With the school year coming to a close in Japan, I figured I’d amassed enough stories to get another compilation out before new students and teachers come in. Here’s my third batch of my own personal comedians doing their best to make me laugh! For my ninth graders and some of my teachers, these will be their last stories; for my other kids, these will be their last stories until they advance to the next school year.
A few more students and teachers:
Jimin: a sixth-grade boy at my bigger elementary school who likes dancing and the dancer/singer Jimin from BTS, hence the nickname.
My JTE: I supposed I never properly introduced her, but my JTE is the main teacher I work with at my junior high school. I’m in a situation where I only have one JTE (some people may have three, or ten, or twelve), as my main school is so small, which makes me all the more relieved that she’s incredibly easy to work with as well as being knowledgeable about…literally everything. She speaks fluent English and is very laid-back, in a good way.
Pikachu-sensei: a special education/temporary support teacher who sits next to me in the staff room, and who loves anything and everything Pikachu. She’s bright and personable, helping me out from day one to feel comfortable in the staff room and to know what the heck is going on during morning meetings, and she greets me in English whenever she sees me. She’s remarkably good with arts-and-crafts, and loves to laugh.
Koya: a second-year middle school boy with an amazing power. He sleeps through about 80% of English class, almost every day, and yet…I can’t be mad, because when he wakes up he always knows the answer. I swear, it’s like magic. My JTE and I can spend a whole lesson going over how to form comparatives and superlatives (“Cold, colder, the coldest,” “Beautiful, more beautiful, the most beautiful”) while he’s hunched over his desk, pencil making faint, wobbly lines as it purposelessly slides down the page, but when we wake him up to tell us the three forms of “great,” he takes one look at his worksheet, says “Great, greater, the greatest,” with no apparent mental energy, and then falls back asleep almost as soon as he’s done. He’s currently taking standardized English tests above his grade. I named him Koya after the BT21 character, who “Always looks like he’s asleep but is just thinking very deeply.”
Balloon-chan: a first-grade girl at my smaller elementary school. Very small, very cute.
Hikaru: a second-year middle school (eighth grade) boy that loves video games. He loves video games. Ironically, he’s very good at studying and is also quite gifted in sports…the problem is that he doesn’t particularly like studying; he’d rather stay up late playing Fortnite. Still, he’s basically good at everything and he tends to do well in English, and what’s more, I certainly understand his love of video games…so I can’t be too harsh. He and Kaoru, nicknamed after the mischievous twins in Ouran High School Host Club, are very good friends, and love messing around with each other.
Kaoru: a second-year middle school boy that…also loves video games. Like, loves video games. I don’t know if he’s good at sports, but he’s pretty good with his studies, and seems to be a focused, bright student. Always ready with a smile and with an open, waiting bowl on days where I can’t eat all of the rice I was given at lunch. (Honestly though, ALL of my middle school boys can put it away like I’ve never seen.) I’m pretty sure he wants to be an architect when he grows up. He and Hikaru are a dynamic duo, and they’re pretty funny when you put them together.
Snowman: a second-year middle school boy who takes his work very seriously, but is also good-natured and easy to get along with. He was the one who, when I complimented how good he was at kanji, said, “It’s probably because I’m Japanese,” like a sassy little booger.
King Charles: a first-year middle school boy (seventh grade) who I initially took to be quite studious, but in reality is both quite studious and quite the character. His ability to act out ridiculous situations and roles with little to no shame is second to none, and I’m always playing along with him in silly voices and overdramatic gestures when we have speaking tests.
After having studied a unit on talking about places and things they did and didn’t have in their towns, some of my sixth graders made presentations for me about where they lived and interesting places that they had nearby. One group did a short speech on Uchinomaki, a smaller town within Aso that’s on the west side of the caldera, and mentioned that they had a hospital there. The larger Aso Hospital on the other side of the caldera is much better known, so when the rest of the class was asked for thoughts on the performance, Jimin piped up,
“This is the first time I’ve heard that there was a hospital in Uchinomaki.”
Everyone “aaaaaah”ed in agreement.
“Do you know which hospital it is?” one of the English teachers asked, to which one of the students replied, “It’s Onsen Hospital!” The teacher said that he was right, after which a small voice came from the corner of the room.
It was Jimin again. “Wait a second…I was born there.”
The classmate next to him sighed. “You’re an idiot.”
