Austin, Texas. July 3rd-5th (the 4th is the Saturday).
You are all, of course, welcome anytime. So if you had more time off you could come earlier or stay longer depending on your vacation time. Our apartment will be a little cramped, but I'm sure Indy Z would have no problem spooning with Schmidtle; I, as always, have no problem spooning with Woodsie. We have two couches. We have an inflatable mattress. We have sleeping bags and air pads.
We also have a rather significant dearth of really tasty beer in Texas (or, at least, tasty beer that is native to Texas)... maybe you could all bring some of your local fare with you.
Thoughts? Comments?
-Luke
Monday, March 30, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
I feel I have been somewhat derelict in my duties
As both the person who started this blog and its greatest advocate, I am ashamed to admit that I recently went over a month without checking it (despite the over-so-convenient RSS feed which [I believe] Luke added--thanks!). And believe me, when I did check the blog I was saddened to see that we went the entire month of February without any activity. Although this isn't such a horrible thing (after all, bears go into hibernation during the winter and they're super sweet--except the one that ate Timothy Treadwell . . . he's a fucker) I was thankful to see that Tamara had recently gotten bored and Chad had recently gotten existential (and entertaining . . . ?), and thus they felt the need to awaken the GBN blog from its six-week(ish) slumber.
But, anyway, enough with the meta-blogging crap. I'm here to check in. And, in the spirit of this blog, I am going to do it in a beer-related way. So, ladies and gentlemen, fellow GBN stalwarts, Indy Z, I present to you "Things That Have Happened to Me Since I Posted Last in Terms of the Beers I Have Been Drinking." The way I view this post progressing is that it will start with the shitty* things that have happened to me/beers I have been drinking, and progress to the better ones. But we'll see how that pans out; it is admittedly a shoddy conceit.
1) I'm Back in School and Classes Don't Suck . . . Too Hard (High Life Cans)
So, as some (all?) of you know, I'm back in school. In early January I started at the SDSU Sports Business MBA Program (which several of you should think about looking into *cough* Rathwell *cough*), and so far, so not terrible. I'm not necessarily enamored with all of my classmates (I don't think I've ever liked everyone in a room with more than five people in it), but there are some pretty sweet dudes. As far as classes go, I'm currently taking Statistics (which isn't too bad since it's the third time I've taken it), Sports and Society (which is the one soft science class and is taught by a total bro, Scott Tinley--who looks like a skinnier version, un-mustachioed version of the Busey character in "Point Break" and won Ironman Hawaii in '82 and '85), and Accounting (which pretty much makes me want to kill myself).
All things considered, though, it's not too bad. While many others are struggling to find jobs, or have moved back in with their parents, or have been found by their roommates with their pants around their ankles (if, for any reason, you haven't read this post, please go back and do so--especially the edit at the end), I'm back in college. It might not be Whitman, but at least it's not the real world. One might not quite be able to say I'm living the high life, but neither are people who drink Miller cans, either.
2) I Had a Pretty Sweet Weekend at Rugby 7s (Steinlager)
For those of you who don't know much about Rugby, most of the big events you might have heard of (6 Nations, Superleague, etc) are 15-on-15, the fastest-growing version of the game is 7-on-7 (called 7s), and the beer of choice at events of both types is Steinlager (which, while a bit watery, isn't half-bad). Rugby is making a push to get into the Olympics, and, because the Olympics is worried about becoming too bloated, its the Sevens version that is being considered.
One of the tournaments on the 7s world tour (called the IRB Sevens World Series) has been in San Diego the last few years, and since it has been here people in my program have been volunteering at it. So about a month ago I spent all weekend out at Petco Park(which is usually where the Padres play and is a fucking beautiful stadium)volunteering with the Rugby 7s media relations department, which mostly entailed just standing down on the field. So I got to spend the weekend watching world class athletes-slash-big, burly men run around in short shorts and tackle each other. I mean, it was 7s, not 15-on-15, so it was a little bit watered down but not too bad.
3) My Living Arrangement, While Not Ideal, Isn't Intolerable (PBR Cans)
I will admit to being a little bit worried about my liing arrangement before I moved in. I'm sub-letting a room in an apartment, which isn't too abnormal for someone my (our) age, but what is abnormal is that one of the two other bedrooms is occupied by an entire family: a husband, a wife, a toddler, and a baby. And by baby I mean baby: D'Honi (which I'm sure I spelled wrong) was born about four days after I moved in, and is now about 9 weeks old.
Also a cause for worry was that I'm living in one of the sketchiest parts of San Diego: City Heights. As you would see if you read that Wiki (which I'm sure none of you will do), the average income of a household in City Heights clocks in at $19,393**--pretty much right at the poverty line--and, although things have gotten slightly better since then, in 1993 three teenagers were killed in a gang fight at Hoover High School (a half-mile away from me) which prompted the City Heights Business Improvement Association to erect billboards that reading "Welcome to City Heights, San Diego's Crime Capital. Won't Anybody Help?" to attract the officials' attention.
