If “Do you like your job?” was strictly a yes or no question, I’d say “No.” The kind of English “teaching” I do stinks. It is a horrible combination of expectations and responsibilities without power or authority.
However, the job makes me smile and laugh on occasion and isn’t a bad gig considering what I get to do on the weekends.
The students’ energy level ranges from catatonic to manic. Some classes are absolutely comatose: half of the students are asleep, the other half is text-messaging or playing blackjack, and three or four students are actually trying to pay attention.
The complete opposite of this is a class full of rambunctious 17-year-old boys that need everything but a bit and bridle to corral them into learning English. They’re also texting and playing blackjack, but more so than that they are acting out the latest comedian’s shtick, punching each other, or wrestling in the narrow aisles. Civil Engineering classes are anything but!
The other classes are usually somewhere in between with a few characters at either extreme. When I pick on a narcoleptic student, he’ll say, “Oh, yeah, Mac, very good, naisu to meeto yuu…” and then trail off and go back to sleep. Amazingly, that’s that at this school. The teacher will say, “Wake up, sleepyhead,” to be able to say that she tried and then continue with the lesson.
A village idiot-type will reply with, “Mistah Mac, Engrrrish berrrrry, berrrrry deefeekarrruto!” to which I say that the kid has a future in Spanish. The wild ones tend to be able to roll their Rs well.
They also tend to come up with the gems that I write home about.
A couple of months ago, while going through an excruciatingly boring review lesson for the 11th or 12th time, I asked some future mechanics how to say “refrigerator” in English. This one gets them because it’s long and full of sounds that Japanese people don’t make.
The big kid in the front, who kind of resembled a refrigerator himself, said, “Kuuraa box!” rather confidently. I told him in Japanese that he wasn’t wrong, but that I was looking for a more modern word.
He screwed up his face, and then I saw the light go off in his head. He stuck out his index finger and swept it across his body, smiling as he shouted, “NOW kuuraa box!”
I dropped the textbook I was holding and fell over the podium laughing. The class exploded and so did Mr. Refrigerator. You totally had to be there, but for us it was beautiful, glorious laughing from the gut that I hope we never forget.
These things help me get through the week. I love kids like Mr. Refrigerator. He has complete disregard for the shame that many Japanese kids feel when they make a mistake. He wasn’t exactly right and he wasn’t exactly wrong, but he tried anyway and he communicated.
“NOW” popped up again a week later in a lesson about shopping with the electricians-in-training. The teacher and I were reading some prepared dialogues and the students were supposed to write down what the customer bought and how much he paid.
I played the role of the customer and had to trim my order down from two CDs to one because I didn’t have enough cash on me. This was a mildly poignant dialogue for me given that Japan is a cash society and that I had been in that situation several times before.
Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin, another “big kid in the front,” snickered and made a remark about my character’s financial situation. Still playing the role, I turned toward him and said, “Hey, I’ve got the cash at home, OK? I’ll come back and buy the other CD later.”
He told me that Japanese still considered that kind of person to be bimbo (poor) and I let him know how ridiculous I thought that idea was. He thought about it for a second and offered a compromise: “NOW bimbo!”
The class tittered and we moved along with the lesson. I had made a home delivery order sheet and crafted a structured conversation between the customer and the operator. We went over the exchange and I asked the students, “What does ‘delivery’ mean in Japanese?”
A few of them turned to each other and pondered the meaning of deribarii. Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin kicked off the following conversation:
Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin: Hey Mac, is that the same deribarii as deriheru?
English Teacher: Knock that off, Mr. Refrigerator’s cousin! That’s inappropriate!
Me: Yes, that’s the one.
ET and MRC in unison: Wait, you know what deriheru is?
[Deriheru = deribarii herusu = “delivery health,” a home delivery-style telephone escort service]
Me: Of course I do, I don’t live under a rock.
MRC: Why do you know deriheru? What kinds of girls do you order?
Me: I’ve never used deriheru, it’s not my thing.
MRC: Awww, c’mon, why not?
Me (making the money sign): NOW bimbo!!!!
I had thought of it and said it before I realized its double-meaning. Of course, I was the only one in the classroom who understood that this newly-coined Japanglish phrase could also be used to define deriheru!
The next day, I visited the Special class with the shopping lesson in hand. In a different exercise, they were to order any number of onions, postcards, coffee, or bacon in a General Store-like setting where the clerk measures the items for you.
I encouraged students in all classes to order items other than the four on the worksheet, and of course plenty of boys ordered cigarettes, beer, and girls, but at least they were being creative.
There are only 15 kids in this class, so someone always gets left without a partner. That someone is usually a very mousey girl that sits in a front corner. She’s smart and pretty good at written English, but she has difficulty speaking it, and Japanese, too, for that matter. When she does speak, it’s eerily quiet and makes me wonder if she isn’t some kind of Japanese ghost that only I can see. I usually partner up with her.
Me, the clerk: How can I help you?
Eerily Quiet: Ah…I’d like…some…coffee…please…
Me: How much would you like?
EQ: … … … …
I looked at her and she was shaking softly first, then more violently. I feared the worst. If anyone had closet epilepsy or some other scary medical condition, it would be this girl. You just never knew what, exactly, was going on in her head.
I peered beyond her stringy hair, which she always had in front of her face, and saw her lips curled back over her yellowed teeth. She was laughing faintly, her body doing more laughing than her mouth.
She took a huge, gasping breath and continued the eerily silent laughing. I can hardly call it laughing, but I don’t know another word for it. Crying is to sobbing as laughing is to what she was doing.
Me: How much would you like, Eerily Quiet?
EQ: I’d… … …I’d like… … …
The convulsing continued. I was stuck in this strange place, because I knew she was laughing, but hadn’t yet closed the book on a serious medical condition requiring medical attention.
I decided to try the question one last time, and then dial 1-1-9 if the shaking didn’t stop.
Me: Eerily Quiet, can you tell me how much coffee you would like?
EQ: I’d…like… … …one gram!
Then she began to giggle uncontrollably. She had just made a funny. Coffee was listed in my “general store” at 200 yen per hundred grams.
I released the tension that had built up and shared a good laugh with Eerily Quiet. The words themselves were amusing at most, but the roller coaster through which she had just led me multiplied the humor. I charged her two yen (about two cents) and returned to the front of the classroom.
I wanted Eerily Quiet to share her treasure with the class, but unfortunately the teacher had already gone through and chosen a few pairs of outgoing boys.
The boys did the charming yet typical orders of 10,000 onions, three girls, ten kilograms of bacon, and the like. The chimes rang and Eerily Quiet’s unique little dialogue vaporized like I’m sure she does when something sets her off. Or when a fellow White Spirit dies in anger.
Truly, you never know when your day will be changed by a gram of coffee.