Despite the prevailing of some of my coworkers that my Japanese is better than Japanese people’s (I don’t know how they get that notion, as I daily make a number of mistakes around them), I’m definitely not fluent. Not yet. There’s a number of things I’m bound to not know or to mess up frequently, and with Japanese it can be quite easy to get words mixed up. Many words in Japanese are homophones, and unlike English they do not have different “spellings,” which is where kanji really comes in and saves the day to let you know which word is which. But in addition to these homophones there are also a lot of words that just…sound really similar, like 病院 (byouin, meaning “hospital”) and 美容院 (biyouin, meaning “beauty salon”), 最高 (saiko, “the best”) and 最後 (saigo, “last” or “finally”), and 鳥 (tori, “bird”), 通り (toori, “through”), and 鳥居 (torii, “Shinto gate”). This means that there are a lot of times I screw up which word I’m supposed to be saying. During one of my Christmas lessons I said that Santa made rice cakes (omochi) instead of toys (omocha), and the first time someone told me what a croquette (kurokke) was in Japanese…I thought they were talking about karaoke. It’s wonderful, constantly feeling like the Cheep Cheep chef from Paper Mario (see photo below this story).
The most recent (and possibly funniest and most embarrassing) of these incidents happened at the dollar store in my town. I had picked up several things I needed for class the next day only to discover, at the cash register, that I had forgotten my wallet at home. I knew exactly where it was…but exactly where it was was not in the dollar store. Attempting to both apologize to the cashier and also explain what I had done, I said, 「あっ、すみません、政府を忘れてしまいました。」(Ah, sumimasen, seifu wo wasureteshimaimashita.) What I had intended to say was “Oh, sorry, I forgot my wallet.” But unfortunately for me, the word for wallet is saifu, and I hadn’t said saifu…I had said seifu. …which happens to mean “government.”
So I basically told the poor lady working at the cash register that I had forgotten my government. It wasn’t until I was back at my car that I realized my mistake, and also realized that after getting my wallet I would have to go back into the same store, look the same woman at the cash register in the face, and pretend I hadn’t just made a fool of myself.
I managed somehow, and now I use that story to help make sure my kids know that it’s okay to make mistakes speaking English.
Most of my kids are genuinely sweet little things. Sometimes I worry that they’ll practically forget me at my bigger elementary school, where some classes I only see them once a month, but they are always good about greeting me and, for the most part, remembering what I tell them. I try to let them know when we have similar interests, like if I see that they have a Pokémon pencil case or they’re writing their “My Hero” essay on One Punch Man, because it makes it a lot easier to talk to them down the line. As a result, a LOT of them know I like K-Pop and BT21, because a lot of them also really are into that stuff. One particular instance where they showed just how much they remembered was back in December, maybe midway through the month. I had class with my fifth graders that day, and it was the last time they would see me before Christmas and New Years. At the end of class they had thanked me for my help that semester, and once we had finished, my English specialist teacher and I had started to gather our things to head back to the staff room. Midway my English teacher was interrupted by the homeroom teacher, and they started chatting about lesson plans. Just a few moments later, I noticed that one of the girls was standing next to me, fidgeting and shifting from foot-to-foot. I wondered if it was about my pencil case—I have a very well-known character pencil case, so my kids always want to look at it—so I turned around to ask, and noticed she seemed really nervous. I asked what was up, and in the quietest, fastest, most incomprehensible Japanese I’ve ever heard, mumbled…something. Still have no clue what she said, months later. But after her little speech, she unclasped her hands from behind her back and shoved something at me. It took me a minute to process, but I soon realized she was holding a little hand mirror with an image of Koya, my favorite BT21 character, printed on the back.
I was blown away. Not only had she remembered that I liked BT21, but I hadn’t even actually told her which character I liked from the group. I had only told her the name of the person who made the character, as each character was created by a member of the popular K-Pop group, BTS. She had remembered which member of BTS I liked, gone out and found a pocket mirror with his character on it, and got it for me for Christmas.
I sputtered for a minute, trying to think of how to thank her (I didn’t feel like I’d done anything to get a present, and I was still in awe that she remembered so much about me), before getting out something that resembled coherent Japanese. She rushed back to her seat to prepare for the next class, and hasn’t said anything much to me since.
The mirror has a permanent spot in my purse.
One of the final reading passages in my ninth-grader’s English textbook is about Michio Hoshino, a Japanese photographer who spent many years in the Alaskan tundra. As I walked around the class helping with pronunciation, I came upon Ravioli who was at the part of the story that described Michio’s wildlife photos. Reading over his shoulder, I watched as he read the first part of the sentence, waiting to see what he would do once he got to “polar bear”—it was a new word, so he’d have to guess or sound it out. Sure enough, when he reached “polar” he stopped and contemplated the text a bit…and then continued,
“…bears…and majestic—”
I snickered. “What kind of bear?”
He looked up at me, cheeky smile on his face as he realized he got caught. After trying his hand at the word a few times, I gave the correct pronunciation and he continued with his reading.
Within the sixth-grade English curriculum is the well-known Japanese folk tale of Momotaro, the Peach Boy. Momotaro, being a Japanese equivalent of a story like Thumbelina or the Princess and the Frog, is popular throughout the country, and the character of Momotaro is often used as a metaphor for Japan itself, like Uncle Sam but a lot younger and with less finger-pointing. Presenting a play of Momotaro in English, then, is theoretically a fun activity that the students get to do, engaging them with English and familiar Japanese culture at the same time.