The living arrangement, though, has turned out to be okay. Home is mostly where I eat, sleep, and do a bit of studying, and occasionally (very occasionally), when I get home from the library or the gym at 10:30 or 11 at night there's no one in the living room and I can watch some SportsCenter (or Baseball Tonight--fuck yes I love the Spring) and or the Daily Show while I make (what is as likely as not some ramen noodle soup for) my dinner. So it's not quite home (which PBR bottles would be), and, in fact, it's not even that close to home by any reasonable standard, but it does what I need it to do. So my tolerable living arrangement is PBR cans.
4) My Dad is Going to Visit (Pyramid Apricot)
I guess this isn't as much something that has happened to me as it is something that is going to happen from this Thursday to next Tuesday***, but, it's my list so it makes the cut. I'll definitely be happy to see him, but I'm not necessarily ecstatic about the logistics of the arrangement: he's not staying at a hotel but instead with me. This means that one of us will be sleeping on my floor, and I'll give anyone 20-to-1 odds if they're willing to bet that it'll be my Dad.
Still, I'll be able to do some of the things that I wouldn't do on my own because they're too expensive (for thirty-five bucks a pop the zoo had beter kick ass as much as everyone says it does), he's bringing my golf clubs, and he is my Dad, so I'm excited to see him. I don't know what this has to do with Pyramid Apricot, except for the fact that my dad wears bow ties which is kind of fruity.
5) Doing an Internship with USA Canoe/Kayak at the Olympic Training Center (St. Pauli Girl)
It's probably going to be a bit of a stretch to relate my internship to St. Pauli (there are no lovely, blond German ladies there--although there have been some burly, male Czech paddlers doing a camp there for the last few weeks), but since the other posts were tenuously tied (at best!) to their accompanying beers, I won't let these difficulties stop me.
USA Canoe/Kayak, while based in North Carolina, has its primary training center at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista. It is also a grossly understaffed organization (as many Olympic sports NGBs are, especially ones that haven't won any medals recently), and the head coach, Nathan Luce(who is Canadian, and thus awesome****), came into the program and was looking for help over the next few months organizing their World Team Trials and thier European World Cup trip, and I jumped at the chance.
So now I spend most Fridays out at the OTC, which is basically an elite athlete summer camp, and thus basically heaven for me. I've got a little office next to Nathan's down by the lake from which I can secretly gawk at all the Czechs massive pecs as they carry their boats in (and also get a little bit of work done). And, to top it all off (I would say best of all, but, as we all know, being around Olympians and aspiring Olympians all day is prety much a wet dream of mine come true), I get lunch in the dining hall every day when I'm out there. It's similar to the Whitman dining hall, if the Whitman dining hall were 3 notches better, had twice as many choices, and had 5 TVs in it (and, also, an absurd amount of nutritional information posted everywhere instead of table-toppers, which is the one down-side--I always kind of like those table-toppers).
So, yeah, this post has nothing to do with the affilliated beer except for the fact that I like both my internship and St. Pauli Girl. So it's got that going for it, which is nice . . .
6) GBN California Chapter Reunions (PBR Bottles)
Last, and certainly not least, I would like to inform you all that the California Chapter of the GBN Society***** (consisting of me, Marnie, and Carolina) has had several reunions--either two or three, I'm not really sure since I was pretty hammered most of the time they were going on. These reunions, like PBR bottles, were fucking awesome (the only problem with these reunions was how hard it was to find PBR bottles to drink at them--apparently they barely exist in SoCal).
The reason these reunions happened was that Carolina's work, which is usually in the Bay Area, shipped her off to Los Angeles three times over four weeks in late January and February. The sites of these reunions were Marnie's house (where Carolina stayed a few times and I stayed once), Merryl Farrar's house (where Carolina and I stayed many times, but Marnie, perhaps scared that one of the many blacked out people would in some way do her bodily harm, never stayed), and the Westwood Brewery (which we went to in honor of the GBN craft brewery tradition only to find out that it is, in fact, no longer a brewery).
Serendipitously, one of these reunions fell over Super Bowl Sunday, during which time much meat/veggie equivalent was eaten, much beer was drunk, much football was watched, and much Bruce Springsteen halftime show was enjoyed. A good time was had by all involved. Just like every time I drink anywhere from one to seventeen PBR bottles (although, now that I think about it, that's probably only a good time for me and is likely a horrible time for anyone around me).
Okay, that got long, and, frankly, kind of trailed off at the end there. Sorry about that. Time for some of you folks we haven't heard from to let us know what you're up to. Are you still lost in the wilderness, Todd? Did you get into UC-Davis, Marnie? Are you alive, Jay/Bhattface? Are you still tall, Schmidt? I need answers, dammit!
Be well, my friends.
*Shitty, is of course a relative term--nothing really terrible has happened to me since I posted last, and, as long as it gets you drunk and doesn't make you go blind, there's no such thing as a shitty beer.
