Ups and downs
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.’”
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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.
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