Lioness in Japan

I took a picture of some candles a student gave me recently. My students have all been very concerned about recent events (naturally — who isn’t?) and it’s all we talk about when we meet. So this student was surprised that I have never had the experience of being brought up with earthquake drills and safety rules, but you know, not everyone knows that Singapore is free from natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes.

She presented me these candles the next time we met and said I should keep them in case there was a blackout or earthquake. Though she cautioned me not to use them if there’s still shaking because they might fall over and accidently cause a fire — these are just backups if I run out of batteries for my torch. There’s a Plan B for Plan B, in other words.

I was very touched that she cared enough to give me candles. My students are always the ones who inform me of impending typhoons in September. I never turn on the weather news in the morning so I always joke that my students are my personal weather forecasters.

I must say that the three strong aftershocks late last week and early this week shook everyone up again — emotionally, too. I know a lot of people have been commenting on the stoicism and positivity of the Japanese (they are) but they are also human and my students all expressed some degree of fear. Every single one of them asked me if I was okay from the aftershocks and they all had the same “it was scary eh? tsk tsk tsk” expression and shook their heads.

On another note, my full marathon in Oshima was cancelled out of respect to the Mar 11 triple disaster and they sent a letter to say my registration fee has been donated to the people in the Tohoku region (which came up to over 1 million JPY). I thought that was a good idea to turn that into donation money and I’ve no complaints. I’m not so bent on running a full marathon lately, partly because my ankle is still sore from time to time from the tumble I had over last Christmas. I’ll get to it eventually, I hope.

Just a random thought bubble I’d share with you today, I suppose…

A recent gift from a student inspired this post. I get all kinds of things from my students and this one made me laugh — freeze-dried space ice-cream from the NASA space centre in Florida.

“It looks cute but it doesn’t taste good,” warned my student.

One of the small pleasures of teaching Japanese adults is that they are very thoughtful to give me omiyage (it means souvenir but people mostly give food) after they return from a holiday, be it local or overseas.

Omiyage is such a huge part of Japanese culture that most train stations and airports hawk bite-sized Japanese sweets amid a plethora of “useless” tourist stuff. That would be a Tokyo Nugget by itself…

My first gift was a floral bookmark from a student I had two years ago. She went to an onsen in Hakone with her mother and got me this little gift. As I taught more and more students, I received gifts like pears, apples, chocolate, mochi (sticky rice flour desserts), lipstick, blusher, lip gloss, masks, Krispy Kreme donuts…

I felt grateful that they thought of me but I maintained (to myself) that if I gave omiyage to my students every time I went on a trip, I’d be constantly buying gifts and be flat broke.

Just before I left teaching in 2008, I had a slew of farewell gifts and one that stood out in my memory is a gorgeous crème cashmere scarf given to me by a student I was very fond of. She was genuinely sad that I couldn’t teach her anymore and I was touched by her generous gift.

Back to the space ice-cream: it felt like Styrofoam but it really tasted like chocolate ice-cream. No, it wasn’t cold at all. It was like noshing on a dry biscuit with chocolate flavour.

If you want to read more about teacher-and-student gift giving, there’s a lovely post at Blue Lotus’ blog.

Sorry for the long delay in this last installment of my “Teaching in Japan” series. Life has been busy with all sorts of things and I have to admit I’ve slacked a little on blogging, but I promise there will definitely be more prolific times.

Let’s dive into this topic — what are Japanese students like and how to teach them?

[...]

As promised in my first post about advice on teaching in Japan, I will do two more entries in this “series”. Today, I will talk about how to get a teaching position in Tokyo.

I have only managed to get private one-on-one type of gigs and any advice outside of that realm is from other people’s anecdotes. This is a super long post so don’t say I didn’t warn ya.

Do I need a teaching qualification?
You don’t need one, especially if you come from a native English speaking country (North America, UK, Australia, New Zealand), but your salary could jump significantly if you did — at least 25 to 40 per cent more.

The basic rate for teaching in Japan is pretty much what you need to live on so it would be hard to have significant savings. Teachers who earn more are attached to big corporate companies that actually have a training centre, which includes an English language and communications department. But they would want to see qualifications and tons of experience related to teaching Business English, so that is something you might want to consider at a later phase in your career.

[...]

Due to several queries from readers about teaching in Japan, I decided to run a series of entries on this topic to help those who are considering taking the plunge. I usually send off long replies and it dawned on me this could be very useful to those who want to teach in Japan.