**And as we all know, I, like most Whitman kids, am scared of poor people.
***The reason he's coming on these dates is because I have an extra long weekend this upcoming weekend. We usually have classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but because we're all dumb jocks and the NCAA tournament starts on Thursday our program head moved our Thursday class to an open time-slot on Wednesday so we could fully enjoy one of the best sports weekends of the year. In order to take full advantage, some of my classmates are driving to Vegas Wednesday night.
****And also worth only $.75 on the US dollar
But, anyway, enough with the meta-blogging crap. I'm here to check in. And, in the spirit of this blog, I am going to do it in a beer-related way. So, ladies and gentlemen, fellow GBN stalwarts, Indy Z, I present to you "Things That Have Happened to Me Since I Posted Last in Terms of the Beers I Have Been Drinking." The way I view this post progressing is that it will start with the shitty* things that have happened to me/beers I have been drinking, and progress to the better ones. But we'll see how that pans out; it is admittedly a shoddy conceit.
1) I'm Back in School and Classes Don't Suck . . . Too Hard (High Life Cans)
So, as some (all?) of you know, I'm back in school. In early January I started at the SDSU Sports Business MBA Program (which several of you should think about looking into *cough* Rathwell *cough*), and so far, so not terrible. I'm not necessarily enamored with all of my classmates (I don't think I've ever liked everyone in a room with more than five people in it), but there are some pretty sweet dudes. As far as classes go, I'm currently taking Statistics (which isn't too bad since it's the third time I've taken it), Sports and Society (which is the one soft science class and is taught by a total bro, Scott Tinley--who looks like a skinnier version, un-mustachioed version of the Busey character in "Point Break" and won Ironman Hawaii in '82 and '85), and Accounting (which pretty much makes me want to kill myself).
All things considered, though, it's not too bad. While many others are struggling to find jobs, or have moved back in with their parents, or have been found by their roommates with their pants around their ankles (if, for any reason, you haven't read this post, please go back and do so--especially the edit at the end), I'm back in college. It might not be Whitman, but at least it's not the real world. One might not quite be able to say I'm living the high life, but neither are people who drink Miller cans, either.
2) I Had a Pretty Sweet Weekend at Rugby 7s (Steinlager)
For those of you who don't know much about Rugby, most of the big events you might have heard of (6 Nations, Superleague, etc) are 15-on-15, the fastest-growing version of the game is 7-on-7 (called 7s), and the beer of choice at events of both types is Steinlager (which, while a bit watery, isn't half-bad). Rugby is making a push to get into the Olympics, and, because the Olympics is worried about becoming too bloated, its the Sevens version that is being considered.
One of the tournaments on the 7s world tour (called the IRB Sevens World Series) has been in San Diego the last few years, and since it has been here people in my program have been volunteering at it. So about a month ago I spent all weekend out at Petco Park(which is usually where the Padres play and is a fucking beautiful stadium)volunteering with the Rugby 7s media relations department, which mostly entailed just standing down on the field. So I got to spend the weekend watching world class athletes-slash-big, burly men run around in short shorts and tackle each other. I mean, it was 7s, not 15-on-15, so it was a little bit watered down but not too bad.
3) My Living Arrangement, While Not Ideal, Isn't Intolerable (PBR Cans)
I will admit to being a little bit worried about my liing arrangement before I moved in. I'm sub-letting a room in an apartment, which isn't too abnormal for someone my (our) age, but what is abnormal is that one of the two other bedrooms is occupied by an entire family: a husband, a wife, a toddler, and a baby. And by baby I mean baby: D'Honi (which I'm sure I spelled wrong) was born about four days after I moved in, and is now about 9 weeks old.
Also a cause for worry was that I'm living in one of the sketchiest parts of San Diego: City Heights. As you would see if you read that Wiki (which I'm sure none of you will do), the average income of a household in City Heights clocks in at $19,393**--pretty much right at the poverty line--and, although things have gotten slightly better since then, in 1993 three teenagers were killed in a gang fight at Hoover High School (a half-mile away from me) which prompted the City Heights Business Improvement Association to erect billboards that reading "Welcome to City Heights, San Diego's Crime Capital. Won't Anybody Help?" to attract the officials' attention.
The living arrangement, though, has turned out to be okay. Home is mostly where I eat, sleep, and do a bit of studying, and occasionally (very occasionally), when I get home from the library or the gym at 10:30 or 11 at night there's no one in the living room and I can watch some SportsCenter (or Baseball Tonight--fuck yes I love the Spring) and or the Daily Show while I make (what is as likely as not some ramen noodle soup for) my dinner. So it's not quite home (which PBR bottles would be), and, in fact, it's not even that close to home by any reasonable standard, but it does what I need it to do. So my tolerable living arrangement is PBR cans.
4) My Dad is Going to Visit (Pyramid Apricot)
I guess this isn't as much something that has happened to me as it is something that is going to happen from this Thursday to next Tuesday***, but, it's my list so it makes the cut. I'll definitely be happy to see him, but I'm not necessarily ecstatic about the logistics of the arrangement: he's not staying at a hotel but instead with me. This means that one of us will be sleeping on my floor, and I'll give anyone 20-to-1 odds if they're willing to bet that it'll be my Dad.
