Ok class, now repeat after me: "We don't need no... Education"

I may have mentioned this before, but it's darned hard to have a completely bad day in this job.
Don't get me wrong -- it's possible. It's certainly happened. But in a job so thoroughly infused with people, you can never tell when something fun, or funny, or touching, or just plain lovely will happen. And it does pretty much every day.

I say this because things were looking to be shaping up into a pretty bad day yesterday. The schedule changed and I wasn't told (until someone came to get me partway through class), one of my JTE's (normally a gem) was befuddled and inattentive and basically sabotaged everything I did in the classroom, and physically I wasn't feeling so hot -- tired, hungry, weary, cold.

Then, well... how can you complain about a day when part of your work involved drawing this on the blackboard:



I had been at a loss for what to do with my 2nd year class, and my JTE had suggested that we do a writing exercise. She loves writing exercises. My other JTE's hate them. This is one of the reasons I have to design different lessons for the same grade level in any given week. In any case, her suggestion was to do a "favorite song" exercise, where the students would write the lyrics in Japanese, and then translate them into English. Good idea, I said, and I made up a worksheet for it (as always, with cute clip art grudgingly coughed up by my ailing, ancient work laptop), with a little section at the bottom asking the student to tell me why the song was meaningful to him or her, why he or she likes it.

So that's what we did. The students got right to work.

The thing about this class is that, well, it isn't like other classes. I first locked horns with this JTE frequently. She wouldn't take a plan or suggestion from me without altering it in some way. Nothing ever worked for her. It didn't take long to see that she has an amazing command of her class, though, and they truly are lucky to have her. They have to work harder, but they really learn. Consequently, we can do all kinds of challenging things that would simply be too much for other classes. I've come to like her as a person, too, and I think only some of the other staff have bothered to see through the tough veneer.

Today we chatted about the subject at hand while the students wrote. (She will often snap up interesting or amusing comments from me and deliver them to the class in Japanese -- much to my chagrin when I forget that I'm "on the record") Well this class she fixed me with a serious look and asked: "Do you know 'Men at Work'"?

Uh, pardon me?

"The music group -- Men at Work. Do you know them?"

Not quite what I was expecting.

I had started out this year wanting to join a school club of some kind, and unfortunately found that everything I was interested in my school didn't do, or wasn't available to me. Kyūdō? No club. Shogi? No. Volleyball? Girls only. I got stuck with the English Club, which might not have been so bad, except that it was being run as just another class, with exercises. No fun stuff. No music, movies, group discussions, debates. Nothing interesting or challenging. So what did I find? The Broadcasting Club. Operating at noon, I could fit it into my schedule. The club broadcasts music throughout all of the classrooms where the students eat their lunch. I thought it would be a great opportunity to play some western music and see what they liked and didn't, and what they were already familiar with. Well, they knew the Beatles. They knew Michael Jackson. They knew Billy Joel. They knew U2. That was about it. I had a third-year student who knew Nickelback, but he's a special case. So I set out to provide a general western pop music education.

The first week we had Billy Idol, David Bowie, John Lennon, The Animals, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Aerosmith, Nirvana, Paul Simon, and Bob Dylan. And they knew none of it.

It was like some kind of strange Footloose universe where the adults had won. Not only were these kids NOT familiar with Stairway to Heaven, they didn't know Led Zeppelin.

Oh, the educating they were going to get.

But two problems arose. One: it truly is amazing the amount of depraved music I listen to. Or put another way, amazing how little western music doesn't contain at least one and probably several of the following: sex, drugs, anti-authority sentiment, anti-education sentiment, criminal behaviour, and any number of other things antithetical to the Japanese ideal, at least in theory. Problem two: I started running out of time, even at lunch. I was missing the occasional day, and there was still so much to play! Van Morrison, Van Halen, AC/DC, the Beach Boys, Chicago, Radiohead, Def Leppard, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Police, The Band, The Pretenders -- and oh the Canadian music! The Tragically Hip, Leonard Cohen, The Tea Party, Barenaked Ladies, Crash Test Dummies, and on and on. But a strange thing happened at about the same time. I'd come wandering into the booth to find... my Japanese club-cohorts playing western music. Just a little, sporadically, but it started happening often enough that I didn't feel that the students were really missing out. They'd have their J-pop and then one of the students would feel like some "Michael", and suddenly the classrooms would be filled with "The Way You Make Me Feel" (ok, we could do better, but that's beside the point). They also played some I'd never dream of playing. Incredibly obnoxious hip-hop. Metal. Avril Lavigne. And so I left.

Anyway, on this particular day, here was my JTE asking me: Did I know Men at Work? Well, that's one of my favourite bands, isn't it? And I'm not talking about the hits, either. Sure, Who Can It Be Now? and It's a Mistake are great, but they hardly compare to I Can See It In Your Eyes, Helpless Automaton, and Catch a Star. I could go on and on... (don't worry, I won't) But naturally what really got me is why does this teacher know Men at Work? Is it because they previously had an Australian ALT? "Oh no. We know Men at Work." (!) Well ok then. And what else does this JTE know and like? (Wait, don't tell me: THE BEATLES.)

"Do you know that song: 'Smoke on the Water'?" ...

