Monthly Archives: November 2010

Speech Therapy

3 Replies

There are many things that I enjoy immensely about teaching in Japan, and one of those is the plethora of public holidays they have here. Since I arrived we have been privy to Respect For The Aged Day, Autumnal Equinox Day, Health And Sports Day, Culture Day and Labour Thanksgiving Day. This, coupled with the JET Programme’s penchant for business trips and Japan’s for exams, means that a full week of lessons is a strangely irregular occurrence. In the 12 weeks I have been teaching, only 8 have been full, uninterrupted weeks of lessons and that’s not counting all the time off in August. Well, I say “off” but when I wasn’t at English Camp and orientations I was sitting in my office on Facebook all day. Err, I mean planning lessons. Anyway, though it is lovely having all these random days pop up on my calendar it does tend to wreak havoc with my lesson plans and as a result, I have some classes with 3 lessons left until the end of term and some with only 2. Cue conversation with JTE:

“It looks like we have an extra lesson here. Is there anything specific you want me to do?”

“No not really. I mean, if you don’t want to do the lesson I can take it myself.”

Now wouldn’t it be nice just to say “oh ok, thanks,” and leave it at that? God knows I’d like not to have to plan another lesson specifically for just 2 classes; but we all know you’re not allowed to do that. You have to say “Oh, no, no, that’s not what I meant. No, I was just seeing if you had any ideas.”

“Not really. Anything’s fine.”

“Right, so something fun then?”

“Yeah sounds good.”

…and that’s pretty much the level of control the school likes to have over the syllabus that I, an unqualified teacher with the Japanese language ability of a mountain goat, bestows upon the youth and future of its country. I like to believe that it’s because I’ve proved I can do a good job, but there’s always a part of my conscience telling me that I’m not doing enough, that my lesson plans are all rubbish and that there is a very real risk that I will be torn limb from limb, skinned and hung out of the window to dry when the students find out I’m not a real teacher. Until that day I’m treading water, and for this particular lesson I decided there would be no writing at all; only speaking.

You may or may not know that the Japanese have great difficulty differentiating between SH & S, TH & Z, V & B and L & R sounds. River becomes liver, sea becomes she, these becomes a rather Germanesque, zeese and very becomes berry. This is because they simply don’t have these sounds in their language. Now considering English is compulsory from the age of 11 you’d think that by the time they reach senior-high they would have this down pat, but often the teachers have the same difficulties and the class sizes are so large (40/41 usually) that it just tends to just propagate in a never-ending cycle of bad pronunciation. Unless you nip it in the bud at the start then it’s going to be difficult to change the way they speak when they’ve developed otherwise good proficiency in the language.

This is what I endeavoured to do, but how the hell do you centre a lesson around speaking when you have as many as 41 students and only 50 minutes? If you were teaching a class of 15, you could probably mouse around and work with each one individually, have group discussions and constantly have them saying stuff. With a class of 41 you have to perform; you have to be on the ‘stage’ prancing around like a monkey fighting for a banana, playing charades with every word you say, making stupid noises and singing, because if you don’t your students will fall asleep. Some of them will fall asleep regardless.

“Do this,” I yell as I grab my tongue with my fingers and put them between my teeth “and blow.” Showers of spit fly across the room as the students learn their TH’s, and the whole room resonates with the sound of a giant doing a silent fart.

“Now go rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr,” and I’m the only one doing it. I feel like a pillock. One kid, lips tightly closed, glares at me like I’m clinically insane. I begin to believe it but then it dawns on me… How is making a sound that they can’t make going to help them to make it themselves? Time for a drawing, I think to myself.

I draw a (very bad) diagram of a mouth, teeth and tongue and the class laughs at my drawing skills. I argue that it’s contemporary; they have no idea what I’m on about. When I explain to them that they need to keep their tongues in the middle of their mouths and start going “rrrrrrr” again, suddenly I’m no longer the only one doing it. Success! Eat your heart out, Picasso.