Still, I'll be able to do some of the things that I wouldn't do on my own because they're too expensive (for thirty-five bucks a pop the zoo had beter kick ass as much as everyone says it does), he's bringing my golf clubs, and he is my Dad, so I'm excited to see him. I don't know what this has to do with Pyramid Apricot, except for the fact that my dad wears bow ties which is kind of fruity.
5) Doing an Internship with USA Canoe/Kayak at the Olympic Training Center (St. Pauli Girl)
It's probably going to be a bit of a stretch to relate my internship to St. Pauli (there are no lovely, blond German ladies there--although there have been some burly, male Czech paddlers doing a camp there for the last few weeks), but since the other posts were tenuously tied (at best!) to their accompanying beers, I won't let these difficulties stop me.
USA Canoe/Kayak, while based in North Carolina, has its primary training center at the Olympic Training Center in Chula Vista. It is also a grossly understaffed organization (as many Olympic sports NGBs are, especially ones that haven't won any medals recently), and the head coach, Nathan Luce(who is Canadian, and thus awesome****), came into the program and was looking for help over the next few months organizing their World Team Trials and thier European World Cup trip, and I jumped at the chance.
So now I spend most Fridays out at the OTC, which is basically an elite athlete summer camp, and thus basically heaven for me. I've got a little office next to Nathan's down by the lake from which I can secretly gawk at all the Czechs massive pecs as they carry their boats in (and also get a little bit of work done). And, to top it all off (I would say best of all, but, as we all know, being around Olympians and aspiring Olympians all day is prety much a wet dream of mine come true), I get lunch in the dining hall every day when I'm out there. It's similar to the Whitman dining hall, if the Whitman dining hall were 3 notches better, had twice as many choices, and had 5 TVs in it (and, also, an absurd amount of nutritional information posted everywhere instead of table-toppers, which is the one down-side--I always kind of like those table-toppers).
So, yeah, this post has nothing to do with the affilliated beer except for the fact that I like both my internship and St. Pauli Girl. So it's got that going for it, which is nice . . .
6) GBN California Chapter Reunions (PBR Bottles)
Last, and certainly not least, I would like to inform you all that the California Chapter of the GBN Society***** (consisting of me, Marnie, and Carolina) has had several reunions--either two or three, I'm not really sure since I was pretty hammered most of the time they were going on. These reunions, like PBR bottles, were fucking awesome (the only problem with these reunions was how hard it was to find PBR bottles to drink at them--apparently they barely exist in SoCal).
The reason these reunions happened was that Carolina's work, which is usually in the Bay Area, shipped her off to Los Angeles three times over four weeks in late January and February. The sites of these reunions were Marnie's house (where Carolina stayed a few times and I stayed once), Merryl Farrar's house (where Carolina and I stayed many times, but Marnie, perhaps scared that one of the many blacked out people would in some way do her bodily harm, never stayed), and the Westwood Brewery (which we went to in honor of the GBN craft brewery tradition only to find out that it is, in fact, no longer a brewery).
Serendipitously, one of these reunions fell over Super Bowl Sunday, during which time much meat/veggie equivalent was eaten, much beer was drunk, much football was watched, and much Bruce Springsteen halftime show was enjoyed. A good time was had by all involved. Just like every time I drink anywhere from one to seventeen PBR bottles (although, now that I think about it, that's probably only a good time for me and is likely a horrible time for anyone around me).
Okay, that got long, and, frankly, kind of trailed off at the end there. Sorry about that. Time for some of you folks we haven't heard from to let us know what you're up to. Are you still lost in the wilderness, Todd? Did you get into UC-Davis, Marnie? Are you alive, Jay/Bhattface? Are you still tall, Schmidt? I need answers, dammit!
Be well, my friends.
*Shitty, is of course a relative term--nothing really terrible has happened to me since I posted last, and, as long as it gets you drunk and doesn't make you go blind, there's no such thing as a shitty beer.
**And as we all know, I, like most Whitman kids, am scared of poor people.
***The reason he's coming on these dates is because I have an extra long weekend this upcoming weekend. We usually have classes on Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, but because we're all dumb jocks and the NCAA tournament starts on Thursday our program head moved our Thursday class to an open time-slot on Wednesday so we could fully enjoy one of the best sports weekends of the year. In order to take full advantage, some of my classmates are driving to Vegas Wednesday night.
****And also worth only $.75 on the US dollar
Thursday, March 12, 2009
Ask and You Shall Receive
Something really boring! Who wants to read a 10 page essay I wrote about the JET Program!!! Tamara, I guess it'll be an indicator of how just how dull geology grad-school is if you jumped at that. But, yeah, I wrote this for an essay contest that I'm hoping nobody else submits to because the grand prize is a cool 10,000 yen and I don't have much confidence in a victory that involves competition. I tried to send this to Marnie but for some reason her computer won't download my email attachments, so she suggested I post it to my blog (www.mylinktothewesternworld.blogspot.com) but I figured that this blog has seen nothing but Luke and Indy's Texan jackassery for too long. So here it is, all 2,999 words of it (leave it to me to push a word limit to... well, to the limit). Also, happy birthday to me.