For my sixth graders at my smaller school, Momotaro was an exciting deviation from normal textbook activities. We divvied up the roles and rehearsed all the parts, making sure everyone knew all of their cues and actions and entrances and exits. Tofu, our Momotaro, even made a fake knife out of cardboard and aluminum foil and brought it to school for his role, so that he could “stab” the monsters with it. My JTE also brought her phone to record the whole thing. The day of the performance we shoved all the desks to the walls, leaving a big open space in the middle of the room where the kids could perform. The beginning went relatively smoothly with only a few forgotten lines and strange half-English ad-libs, and when we got to the big battle between Momotaro’s group and the monsters it looked as if we’d actually make it through in one shot—which, for this class and its very cute but very crazy kids, is not a given. Momotaro and his crew had just about thoroughly bested the monsters, so one of my girls got a chair from the side of the room and began to bring it over to the center so that Momotaro could sit on it as the monsters said their apologies for being so bad.
Unfortunately, at the exact moment she was carrying it across the little battlefield, the Fallen Monster Baby Naruto sat up off the floor…and smashed his head into the chair leg.
There was a momentary silence, followed by Baby Naruto curling up to his knees, head on the floor and saying, “THAT HURT.” He didn’t start crying, but it was obvious that whatever he had done it wasn’t just a bump on the head; he didn’t bounce back like normal, but stayed on the floor, holding himself, until my JTE and I rushed over to make sure he was okay. When we looked at his head it was red and sore, and had slowly started to bleed.
He was immediately sent to the nurses’ office, and ended up going to the hospital for stitches. Even though it wasn’t as bad as it had appeared, it was a nasty little wound. The classroom after he left was deafeningly quiet as the rest of his classmates, feeling guilty and bummed, killed the rest of their class time with reading.
The next week we tried Momotaro again, and got all the way through it. …But we were a little more strict with just how far the “battle” went.
While I only go to my smaller elementary school one day a week, I see the kids in the lunchroom when I’m teaching at the middle school, too. Usually they’ll just say hi to me, sometimes wanting high-fives, and often when they’re walking around in classes I end up just standing in one place as all of them pass by, saying “hello” as many times as I can. One day in particular about three elementary grades in a row were walking past me to get lunch, so I was waving at all of them and greeting them as they went. Of course, these are little kids, so I was being a bit silly, saying hi in silly voices to make them all giggle. Immediately after the last class however, my eighth graders passed by on their way to get lunch, and at the head of the group were Hikaru and Kaoru. Had it been one of my shier kids like Baby Naruto I probably would have just said hi like a normal person, but I knew I could get away with messing around with these two.
“Hello,” I said in a cutesy baby voice, waving at them.
I wasn’t disappointed: they responded in kind, seamlessly shifting from normal Japanese middle school boy conversation to high-pitched English, even striking little poses before passing by and resuming their discussion like nothing had happened.
For many ALTs, one of their monthly to-dos includes decorating an English board, which is supposed to help promote English outside the classroom as well as cultural exchange. Recently, I’ve been including challenges with my board that reward students who are able to read and understand what I’ve written (though with the way I’ve written it, all of them should have a fighting chance at answering the questions). Still, many students take one look at an English board and want to run away, as it can be daunting trying to read something in another language. I’ve been encouraging them to do the English challenges by going with them to the board, usually in a group or a whole class, bribing them with cute stickers as I help them navigate the questions. I’m hoping that over a few months, as they see that they can read and answer the challenges I’ve given them, they’ll gain confidence to start facing the challenges on their own a bit more, but that’s not quite part of the story.
The other day I had gone with the seventh graders to the board after class, making sure they knew which sections the answers were in and what the questions were asking. They eventually got both questions right (though it took some teamwork and a bit of translation), so though not everyone answered individually I told them they could all have a sticker.
“You all worked hard,” I said, “so come pick out whichever one you want.”
The lot of them descended upon the waiting stickers, and among the scattered cries of “cute!!” I heard Kyouya say from the back, “Wait, I didn’t do anything!”
There was a bit of a worried hitch his voice, like he was conflicted about something, but as no one had seemed to hear him he said again, “I didn’t work hard at all, I didn’t answer anything.”
He was so honest it was adorable. But he had shown up with everyone and had listened to everyone talk about the board and about the answers, so I counted that as good enough.
“It’s okay, just make sure you do your best in the future,” I told him, holding out the stickers. Despite the inner conflict, he took one.
After a full day of classes and nursing a sinus infection, I was looking forward to being able to work at my desk quietly (save some hacking coughs) for the last hour of the school day. I didn’t have much to do as the holidays were approaching and class preparations only extended to the end of the week, but I figured I would be able to study Japanese a bit, or maybe tweak some translations for English Conversation Class since I had the time. Walking back to the staff room with my JTE, however, put a bit of a wrench in those plans—
“For sixth period today,” she told me, “the student council has elections.” She listed off the students who were running, and asked who I thought would win. I couldn’t well decide between them, but the conversation was cut short before I could give a proper answer. Answer or no answer, however, it remained that sixth period would be a school-wide electoral meeting and, sitting down heavily on my chair, I begun to calculate how many Ricolas I would need to smuggle in so that I didn’t cough through everyone’s speeches.