After a game designed to have them differentiate between the sounds in each pair we moved onto shortened English; wanna, gotta, gonna, dunno, gimme, etc. I started by getting them to draw lines between these words and what they thought were the correct ‘proper’ English equivalents. Using the phrase “I have got to go” as an example I then had them repeat after me, getting faster and faster each time until we were on “‘ve go’a go”. I did the same for the other words. Though some students revelled in the chance to do this, some of them clearly hated it. I can completely understand this since it was only last week that I was asked to attempt a Japanese tongue-twister and, after failing miserably 5 or 6 times, I simply deemed it stupid, unworthy of my time and ultimately impossible. The Japanese must just be more talented with that particular sound. Genes innit.

Try it yourself if you think you’re hard enough:

Tokyo tokkyo kyoka-kyoku kyou kyuukyo kyoka kyakka.

What’s that? You can’t even read it? Yeah me neither; let alone say it at a hundred kyo’s a second.

Anyway, if they learned nothing else from this lesson, they learned first-hand the importance of being able to differentiate between light and right, and I sincerely hope they had a good time doing it. I’ve adjusted my will to make sure that my skinned, dried remains are deported if they didn’t.

Gravy Rage

1 Reply

When we were fresh off the boat, happy in our little JET bubble and prancing around a posh hotel in Tokyo, we attended many lectures. A lot of the topics revolved around how hard our hands would be smacked if we took drugs or drove while under the influence, what the various degrees of bowing are and others which I forget. I forget because I was jet-lagged into oblivion; a near-death experience where my eyes were lolling around so much that I had seen the back of my head from the inside; where I would fall asleep in my seat so often that I had bruises on my cheeks from where they had repeatedly plunged into my shoulders. This is just like that Dermot O’Leary “S.A.S: Are You Tough Enough” programme, I thought to myself. White noise!? Pah! They should make them get on a plane for 10 hours and sit in a lecture theatre for an entire morning.

“—if you get caught, the police will arrest—”

Can’t arrest me, I’m S.A.S. foo! Ain’t gettin’ on no other plane either. I ain’t never getting on no plane again—

“Bobby.”
“Eh?”
“You were just snoring and talking like Mr. T—”
“No I wasn’t.”
“Dude, I swear you just said—”
“Nah man, you’re imagining things. Crazy foo’.”

The Japanese are legendary for their ability to fall asleep anywhere they want to; on a bench, on a train, at their desks, on top of a wardrobe— It doesn’t matter where. If there’s a will there’s a way, and there’s always a will. This is a skill that I have learnt very early-on and it will probably stick with me forever much to the dismay of my future employer, whoever it may be.

One lecture I didn’t forget was the one about culture shock. It was delivered by a very flamboyant chap from California who had appeared on the JET Programme DVD and, on said DVD, delivered a performance lacking any iota of personality and as cheezy like a packet of Dairylea in a hair-dryer. As he walked on stage, whispers of familiarity rose through the crowd and he strolled to the podium and acknowledged them, spending a good 5 minutes taking us through his horror when he saw the finished DVD, and how he would attempt to rectify the “personality damage” he had inflicted on himself. What followed was one of the most hilarious personal accounts of life in a new country I have ever had the pleasure of hearing, and for an entire hour he had the whole room in stitches while he recounted his initial experiences in Japan.

This talk centred around the various different stages of culture shock, of which there are precisely four (although this precise figure differs depending on which expert you talk to); Initial Euphoria, Irritation and Hostility, Gradual Adjustment and Accommodation. Initial Euphoria is fairly obvious; you love everything and everyone in your new country and you are ridiculously excited to the point of pulling faces that make you look like you’ve won the lottery, a Nobel Prize and a book containing the secrets of the opposite sex all in one wondrous moment. And you were only looking at a neon shop sign. You run around everywhere, bulldozing your way into every ramen shop you can see, commenting wildly on how CRAZY, MAD and AWESOME everything is. You can’t believe you’re even there, you pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming and you pinch Japanese people to make sure they feel pain and are not actually robots created by the most technologically advanced nation in the world. They do, and they’re not, by the way.