It’s approaching 3:00 and I can’t do it anymore, so I gently but decisively snap the cover of my textbook shut and try to reclaim my wits from the cracks and crevices between verb conjugations and vocabulary words into which they’ve fallen over the past few hours. Today is a test day, which, as any JET participant past or present would tell you, means that I have absolutely nothing to do, so since roughly 10:30 I’ve been doing my best to stay stuck to the slippery shapes of kanji and the real-world stuff they signify, but it’s been five hours and I can feel the slashes and swoops getting slick, so there’s no use trying to hold on anymore. Studying isn’t going to do me any more good today.
Looking up from my closed book, the ambient sights and sounds I’ve been trying to muffle for the past four or five hours resolve into the still mostly incoherent hustle and bustle of the teachers’ room I inhabit a corner of. Closing my textbook for the day is a simultaneously exultant and rueful act; there is nothing more satisfying than marking out another chapter of vocabulary words and grammar points like previously undiscovered intellectual topography on an adventurer’s chart; but, at the same time, refocusing my attention upon the scattered eddies of conversation in the teachers’ room immediately takes up all notions of progress and sweeps them out to sea. Sometimes it seems like I don’t understand anything. Nine years of this and the map still seems mostly blank. This language is a vast territory of signs and symbols and sentiment that can’t be traversed in a day. Or even a decade.
But then again, what language can be? Certainly not English. It’s 3:20, the tests are finished, and students have started to trickle into the teachers’ room to collect the various keys, rosters, and file folders necessary for the extra-curricular activities that are in turn a pretty necessary part of the lives of Japanese middle school students. My Japanese middle school students. My students. As a twenty-two year old kid fresh out of college I still wonder what right I have to be pretending to teach anybody anything, let alone something as trackless and monolithic as a foreign language, but nevertheless, four times a week I stand alone in front of a room full of these very same kids now running off to put on kendo skirts or basketball shoes and do my best.
Hamamatsu city in Shizuoka Prefecture offers something of a unique experience to its resident JETs in that in addition to the standard Team-Teaching classes most JETs participate in, we are also asked to teach a number of so-called “English Conversation” classes on our own. To put it simply, Team Teaching pairs a main Japanese Teacher of English (JTE, not to be confused with JET) together with a native English speaking ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) who occupies what is very much a supporting role in the classroom. Some teachers are better at using their ALTs than others, but it seems that I, at least, often end up standing silently in a corner like a neglected doll, waiting lifelessly and listlessly to be animated by my Japanese teacher’s signal to read some lines from a textbook. In a Team Teaching class I’m not much more than an expensive piece of talking furniture standing plugged into the wall; sometimes I certainly feel like I have as much impact on the kids as an American-themed mood lamp. However, “English Conversation,” or, “Eikaiwa,” as it is commonly referred to, doesn’t allow me the excuse to fall into such a passive position, because an “Eikaiwa” class is entirely mine, and standing silent in the corner would most likely end with me perishing at the hands of an angry mob of restless 14 year-olds, wielding erasers instead of stones but expressing their discontent just as effectively. Or fired. Teachers are generally paid to teach, not to just stand there.
I’ve mentioned a few times that I am “teaching English,” but that’s a bit of a disingenuous and misleading statement that I wish to clarify. I teach “English Conversation,” which is an entirely different matter. I can’t teach grammar, I don’t give tests, I’m not responsible for or even really capable of imparting new knowledge to my students about the complex, contradictory organizational system that is the English language. However, that’s not really a JET’s job. It is a JET’s job to stand outside the lifeless organizational system as living, breathing, human proof that there is more to English than lines in a textbook or chalk on a board. I study Japanese like a demon not simply because I like the shapes kanji and verb conjugations make, but because the language is my link to the thriving, energetic world I find myself immersed in every day; Japanese students studying English in Japan don’t have that same incentive, so, in reality, it is a JET’s only job to be him or herself and make studying English relevant. There is no better place for me to fulfill this role than in my own “Eikaiwa” classroom.
It has taken me a very long time to come to that conclusion, however. Turning Eikaiwa into what I think it is supposed to be has been a long process in many phases, characterized by misconceptions, constant struggles, rare triumphs, and countless failures, but, even though naivety had more to do with it than anything else, my first impression was the right one. I was excited. We were told about Eikaiwa classes shortly after getting off the train from our orientation in Tokyo, over a month before we would actually teach our first one, and to my boggled brain, preoccupied with the sights and sounds of a new life in a new country and entirely innocent of the actualities of a class of my own, it sounded perfect. What better way to promote foreign language learning and internationalization than at the head of a class? I imagined rows of enrapt children listening to my lectures about the regional diversity in America, rows of inquisitive children puzzling over the strange, cultural objects I had packed into my suitcases like relics from the American temple, and rows of energetic children conversing with me about… well, I didn’t know exactly, something in English. The details didn’t matter then; it was August, my first lesson was a month away, and I basked in the anticipation of being a real teacher with a real class.