As my JTE was preparing to walk to the cafeteria, however, she gave me a pat on the shoulder.
“Everyone’s going to the meeting, but don’t worry. You can stay here, it will probably be really boring unless you understand all the speeches.”
I had a brief inner conflict at her consolation, as it both blessed me with permission to forego the meeting and simultaneously made me feel like a Bad Teacher for not supporting my students, even if I had no idea what they were saying. But this was short-lived, as I was really, really sick of stifling coughs and sniffling my way through fifty-minute intervals, and I said I would skip out on the meeting.
My JTE nodded. “You’ll be the only one here, so if the phone rings—” I suddenly wished I was going to the meeting, as answering the phone in a different language is possibly one of the scariest things on the planet. “—you can answer it. Say, ‘Hello, this is Miriam of 〇〇 Junior High School,’ and then—GACHAN! Just hang up.” She made a motion of slamming down the phone as she said it, and when I saw her smile I realized she was joking. She didn’t actually expect me to answer the phone when it could be anyone from a parent to the Board of Education. Thank goodness.
Pikachu-sensei laughed at my JTE’s instructions, and joining them I added my own idea. “No, what I’ll do is, I’ll pick up the phone and say, ‘Hello, this is Miriam of 〇〇 Junior High School. Sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.’ And then I’ll hang up!” I pretended to announce myself in high-pitched, polite Japanese, which, of course, proved my own introduction to be false.
My JTE and Pikachu-sensei were both lost in a fit of laughter. Once the joke had blown over a little both of them headed towards the door, but Pikachu-sensei stopped to wink and give me a phone hand gesture, saying, 「電話お願いしま〜す」(roughly, “We’ll leave the phone to you while we’re gone”) before she disappeared into the hallway.
The Monday after my birthday, my JTE had all of my classes tell me happy birthday before we started the lesson. For most of the kids there wasn’t much of a surprise as they had sang to me at lunch, but my sixth graders hadn’t heard as much from the elementary side of the cafeteria and were a bit more rowdy when they found out. Many of them shouted “Happy birthday!” in an assortment of pronunciations, after which Tofu piped up,
“How old are you?”
There was a clatter as Baby Naruto shot straight up out of his chair, eyebrows on the ceiling. “SHE’S A LADY YOU CAN’T ASK HER THAT IT’S RUUUUUUUDE!”
Honestly I didn’t care much, so between trying to shush the giggles out of the rest of the kids I told Tofu has just turned 23, but Baby Naruto was personally affronted and spent a few minutes sputtering his disbelief that Tofu could be so insensitive. My little knight in shining armor.
I don’t often teach my first graders at my smaller elementary school, so when I found their class on my schedule one week I couldn’t help but be a bit excited for their class. There are only three of them, so with two English teachers and a homeroom teacher the class feels more like a discussion group than an actual lesson.
When my English teacher (not my JTE…it’s complicated) and I entered the class, the three kids were lining up their desks in their proper places. We noticed that they had taped little signs to the front that said the names of different shops—a “toy shop,” a “vegetable shop,” and one that I couldn’t have read if I had been there for a year. My English teacher asked about the signs, to which Balloon-chan replied,
“Last class, we were studying words (in Japanese), so we made shops and we drew pictures of things to sell at our shops! I have a vegetable store so I have vegetables! Wait, I have pictures!”
She shuffled to the back of the classroom and returned with a stack of colorful illustrations. Tapping them on the desk to arrange them neatly, she pulled the first one off the top and laid it down for my English teacher and I to see.
“These are my vegetables! Look, a dog!”
“…Balloon-chan, a dog isn’t a vegetable…” My English teacher was trying desperately not to laugh as she looked at the picture, which was indeed a dog.
She wasn’t listening. “This one is a cat! This one is a bird!”
“Oh, that’s very cute—”
“This one is a turnip!”
“Okay, a turnip is a vegetable, that’s good—”
“I have a hamster!”
“I don’t think this is a vegetable store,” I whispered to my English teacher, who was conflicted between laughing and encouraging Balloon-chan’s creativity.
After the hamster, the remaining cards were of proper vegetables.