The lessons I learned in teaching conversational English were drawn from the advice of a friend, who had a year of teaching experience, and my own trial and error. It isn’t something too hard to pick up without a teaching qualification but it has its challenges.

[...]

Teaching Japanese adults is winding down to an end. By March 1, I’ll be working full-time from the kangaroo’s office.

All this week, I’ve been informing all my students about my new job. All of them said nice things like, “I’m so sad to see you go!”, “All the good teachers eventually find full-time jobs — they don’t stay in teaching”, “You’re a really good teacher!” and my favourite: “Where am I going to find another one from Singapore?”

I’m so going to miss chatting about Japanese culture and lifestyle. They sort of became friends and I will miss some more than others, especially the chattier ones like Saturday’s fashion executive Mami, Tuesday’s translator Asami, Thursday’s real estate mogul Nozaki, Wednesday’s education business boss Mayuko and Monday’s advertising account manager Takashi. Everyday of the week, I learned something new about Japan and what make the Japanese tick.

On the other hand, I won’t miss explaining vocabulary nor the repetitive grammar exercises. And the ones who are fairly mild in opinion or wait for me to stir up conversation every single minute.

But the reality is, these lovely souls are just a part of one small phase in the scheme of things. Time to encounter new experiences.

I’ll start with the “down”. The novelty of teaching is waning a little and I’m glad to have the upcoming month-long break. It has been good mostly but yesterday was one of the most trying days of my life (after the girl who keeps crying — she still holds the number one worst student spot in my book). My student, who drove me up the wall, is an Osaka-born Tokyoite, so he’s much more direct in his approach to things. He is an absolute beginner (so he has no sense of tenses, spelling, or vocabulary) but is extremely keen — he actually tries to read The Daily Yomiuri. I would normally applaud such enthusiasm, but if you don’t know basic grammar, this is simply beginner’s passion.

I coin it so because these students are the ones who tend to fall the hardest. They are impatient (I have never tried to read a Japanese newspaper — it’s like a two-year-old struggling with The Economist) so when they can’t speak quickly enough, they lose interest very fast too.

So Mr Osaka was given four pictures with people in different states of “employment” — there was a retired man, a full-time mother, a student and an unemployed man. After going through all the vocab, Mr Osaka insisted that the unemployed man is a full-time mother because a full-time mother is also unemployed. Hmm, well, this logic may work in other fields but I told him that’s not the case. I told him that this man cannot be a mother because he’s not female. Mr Osaka then insisted, “He is a full-time man.”

I tried to explain that a “full-time man” is a strange concept because if he were a “part-time man” — he would be a woman half the time and a man half the time.

He still persisted in this stubborn salaryman way. I was so impatient and kept going, “Chote hen! (It’s strange!)” I was exhausted from this sour-faced, confused dude. I went home to the kangaroo and related this. He was most comforting. He said, “Yeah, I know what you mean, it’s like, ‘Mate, just give me my money.’”

************

The upside of things: I think i got my bicycle legs back and teaching was really alright today. My teeth did not gnash a single time.

One of my students, Yasuki, made it on his TOEFL test! It’s been a long, arduous journey tackling sample questions and marking his essays. He got a score high enough to qualify for an MBA school application in the US. I was so happy for him and I guess I helped in some way. I always fretted that being an untrained teacher, I didn’t know shite about pulling a student through official English proficiency tests.

This is so totally what I need right now to keep going on the teaching front. I never believed that I would hit a wall because my experiences with teaching conversation has been good for the past six months. But now, I do face some frustrations and I get tired more easily than before. Sometimes I would wonder if my students are improving at all or that I am just collecting easy money where it feels like a complete farce.

It’s nice to know I can help and will just bask in this one for a bit.

Don’t let this entry fool you but I’ve had 90 per cent good teaching days but one lesson today totally sucked. I pride myself in always making my lessons fun and interesting. In fact I get annoyed when people say, “Isn’t teaching frustrating? I don’t know how you do it!” I mean, are venture capitalists given such sniffy comments?

Most of my students are fairly chatty as they are genuinely keen on expressing themselves in English. This group also loves the language so it pleases me that they go to lengths to speak their minds or mention something unusual. The others whom I classify as raw beginners show more or less the same enthusiasm.