To say nothing of what I was going to do with that real class. It’s 3:30, and leaning back in my chair, my hands behind my head, feet pretty much up on my desk, I recall those distant weeks in August. They started out in a similar sense of repose, but as the clock ticked and the first day of school began approaching, the tension started mounting. In trying to plan my first lesson, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. What do my kids already know? What should I teach? How should I teach it? Do I play games? Flashcards? Music? Are these kids visual, tactile, or olfactory learners? Wait, what? Olfactory? I’m not qualified for this. With every day my excitement for Eikaiwa lessons began to teeter, and then, as my mental waste-basket began to fill with discarded lesson plans, tipped into a deep dark chasm of panic and fear. On the fourth of September I walked into my school with a lesson plan clutched in my sweaty palms, but little hope of executing it effectively.
My first lesson was an unmitigated disaster. It was excruciating. It was one of the sorriest excuses for a “teaching performance” the world has ever seen. I… don’t remember what it was about. Some sort of self-introduction. In truth, all I really remember are shattered expectations and the sense of a long road ahead. My opinions were met with blank stares, my pictures with disregard, and my attempts at English Conversation with mute incomprehension. When I was daydreaming about discoursing on the differences in mentality between people from the Pacific Northwest and people from Texas I was overlooking something crucial; my students are 14 years old and couldn’t care less. When I was envisioning opening said students’ eyes to the mysteries of American culture, I was forgetting something obvious; McDonald’s, IPods, and baseball are already doing pretty well for themselves over here. However, when I was anticipating classes brimming over with fluid English conversation, I guess I just wasn’t thinking at all. As of my first lesson, my students had only been studying English for about 18 months, and I, of all people, should know that language is a vast territory of signs and symbols and sentiment that could never be traversed in such a short amount of time. As my JTE put it, my students were really “just babies” in their English ability, and I was going to have to radically redefine my methods in order to accommodate that fact.
That adjustment was hard to make, and after that first day my illusions for Eikaiwa gave way to a surprisingly harsh reality. Actually teaching these kids turned out to be a lot more difficult than dreaming about it. My lessons weren’t coherent, or they weren’t useful, or they weren’t fun, and I started to hate them because of it. My visions of walking in and teaching Faulkner were (understandably) gone, but there were other hang-ups, too. As I’m sure is the case with most JETs, giggling followed me through the hallways, silence accompanied me in the teacher’s room, and it seemed like Otherness and a sense of irrelevancy hung around me everywhere. In class, in the halls, in the teachers’ room, I was a free radical floating through the veins of an otherwise integrated body, fully out of place and unable to attach myself to anything. For the first time in my life I felt marginalized by my Americanness, by my English-speakingness, and as I passed lonely day after lonely day, my students ignoring me in class because they couldn’t understand me, my teachers ignoring me in the teacher’s room because they had no reason to talk to me, and everybody giving me a wide berth because they didn’t know how to interact with a 22 year-old quasi-teacher from Seattle who speaks only enough Japanese to make conversations awkward instead of non-existent, I began to worry that I was never going to be able to fulfill my only role as a JET. How can you be a living, breathing, human representative of a foreign country if nobody treats you like a living, breathing human-being? It’s nobody’s fault, but as a JET your most apparent characteristic is your foreignness; as such, your biggest asset also becomes your greatest obstacle. I wanted more out of my relationships with my students than the giddy waves, cautious “hallo’s,” nervous squeaks, and hasty pounding of foot-falls down the hallways that I was getting over my first few months, but in order for that to happen, my kids would first have to stop thinking of me as that strange gaijin roaming the halls of their school, and start thinking of me as their teacher, Chad.
Even though Eikaiwa was my best way to achieve that paradigm shift, change was slow in coming. In my students’ attitudes, yes, but more importantly in my own teaching methods. 3:50 and I find myself rooting around in my desk for no particular reason except maybe in hopes that the shuffle of papers will drown out the tick of the clock, and a single sheet covered in my scribbling catches my eye. Curious, I pull it out and scan the first few words at the top. “I hate lesson planning.” Uh oh. Reading further down, I feel the frustrated ramblings of a teacher with no more ideas like the inexorable pull of a black hole tugging me into the past, and all of a sudden it’s no longer almost closing time and I’m standing in front of a class of rowdy second-years, a sheet of simple questions clasped in my fists, a meaningless roar of Japanese in my ears, and a headache blooming in my brain. Shaking my head to clear out the ringing, I raise my voice to be heard over the din, and yell, “ Ok! Now, the next question! What… food….do…. you like?” The kids’ desks are arranged into rows and I’m trying to get them to play a relay game as a warm up; answer my question correctly, and you can pass your flag to the person behind you. First team to make it to the end of their row wins. Sounds simple enough. Looking out over the sea of inattentive faces, however, it’s clear that I didn’t communicate myself as well as I’d thought. They don’t really seem to get it, and I can’t help but mistake incomprehension for resistance; this class is supposed to be about working together, but, as I suppose teachers across all disciplines sometimes do, I feel like I have to battle for every answer I get. After a few awkward seconds of waiting for something to happen, one of my kids mercifully, if tentatively, raises her flag, and I immediately call on her. “Sushi.” She passes her flag, and as I scan my sheet for the next question (“what sport do you play?”) something in my brain pops and I can feel myself giving in to the existential crisis I’ve been holding off since early September. Is this all there is? Is this really what it all amounts to? Being pointed and laughed at in the hallways? Endlessly asking stupid, vapid questions that nobody listens to anyway? When’s your birthday? What color do you like? What fruit do you like? What subject do you like? Is this what they meant by internationalization, by foreign language education? Is this all I’m here to be doing? May 5th, blue, strawberries, recess, where’s the transcendent moment of cultural contact, where’s the communicating across borders, where’s the feeling that I’m anything more to these kids than a fleshy tape-recorder emitting a bunch of crazy things that somebody else is forcing them to listen to? Screw cultural contact, where’s the flesh and blood, where’s the human contact in this mechanical exchange of proscribed phrases?