I had known for a few weeks that, on a Thursday afternoon in January, my middle schoolers were going to have a 百人一首 (hyaku-nin isshu) karuta competition. Karuta was something I learned through watching a Detective Conan movie, funnily enough; it is a traditional Japanese card game consisting of 100 poem cards. Each card, which represents a famous lyric poem by well-known old Japanese poets, has the second half of the poem written on it. That side is turned up and the cards are shuffled and arranged randomly between two or more players, who sit on the ground in seiza. A reader then reads the poem from the beginning (each poem has a set pitch and intonation, which makes it sound somewhat like an old Buddhist chant or, in Western terms, more like a Gregorian chant), and when they begin the second half of the poem anyone who finds the poem card may “take” it. “Taking” it includes, at the least competitive level, touching the card, but in professional tournaments or games this means swiping the card dramatically off the board with a slapping sound, often with enough force to actually hurt someone. For professional karuta players who have memorized all 100 poems and all of the set tones/intonations, the moment the reader says the first few syllables of the first part of the poem they know which card they’re looking for, and only can hope that they a) find it and b) take it before their opponent, but after the second half of the poem begins.
For about thirty middle schoolers, looking for the card usually started after the first syllables of the second half of the poem. What can I say—my town specializes in kagura, not karuta.
Having a vague understanding of the rules and an interest in watching what my kids were doing, I decided I’d go and take pictures as they played. When I got to the lunchroom, however, I was quickly ushered to a group in the corner.
“Baby Sasuke isn’t here today,” Pikachu-sensei told me. “You know to play, right?”
I gave a tentative yes, so they plopped me down in Baby Sasuke’s group with three of my girls—one seventh grader, one eighth grader, and one ninth grader.
“Miriam-sensei is going to play, too??” They were just as incredulous as I was, but I assured them they wouldn’t have much to worry about. I’d never played before, and they would be a lot faster than me at reading the cards, so I’d just be here to fill space and have fun.
Turns out that, when playing unprofessionally, blindly looking for whichever card starts with whichever syllable I heard first is about as good as playing while knowing Japanese. Of the 100 cards we went through 96 of them, and of those 96 I took 25—the second highest amount in my group. It didn’t make much difference considering the tournament points were only being counted for each grade (no other teachers were playing), but I had lots of fun doing it, and I was proud of holding my ground. It was also fun to see my girls, usually quiet in class, so competitive; there was much screaming and the occasional foul mouth when cards were taken by other players.
Maybe I’ll have to pick up karuta as a hobby!
(For anyone interested in seeing how karuta is practiced or just…looks from a better angle, I’d recommend the second half of this video, which shows actors for a karuta movie to preparing for their roles, or this video, which is of another student (but less formal) tournament. For those interested in seeing the best of the best, looking up the “Karuta Meijin Match” or “Karuta Queen Match” will give you the annual karuta championships in men’s and women’s divisions, respectively.)
One day in December I had seen my ninth graders running in and outside at random times, sometimes just two of them staying out on the track field for a while, jumping up and down to keep warm, other times all eight rushing down to the center of the field, looking around briefly, and running back inside while rubbing their arms. It was freezing that day, and I was mystified as to why they kept subjecting themselves to the elements. I even briefly wondered if it was some sort of punishment for bad behavior, before remembering that a) I had good kids, and b) that kind of punishment would probably be illegal. But when I asked them at lunch what they had been doing they kept using a word I didn’t know, 観察 (kansatsu), and saying in Japanese that the sun was moving. For a while I thought they were talking about looking through telescopes as they kept miming a single-eye binocular, but that didn’t seem quite right as I hadn’t seen a telescope on the track. When I returned from lunch I looked up the word in the dictionary and found that it was “observation” which, when coupled with them talking about the sun moving, made a lot more sense. They must have had some sort of science lab or activity all morning that had them monitoring the movement of the sun, and it just happened to land on a day that was…unfortunately cold.
But what really tickled me is how desperately they were trying to explain what kansatsu was to me. Not knowing the word in English, they kept trying to explain it in different but ultimately unhelpful ways, and they were laughing and getting frustrated with how poor of a job they seemed to be doing.
At one point the science teacher came by and, seeing as it was him who set up the experiment, a few of the students set upon him asking, “What’s kansatsu in English?”
He looked a bit lost, then turned to another student in the same class and asked him the same thing, “Hey, what’s kansatsu in English?”
Everyone in the area let out a mix between a laugh and a groan of defeat. “You aren’t supposed to ask us, we’re asking you!” one of the girls insisted, and gave up. The science teacher just looked a bit mystified, and went back to whatever he had been doing.
Late December finds my seventh-graders writing Christmas cards to each other as a fun way to end the year. Using a handful of set phrases the textbook had given them and some creative uses of the English they knew they were having a great time, and after having the English grammar checked were even given stickers to use as decoration.
One of my students, having finished writing, brought his card up to be checked before he began decorating. He was close to getting it right, but something felt a bit off—I couldn’t immediately place it, but when I read over his card I got the impression that I had missed something.
Sure enough, I looked at it one more time, and…
“Oh, hold on; you need an ‘e’ here, not an ‘a.’ You aren’t planning on marrying Christmas, are you?”
“NO!” he shouted, looking vaguely horrified at the thought that spelling “merry” as “marry” could result in such a heavy consequence. His classmates started snickering.
