up by using the heat as much as I want. Nova gave us all space heaters, but they just aren't strong enough to beat the winter chill. So it's looking to be a very cold winter. Blah.
J watched "The Devil Wears Prada" a couple of weeks ago, and was highly impressed. Now, every time there's a new female student in Voice he asks her her opinion of high heels and designer brand goods. He demanded to know our exact reasons for wearing or not wearing high heels, and simply could not believe that some women don't want to wear tall heels because they don't want to be taller than their boyfriends/husbands. If he were a woman, he'd "want to be a model and walk down the catwalk," he said, as he flounced across the room in his best model imitation.
Today we were talking about middle names, and I asked the students what middle name they'd want if they had a middle name. J decided on Bond, because then he could write his name J. Bond.
I'm enjoying most of my kids' classes. Even the really rambunctious kids are really cute, just incapable of sitting still for more than thirty seconds. Sometimes the class turns into more of a wrestling game than an English lesson. I always win, of course, because I'm three times their size, I'm taller than them, and I'm not ticklish. It's relatively easy to hold the vocab cards above their heads and wait until they tire of trying to climb me like a tree.
Note to everyone who pushed Naruto on me: do you realize what unspeakable horror that anime has unleashed upon the world? Forget global warming, forget illegal immigration, forget third-world poverty: the greatest menace to the future of this planet is the great and awful kancho. To those of you that are fortunate enough to have never seen Naruto and been exposed to the kancho, it consists of these three steps:
1. Clasp your hands together.
2. Stick out your two pointer fingers.
3. Poke your fingers where the sun don't shine, all as a friendly gesture of affection, of course.
I'm so not making this up. This is how the Japanese version of folding little paper footballs and trying to score field goals through your friend's fingers--just an ordinary, hum-drum way of passing classtime when you're bored. Except it involves poking your friends, the teacher, and any innocent bystanders within range, in the unmentionable bits.
No, seriously.
I'm not making this up.
Ask any other English teacher in Japan--they'll have their own horror stories.
We can't WAIT for Naruto to finish airing over here, because maybe this stupid little game will die a quick death and be consigned to the dustbin of freakish trends that didn't pass fast enough, where it belongs.
Well, it only took two weeks of kids' lessons for my first kancho attempt. Fortunately, I've managed to hide from the kids that I can speak Japanese (my secret weapon!) and the kid was stupid enough to brag to his friends in Japanese about what he was about to do, so it was easy enough to fend him off.
Hey, at least it means my students like me...
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