... YOU LIKE DEEP PURPLE?!? "Oh yes, very much." And so there we go, singing "Duh duh duh, duh duh duh-duh, duh duh duh, duh duh" in front of the class. What else does she like? David Bowie. The Police. Queen. Kiss. I was staggered. So we chatted about western bands that I thought she might know or like, and thus we came to Pink Floyd, and my drawing on the blackboard. (my drawings are a constant source of amusement to her -- she calls me the lawyer who likes to draw) She also asked me if I had been a good student when I was in high school, and when I said yes, she said: "I don't believe it!" Uh, ok. But she explained she meant "studious and well-behaved" rather than getting good grades (to which the answer again was yes -- I didn't start rebelling till university). But it was some kind of "all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy" observation/compliment, she explained, so that was ok.

Oh, incidentally, those are the lyrics to Clapton's I Shot The Sheriff around that picture. My JTE wanted me to write some song lyrics for the students, and well, I was damned if I could remember any. I mean, I could think of lots of good music, but not all the words to any given song. Some of the clever ones I'd recorded and transcribed for use in class weren't handy, and again I couldn't remember all of the words. So I Shot the Sheriff went on the board. Which, if you strip it of cultural context and humour, is kind of a violent song. At least I resisted the urge to go for Another Brick in the Wall.

An interesting addendum to my recent shogi match story. I was fishing around for more info on the game -- it's fascinating, really -- and came across some information which shed new light on the game I had had. Surprising light. Apparently, novice players are given handicaps. Great, heaping handicaps, starting with the rook and bishop (by far the most powerful pieces; there are only one each of them, and there is no queen) but generally even more:

An experienced player at shogi can give a beginner the handicap of eight pieces easily. This means that the experienced player plays without his rook, his bishop, his two lances, his two knights and his two silver generals. In fact, games are sometimes played at the handicap of ten pieces (without the two golds as well) and still the giver of the handicap wins. I have played games where I have given a beginner a handicap of the entire board, playing only with my bare king, without even pawns, and still won.

I am by no means a great player of shogi. Nevertheless, I can easily give the average person, not a regular club or tournament player, the handicap of six pieces, meaning a rook, a bishop, two lances and two knights. Moreover, I can give any player rated less than 5 kyu the handicap of a rook and a bishop and I will win every game at those odds.

Because of the greater complexity of shogi, the stronger player will win with much greater frequency than in chess. Big upsets are much rarer.

From Basic Rules of Shogi on the web. So again, I'm stunned. I had no handicap. Maybe I have a talent for this thing. Have to follow up.

The other thing that's happening here lately is it's paper marking time again. This time with a rather tight deadline, so I'm spending a lot of time wading through some 240 of them. I first blogged about my discomfort correcting the kind of unguarded, heartfelt sentiments expressed in some of these essays, and that hasn't really improved. I get essays on war, loss, and heartbreak, and my response is the same: stroke out the erroneous words and letters and try to provide some kind of helpful, supportive comment.

Some of the essays, though, are hilarious.

One of the things that's really striking is how words are mispelled according to how they would be mispronounced. So you get plenty of "l" and "r" mixups, which in writing can be a little jarring. Sometimes vowels share that fate, also.

"I have two dogs. They are very very very cute. Their names is slum and dunk..."

Well, I was in correction mode, and almost without thinking I wrote "Slam?" above where the student had written "Slum" and instantly regretted it. The student goes on to describe Slum and Dunk in fairly good detail, and with obvious affection. Is the family now sadly pondering whether to change their beloved pet's name, now that they're aware that his name is synonymous with urban decay? I have no idea.

Plagiarism can also be a bit of a problem, though not nearly so much as at home in the west. For every set of compositions, I usually get a single pair where there was obvious copying happening (complete with identical mispellings) and usually another where a pair of students simply seem to have worked together. I suppose they figure that, with so many students, so many papers, I wouldn't notice. But I go through them rather intensively, in a short amount of time, and I can spot the similarities right away. So I was a bit surprised when a student thought that they could copy me and not have me notice.

First, he ignored the instructions, to choose one of the three possible topics (family, pet, or hobby) and instead wrote one paragraph on each, modeling my examples exactly, replacing a word where necessary (baseball where I had written snowboarding, cat where I put dog, etc.) My example sheet for first years also usually includes some vocab or expressions that they might find useful. So after writing three paragraphs copying my examples nearly exactly, the student concluded his essay with the following sentence:

"Here are some adjectives that you might use."

Yeah. We had a pretty good laugh about that one.

Some compositions are just in a charming, idiosyncratic style that I hate to mess with. It's a fine line between good english and boring english, but where there's an obviously better way to say something, I mention it.

"Allow me to introduce my family to you. How many people are there in your family? There's six in my family and for families. My mother, father and grandmother, grandfather and great grandmother. they are is look great. My great grand mother especially she in good shape. Does she do something special to do? No, she doesn't. She is go to bed early and gets up early. She have a good sleep and get plenty of rest. Does she have any hobbies? She hobby is knitting and sewing. It looks like she is very fun. What does you father does for fun?

My father hobby is walk a dog. And he likes have a good sleep but he don't have free time now. He business is persimmon farmer. We make our living by farming. Oh agriculturalist? Yes. my family is early risers. But I don't like early riser. Because my mother sid. "The early bird catches the worm."

I get up early this morning. I experience in no different from before. I overslept again.

My family is large family. they are in good shape. They are living in the by out of choice. Do you like your family? Yes, oh course."