“Oooooooh, you’re going to marry Christmas~! When’s the ceremony?”
From the front of the room I could see him frantically rubbing out the spelling, ears pink. Well, it was an honest mistake.
Daily warm-up questions in English class always include things like the date and the weather as well as asking students, “How are you?”. While in America most people say “good” or “fine” regardless of how they actually are, in class students are encouraged to use the emotions they know—happy, sad, sleepy, hungry, et cetera. On one particular day at my larger elementary school, the question was posed to one of my fifth-grade classes and the deafening response came back from one student—
“I’M TIRED!”
“Oh, really?” My English teacher looked unconvinced, as his answer had to have been loud enough to be heard across the street.
“I’M TIRED!” He said.
I started to ask how the other students were, but before I could start there was another yell:
“IS THAT A CHICKEN!?”
The same boy was looking at my pencil case, somewhat in awe. While it isn’t a chicken, it does have a red part above the face that could look like a rooster crest if you don’t see it clearly.
“No, it’s a fried shrimp,” I answered him, laughing. Then looking at the other students who were covering their ears, I asked, “Are you sure you’re tired?”
“YES!”
He continued to yell his answers for the rest of the class.
I’ve gotten to participate in a variety of weird and fun activities since coming to Japan as a teacher, partially because my teachers and kids are eager to see me interact with Japanese culture and also partially because, while I’m a teacher, I’m a weird in-between teacher that gets the best of both worlds by not having homework but also getting to talk with my middle schoolers as if we were all the same age (honestly, the oldest of them are only six or seven years younger than me, which somehow doesn’t feel like that big a difference to begin with). One such activity was brought to my attention one day at lunch, where I was told that during the afternoon break my kids would be competing to…pick up beans.
That didn’t make much sense to me, so my JTE explained. The competition would be to see how many dried soy beans (which are very round) each student could pick up with chopsticks in 30 seconds. After all, chopsticks are perfectly functional, useful tools, but like trying to eat yogurt with a fork there are some things they simply aren’t the best at. One such thing is picking up small, round, firm objects, and thus the bean-picker-upper competition was born as a way to measure just how good everyone is with chopsticks. Honestly, I’m not sure if this is an all-Japan thing or a just-my-school thing, but regardless it sounded kind of fun. My JTE encouraged me to join in to see how I compared to my kids, and I agreed even though I had the sneaking suspicion that I was going to do horribly. The students seemed excited about it, which was encouraging; at least if I did poorly, they’d be entertained.
“Ravioli,” my JTE motioned to him. “Explain how the bean competition works in English.”
Said Ravioli, completely unsure of how to explain the rules in English but always willing to try, finished the bite of food he was on, put down his chopsticks, and set to his challenge with enthusiasm.
“Okay,” he started, and immediately stopped. A few moments passed before he picked up his chopsticks and pointed at them. “CHOPSTICKS.” His confidence made his classmates laugh from across the table.
“Uh…take chopsticks,” he said, thinking hard, “beans…” My JTE had begun to chuckle.
“BEANS,” he continued. “My beans…?”
Ravioli’s classmate gave him a questioning look from across the table, as if to say, “Are you sure about that?” But he didn’t stop.
“My beans…pick…uh…oh!” He had finally found the verb he thought he wanted. “TOUCH! TOUCH MY BEANS!”
One of the girls across the table managed a look of horror before erupting in laughter, and at the same time one of the boys in Ravioli’s class started frantically saying “STOP, STOP!” while also looking as if he wanted to die of shame. It was a mess. Half of the students were laughing because the sentence sounded funny, the other half were laughing because they had some idea of what he was actually saying, and overall everyone was laughing because, despite the assurance with which Ravioli had made his proclamation, everyone knew that somehow or another that he had definitely not explained the rules of the bean competition.
For the curious, I ended up transferring 13 beans in 30 seconds which, while nowhere near the student record, wasn’t anything to sneeze at.
At the beginning of each English class, my seventh graders play bingo to help improve vocabulary. They first repeat all the words after me, and then must repeat as well as I call them during the game. In this particular round of bingo, one of the vocabulary words was “mountain,” and my JTE decided to quiz them on some of their nature words. Most of them went well, and as their confidence grew they got louder and louder:
“What’s 山 in English?”
“Mountain!”
“What’s 川 in English?”
“River!”
“What’s 木 in English?”
“Tree!!”
“What’s 花 in English?”
“Flower!!”
“What’s 海 in English?”
“SEA!”
“What’s 大きい海 in English?”
“BIG SEA!!”
The right answer was “ocean.” My JTE and I sputtered with giggles as they collectively got it wrong, but we couldn’t blame them for their mistake; Japanese only has one word that means both “sea” and “ocean,” so they did their best…and just translated things a little too literally.
My three first-graders at my smaller elementary school are always a joy to watch, because they’re at an age where they don’t quite understand the world yet. It’s hilarious watching them try to take instructions, or watching their homeroom teacher prank them in class, because half the time they just…don’t get it.