Where was any of that? It may have been my fault for not approaching them correctly, but in the depths of winter, in the middle of classes like that, I guess I didn’t feel like the Eikaiwa or JET Programs were worth much at all.
But they are. I wish I had a moment to call out of my memory like a thunderbolt from the sky that would punctuate that point with a hail of sparks and a sonic boom, but the shift from Eikaiwa as a waste of time to Eikaiwa as the best use of it has been accompanied by nothing so dramatic. All I have are faces and names: Shiori, Shunya, Shuhei; Ryo, Ryouji, Ruri; Hirokazu, Hirofumi, Hiroyuki, Hina. These names and dozens more summon up smiles and something that seems like communicating. Something that feels like that authentic moment of human connection I was so craving while officiating robotic row relays in the wintertime. Ultimately, I’m left with the realization that acclimation is slow to come in the most comfortable of situations, and being cast in front of a group of teenagers who can’t speak your language isn’t comfortable at all. But acclimation comes, and as I’ve gotten accustomed to the mob of children I find in front of me on an almost daily basis, their numbers have seemed to dwindle, their shadows have shrunk in the lights of the florescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and they look a lot less like enemy hostiles and a lot more like regular old kids. Kids with personalities, kids with quirks, kids with hearts; weird kids, cool kids, hopelessly shy kids, brilliant kids, struggling kids, but all kids just the same. I don’t know what’s changed except for the date on the calendar, but somehow it is kids I now see staring back at me in class instead of unresponsive, kid-shaped automatons. I see life in them now where there’s never been any, light in eyes that are usually glazed-over, and I can’t overstate the significance of that change. My teaching methods are still by no means perfect, but I can work with kids; I can’t with robots.
I wonder if this warming trend isn’t indicative of something else. Maybe they are starting to see me as Chad, instead of that American guy who tries to teach them English. Maybe after eight months together my nationality has been subsumed by my humanity, and they just see me as that guy who tries to teach them English. It’s 4:10 and as I gather my things to leave, I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t the heart of internationalization; not necessarily effacing cultural identities, but seeing through the local trappings that make us citizens of a nation and seeing into the universal traits that make us co-residents of a globe. Are we there yet? Have I shattered misconceptions and ethnocentrisms and all sorts of other paradigms on the way to turning Maruzuka Junior High into cultural enlightenment on Earth? Ha, eight months and I’ve hardly had a moment to breathe, let alone blow down that house of bricks. I know I’ll never have a conversation with my kids that isn’t a little bit jerky, awkward, or grammatically suspect, but even if English is a vast territory that I’ll never see them cross, the road to not looking at each other as gaijin is short, and as long we can travel it hand in hand, as it were, one Eikaiwa lesson at a time, it’s one we can see the end of together.
If you're still reading this, god bless you.
It’s approaching 3:00 and I can’t do it anymore, so I gently but decisively snap the cover of my textbook shut and try to reclaim my wits from the cracks and crevices between verb conjugations and vocabulary words into which they’ve fallen over the past few hours. Today is a test day, which, as any JET participant past or present would tell you, means that I have absolutely nothing to do, so since roughly 10:30 I’ve been doing my best to stay stuck to the slippery shapes of kanji and the real-world stuff they signify, but it’s been five hours and I can feel the slashes and swoops getting slick, so there’s no use trying to hold on anymore. Studying isn’t going to do me any more good today.
Looking up from my closed book, the ambient sights and sounds I’ve been trying to muffle for the past four or five hours resolve into the still mostly incoherent hustle and bustle of the teachers’ room I inhabit a corner of. Closing my textbook for the day is a simultaneously exultant and rueful act; there is nothing more satisfying than marking out another chapter of vocabulary words and grammar points like previously undiscovered intellectual topography on an adventurer’s chart; but, at the same time, refocusing my attention upon the scattered eddies of conversation in the teachers’ room immediately takes up all notions of progress and sweeps them out to sea. Sometimes it seems like I don’t understand anything. Nine years of this and the map still seems mostly blank. This language is a vast territory of signs and symbols and sentiment that can’t be traversed in a day. Or even a decade.