Irritation and Hostility is where you start to miss everyone and everything back home. After the loneliness, desperation and extreme lack of confidence (see Shiz up my Uoka) things begin to annoy you, and you wonder what you were thinking when you decided to leave the safety and security of pie and mash, real ale and McCoys crisps for a world where they eat rice and fish for breakfast. We’ll get onto that in a mo.

During the Gradual Adjustment phase— Well, why do you buy Ronseal Quick Drying Woodstain again (non-UK readers can enlighten themselves here)?

Eventually, you ‘get’ it. The culture feels familiar, you can read people much better, you can handle day-to-day situations with as much or nearly as much ease as you can back home, and you start to feel as confident as you once did in that land now so far away. You’re now in the Accommodation phase. Everything’s fine and dandy, and you start to feel a little protective over your new town/prefecture/country.

Of course, it’s not as cut-and-dry as all that. Though I never find myself back in stage one, I regularly flitter about between the other stages.

My latest little excursion into the Irritation and Hostility phase was one brought about by a sudden, insatiable desire for comfort food. It was the end of a long day at school, it was dark outside and I was going back to my empty apartment in that dull, emotionless state you get in when you’ve drank too much coffee and your brain feels like it’s been dunked in glycerol, wrapped in cotton wool then shoved back inside your skull. I picked up some potatoes, broccoli and pork chops on the way home and set about on my attempt to make some mashed potatoes, broccoli and pork chops with onion gravy. Easy enough, right? Wrong. My gas stove is roughly 70 years old and, though the stoves themselves are actually pretty good, there are only two, and the grill cooks whatever is on top of it a great deal more thoroughly than whatever is underneath. After I had cooked the broccoli (in the same pan as the potatoes) and extracted them with a pair of tongs I put them onto my draining board for lack of any other surfaces, along with a cooked pork chop, and realised I had no way to keep them warm. Normally I would stick them under the grill but, considering the circumstances, I left them on the side to grow cold while I mashed the potatoes with a fork and attempted to make some onion gravy.

It was all going so well until I opened the cornflour. I bought it in the supermarket the a few days before accompanied by an emotional mix of elation and scepticism. The former for even being able to read the label in the first place and the latter for spotting a) the colour, which was a lot like custard powder and b) the last bit on the label in brackets: ロースト, which means “roast”. What the hell does roast mean, I thought to myself. They’ve roasted the flour; you’re supposed to roast it; you use it in a roast, what? Elation overthrew scepticism however and I bought it in the hope that it was just the colour that was messed up.

Now, I don’t know why they call it cornflour, because it’s NOT cornflour. It’s nothing like cornflour. In fact, if it tried to enter the Cornflour Olympics then it would not only be turned away, mocked and banned forever, but the other packets of cornflour would stick a sign on it’s back saying “kick me” and do so until it bruised on its way out. Maybe it would bruise white and become more cornfloury in the process. Who knows.

Anyway, when you mix this stuff with water it turns into a sticky yellow paste and if you’ve thickened gravy before you will know that it should just look like very white water. There was no way I was going to subject the otherwise, quite nice gravy to this kind of torture and so I filled the paste cup with water and threw away the cornflour in disgust. The end result was lumpy mashed potato with cold broccoli and a sad-looking pork chop, all covered in brown water. The comfort that I so craved and, back home could always rely upon, was far from my grasp, and I pined for a meat pie more than I pine for the destruction of the Black Eyed Peas and the ritual burning of every song they ever made. Which is a lot by the way.

The next day I went to two different supermarkets trying to pull together something resembling Western comfort food. This is difficult for many reasons: I don’t have an oven, the sausages here taste like a pint of oil in an intestine, there are no such things as pies, there is no such thing as gravy. So that only wipes out about 90% of comfort food in the UK then. After filling and emptying my basket with only a few of the required ingredients for various different dishes each time, I put everything back, again, grabbed a packet of BBQ flavoured corn snacks and some instant noodles and stalked home in disgust.

The next day after work I had it all planned out. Chicken, mushroom and tarragon pasta in a cream & cheese sauce. The supermarket had everything I needed; ok so the only pasta you can buy here is spaghetti and they don’t do cheddar, but in the end I had made a very respectable Italian dish that both comforted me and satisfied my desire for Western food.

For now at least—