Case in point: at the beginning of every class, English included, Japanese kids must stand up, stand at attention (shoulders back, arms stiffly at the side, everything), and bow to the teacher before sitting back down. In middle school some English teachers will change this a little, since no one bows in Western cultures, but for elementary it’s the same so they don’t get confused.
When we started class with the first graders, their bows were pretty weak; just little 10-degree inclines that work if you’re greeting someone as you’re walking down the hallway but not if you’re addressing a teacher. My English teacher called them out on it, and asked them to do a proper deep bow to begin class.
What followed was the thunk of three heads hitting their desks, bows only having stopped when their head couldn’t go any further.
In preparation for their final English speaking presentation of the year, my eighth-graders have been writing about their favorite things—favorite anime, favorite video game, favorite movie, et cetera. As they’ve been writing I’ve been walking around the room fielding questions and fixing spelling mistakes, which also means I’ve gotten to spy on their short essays before they present them.
Every student has their own strengths and weaknesses; some of them can be left to their own devices and will write the whole thing, others need some nudging as they go or will need the occasional grammar assist. Koya is usually a student I don’t have to correct very often, or if I do it isn’t for anything that completely breaks the English language; as long as he doesn’t fall asleep he can get stuff done reasonably well. For this assignment, I had passed him early on and seen that he had finished the first sentence (of about six): “My favorite character is Yoshi.” A solid start, and it was nice that I knew who he was talking about as it meant I could help him better later if he couldn’t think of anything. But while he had the first sentence down early on, as I continued to walk around the class I realized that he hadn’t even started the second sentence after five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes. I wondered where he was stuck, but with plenty of other things to check with the other kids, I gave him some space in case he was just trying really hard to remember something.
A little more than halfway into the class, I had finished up helping one student when I noticed that my JTE was helping Koya. They seemed to be having a discussion, and Koya had his head in his hands, looking bewildered. I wandered over to see what was going on, and when I neared his desk my JTE motioned me to come help.
“‘My favorite character is Yoshi,’” I read aloud. No issues there.
My JTE pointed to the space where the second sentence would go: “He’s having trouble because he can’t figure out if Yoshi is a boy or a girl.”
I looked at the worksheet blankly for a moment, and then realized—the next sentence had to start with a pronoun.
“Yoshi’s a boy, right?” I asked, trying to draw on my own knowledge. “Wouldn’t it be ‘he’?”
“But he lays eggs.”
Honestly, I’d never thought of that before.
My JTE laughed as my face went from puzzled to concerned. Koya sighed again, still staring at his worksheet—even though he knew what he wanted to say in English, he couldn’t get past the pronoun.
“I’m pretty sure Yoshi is a boy,” I said. “Maybe they’re like male seahorses? The Yoshi in Paper Mario is definitely a boy…”
Still, by the end of class we hadn’t effectively settled the issue, and the day ended with Koya only finishing one sentence in his essay. When I posed the question to my family chat, my dad did some digging and found out that Yoshis are asexual dinosaurs as they only need one Yoshi to make and hatch eggs.
Koya went with “it” for his essay pronouns.
My seventh graders, like most of my other kids, never leave me hanging when it comes to a good laugh. Seventh grade English in Japan is focused on a lot of vocabulary memorization, so with a bunch of new words rolling around in their heads they get them mixed up sometimes, or they just don’t quite remember the meaning, and it’s usually hilarious. Just like the previous “big sea” story, we were practicing Japanese-to-English vocab repetition one day, this time with verbs and the past tense. But before moving on to past tense, we reviewed the present-tense verbs to make sure everyone was on the same page.
“始まる!” My JTE said.
“Start!” Came the reply.
“手に入れる!”
“Get!”
“楽しむ!”
“Enjoy!”
“大好きです!”
Everyone hesitated except King Charles, who raised his voice dramatically and said, “I LOVE YOU!”
Love was the right verb, but of course “I love you” isn’t quite on the vocabulary list. Laughter swept over the class as my JTE told him “thank you,” trying to keep her own chuckles in check, and it was a few moments before the class settled down enough to continue.
During afternoon break and cleaning time, all of the kerosene heaters are turned off in my middle school (no central heating, remember) and many windows and doors are opened for air circulation. This can make it quite chilly for a while, which has students running around trying to find ways of keeping warm.
One day in particular I went up to my eighth-graders’ room to move some music onto their computer to find four of my boys sitting on the floor in a row, directly placed where the sunlight was streaming through the window into the room. All of them—Koya, Snowman, Hikaru, and Kaoru—were reading, so hunched and huddled over their books that they looked like cats curled up in a windowsill, legs crossed in awkward positions and shoes lined up neatly beside them.
It was so cute.
I laughed at them and told them how it looked, to which they responded, “It’s warmer over here,” and went back to their books.