But I have one particular student, Makiko, who is difficult. She takes conversational lessons to communicate with her French boss in English. She doesn’t say this frankly but I gathered from our numerous lessons that this boss of hers is a difficult man to deal with. I imagine French impatience and arrogance, plus an equal inability to communicate well in English, on top of an unwillingness to learn any Japanese are a recipe for disaster.

After two months, I had a particularly trying lesson with her. She clammed up at whatever I suggested. I was worried that she couldn’t understand me at all and asked her many questions to promote conversation but she froze. Then she burst out with a breaking voice, “It’s too difficult for me! Why can’t I speak spontaneously after two months’ of lessons?” She also added with her lower lip trembling, “I need more time to read and understand the article. I can’t just read it once.”

I was quite shocked because a) how could you expect dramatic results after eight weeks? b) why didn’t she tell me earlier it was too difficult? c) I’ve never made anyone cry during a lesson. I always knew that the average Japanese is rather reserved, and so, less talkative or expressive. I’ve also learned that being indirect is one of the hallmarks of the Japanese “way”. Sometimes I take refuge in that because I’m not fond of confrontations myself but I do feel this overwhelming suffocation when I’m faced with this wall of silent opaqueness.

So we reformulated her class — I would give her the news articles beforehand so she could have a thorough read and to check out all the words she didn’t know. This would give her more time to talk during the lesson. I had misgivings about this because her problem is not really a lack of English grammar or vocabulary but really about self-confidence. It seems she hates looking like she doesn’t know what she is looking at or to be unprepared. But how do I foster “spontaneity” if she clearly abhors being put on the spot? The crux of having conversational lessons is to be in an environment where you are more or less unprepared so you can speak on the fly.

When I send the articles to her a week before our next lesson I would gently remind her to think of related topics to talk about, but without fail, when I meet her, she would fidget awkwardly and I would launch into various topics first. Most days I’m fine with this as I feel it’s my responsibility to take the initiative but today I felt a wave of irritation when she didn’t complete her sentences and looked absolutely lost. I tried to guess what she was trying to say, encouraged her to use her dictionary and told her to forget about grammar for once. Usually I would overlook her silence, let her dismiss her half-formed thought and move on to the next topic but I just had about enough of her meekness today.

She looked like she was going to cry. Instead of feeling sympathy, I was even more annoyed as I thought inwardly, “You’re 40! You work for a huge multinational nuclear energy company! Who on earth is going to keep being so patient with your shyness or unwillingness to speak up?!” Mind you, I didn’t scold her at all. Maybe my forced smile was enough to fling her into a spiral of fear.

I skipped to the next topic where she clammed up again so I was thankful when the clock said it was the end of our hour. Here I am, surfing around the Internet, looking for other teachers in Japan with the same problem and perhaps offer me a solution to this dreadful pain of a silent student. It seems this behaviour is quite common and it must be worse if you’re facing 25 poker faces — so I’m in a luckier position apparently. I hope next Wednesday wouldn’t have a repeat of this. Boiling away now…

I just finished six lessons today. My jaws are exhausted from talking. I knew I was in trouble when I was tired by the end of my second lesson of the day. I ploughed on and on and on. I don’t know why I am so tired because I’ve been doing this for several months already…

Not only did I have to speak so much, I had to do it over loud café music sometimes. One student in Ebisu meets me in a very teeny bopper café Bagel & Bagel that blasted Avril Lavigne’s latest album at top volume. I immediately regretted my choice of topic — Michael Moore’s latest documentary on America’s flailing medical system, Sicko. It was esoteric and overwhelming to explain every other word. So much for my enthusiasm for his movie.

As I crawled home on my heels, I decided to open up my weekday rest day, Wednesday. I usually take this day off to meet my language exchange partner and run in the hash at night. I decided to teach in the day but still keep that evening free for my beloved running group.

I’ve been using Brit expat in Taiwan (now in Syria) Daniel Wallace’s experiences as a yardstick of sorts. He thinks five or six lessons are tiring but possible, while seven and eight are just mind crushing.

Now I know how my retired teacher mum feels at the end of the day — grouchy and tired. But I don’t know how she could carry on nagging all night after a day of painstaking verbiage. For the first time ever, I nearly lost my patience when a particular beginner student (a 40-year-old salaryman) refused to admit repeatedly he didn’t understand my instructions “Can you point out the sentences that describe the Mona Lisa picture?” He just stared at the textbook while I asked him for the meaning of each and every word in Japanese. Still nada.)

Please don’t ring me — just message me online. Let my fingers do the talking. The spirit is willing but the flesh is not.