Having my mom visit my classes was an interesting experience, but the one I was most anxious with was my sixth graders at my smaller elementary school. Those kids are some cute little buggers, but they’re also slightly insane, and I was worried that with my mom there they would get absolutely nothing done. Thankfully they were (mostly) cooperative for the class, but they still gave us some stuff to laugh at.
“Where am I from?” my mom asked. I told them where I was from when I introduced myself at the beginning of second semester, so theoretically they should remember.
“AMERICA!” Baby Naruto shouted helpfully, which was true but wasn’t what we were looking for.
“What state?” I raised an eyebrow. This was where it would get interesting, I was sure.
“Alabama,” one of my kids offered.
“NOOOO that’s where the previous ALT was from!” one of the girls corrected, looking mortified at the mistake.
“It starts with ‘I,’” said my JTE.
“Indiana!”
“Close!” my mom and I were impressed.
“INDIA!” Came a shout from the back of the room.
“THAT’S A COUNTRY!” Someone else yelled.
“EGYPT!” The three of us—my mom, my JTE, and myself were all laughing by this point.
“IGUANA!”
“THAT’S A LIZARD!” Baby Naruto was scandalized at the answer.
After more general chaos they eventually got “Illinois,” but my kids wouldn’t let their classmate live “iguana” down for the rest of the period.
During afternoon break one day I was called into the computer room, where all of my ninth graders were taking photos for their middle school memory book. They had been getting pictures of all of the teachers, and since I had some free time I’d just do it with the rest of the kids.
As we were waiting in line, I spotted a Japanese stinkbug—a kamemushi—on the floor, motionless, and pointed it out to one of my boys.
“Is it alive?” he asked, partially to himself, and squatted down next to it. I thought he was going to hit it, but instead he started thumping his hands down on the ground next to it, making a lot of noise and trying to see if it would react. Once Ravioli saw what he was doing he joined in the fun, turning the previous soundscape of camera clicks and instructions to “smile” into a jarring percussion piece. After about ten seconds, the stinkbug started to slowly walk forwards, not at all in a hurry.
“It’s alive,” the boys confirmed, stopping their barrage, and went back to waiting in line.
Throughout the whole thing, none of their classmates or teachers had even bothered to see what was going on. Must be pretty normal.
Speaking of stinkbugs, there was one in my sixth-grade class the other day. My JTE and I were teaching as normal when someone mentioned that they smelled a stinkbug (in Japan, they smell strongly of parsley). As the scent grew stronger and stronger, wafting over the class, students began to look around their desks for the bug. One by one they made faces of disgust as they started to smell it, covering their noses and mouths with their handkerchiefs, until even the last boy in the corner belatedly made a retching noise and declared, “IT STINKS.”
The whole class was put on hold because of how strongly it reeked in the room, and we all set about trying to find its source. I spotted it at last—near the front of the room, my JTE had stepped on a particularly large stinkbug, releasing all of its strongest fragrances.
“Sorry everybody,” she said, laughing, as they all groaned and made protests. A mischievous smile crept across my JTE’s face, and as they were whining she began to walk around the room with wide, high strides, trying to waft the smell from her shoe towards them.
“I’m. So. Sorryyyyy,” she punctuated each word with a step, obviously not sorry as the students started making louder complaints and stifling giggles. We ended up opening the windows and finishing class, but when the homeroom teacher came back in at the end of class, even he wrinkled his nose and said, “Ugh, why does it smell in here?”
We all just laughed.
Elementary graduation happens a bit after middle school graduation, so the week before Spring Break found me watching my sixth graders wear uniforms for the first time and receive little diplomas. While middle school graduation is heartfelt and a bit sad, elementary graduation is just adorable; watching my kids wondering at which parts they have to stand and bow and turn and sit was hilarious, and with their too-big uniforms and the most serious faces I’ve ever seen on the lot of them, it was overall a good time. But in between all the songs and the formalities and the speeches, my favorite part had to be from Baby Naruto: at the beginning of one of the speeches, the head or something or other from the educational who-knows-where asked the nine graduates,
“Your time has gone so fast, hasn’t it? Do you remember that day, six years ago, when your parents first dropped you off at school?”
Most of them had the insight that an answer probably wasn’t necessary, but from my seat in the teacher’s section I could see genuine, honest Baby Naruto thinking…and shaking his head “no.”
When there is time for English fun and games—once a semester, if we’re lucky—I’ve been trying to teach my kids the beauty of Mad Libs, trying to exercise their vocabulary brains in a fun way. It’s tricky for them to come up with English words on the fly, but the stories that come out of it put a smile on everyone’s face.
My favorite Mad Lib of the last batch had in it the award-winning lines, “On our way to the easy park, we saw a strong tuna riding a bike. We also saw big, happy balloons tied to a cat.”
After reading this, I couldn’t get the image of a hugely muscular, misshapen tuna out of my mind, which resulted in the following drawing. I still smile looking at it.
WabiSabi She 