But then again, what language can be? Certainly not English. It’s 3:20, the tests are finished, and students have started to trickle into the teachers’ room to collect the various keys, rosters, and file folders necessary for the extra-curricular activities that are in turn a pretty necessary part of the lives of Japanese middle school students. My Japanese middle school students. My students. As a twenty-two year old kid fresh out of college I still wonder what right I have to be pretending to teach anybody anything, let alone something as trackless and monolithic as a foreign language, but nevertheless, four times a week I stand alone in front of a room full of these very same kids now running off to put on kendo skirts or basketball shoes and do my best.
Hamamatsu city in Shizuoka Prefecture offers something of a unique experience to its resident JETs in that in addition to the standard Team-Teaching classes most JETs participate in, we are also asked to teach a number of so-called “English Conversation” classes on our own. To put it simply, Team Teaching pairs a main Japanese Teacher of English (JTE, not to be confused with JET) together with a native English speaking ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) who occupies what is very much a supporting role in the classroom. Some teachers are better at using their ALTs than others, but it seems that I, at least, often end up standing silently in a corner like a neglected doll, waiting lifelessly and listlessly to be animated by my Japanese teacher’s signal to read some lines from a textbook. In a Team Teaching class I’m not much more than an expensive piece of talking furniture standing plugged into the wall; sometimes I certainly feel like I have as much impact on the kids as an American-themed mood lamp. However, “English Conversation,” or, “Eikaiwa,” as it is commonly referred to, doesn’t allow me the excuse to fall into such a passive position, because an “Eikaiwa” class is entirely mine, and standing silent in the corner would most likely end with me perishing at the hands of an angry mob of restless 14 year-olds, wielding erasers instead of stones but expressing their discontent just as effectively. Or fired. Teachers are generally paid to teach, not to just stand there.
I’ve mentioned a few times that I am “teaching English,” but that’s a bit of a disingenuous and misleading statement that I wish to clarify. I teach “English Conversation,” which is an entirely different matter. I can’t teach grammar, I don’t give tests, I’m not responsible for or even really capable of imparting new knowledge to my students about the complex, contradictory organizational system that is the English language. However, that’s not really a JET’s job. It is a JET’s job to stand outside the lifeless organizational system as living, breathing, human proof that there is more to English than lines in a textbook or chalk on a board. I study Japanese like a demon not simply because I like the shapes kanji and verb conjugations make, but because the language is my link to the thriving, energetic world I find myself immersed in every day; Japanese students studying English in Japan don’t have that same incentive, so, in reality, it is a JET’s only job to be him or herself and make studying English relevant. There is no better place for me to fulfill this role than in my own “Eikaiwa” classroom.
It has taken me a very long time to come to that conclusion, however. Turning Eikaiwa into what I think it is supposed to be has been a long process in many phases, characterized by misconceptions, constant struggles, rare triumphs, and countless failures, but, even though naivety had more to do with it than anything else, my first impression was the right one. I was excited. We were told about Eikaiwa classes shortly after getting off the train from our orientation in Tokyo, over a month before we would actually teach our first one, and to my boggled brain, preoccupied with the sights and sounds of a new life in a new country and entirely innocent of the actualities of a class of my own, it sounded perfect. What better way to promote foreign language learning and internationalization than at the head of a class? I imagined rows of enrapt children listening to my lectures about the regional diversity in America, rows of inquisitive children puzzling over the strange, cultural objects I had packed into my suitcases like relics from the American temple, and rows of energetic children conversing with me about… well, I didn’t know exactly, something in English. The details didn’t matter then; it was August, my first lesson was a month away, and I basked in the anticipation of being a real teacher with a real class.
To say nothing of what I was going to do with that real class. It’s 3:30, and leaning back in my chair, my hands behind my head, feet pretty much up on my desk, I recall those distant weeks in August. They started out in a similar sense of repose, but as the clock ticked and the first day of school began approaching, the tension started mounting. In trying to plan my first lesson, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. What do my kids already know? What should I teach? How should I teach it? Do I play games? Flashcards? Music? Are these kids visual, tactile, or olfactory learners? Wait, what? Olfactory? I’m not qualified for this. With every day my excitement for Eikaiwa lessons began to teeter, and then, as my mental waste-basket began to fill with discarded lesson plans, tipped into a deep dark chasm of panic and fear. On the fourth of September I walked into my school with a lesson plan clutched in my sweaty palms, but little hope of executing it effectively.
My first lesson was an unmitigated disaster. It was excruciating. It was one of the sorriest excuses for a “teaching performance” the world has ever seen. I… don’t remember what it was about. Some sort of self-introduction. In truth, all I really remember are shattered expectations and the sense of a long road ahead. My opinions were met with blank stares, my pictures with disregard, and my attempts at English Conversation with mute incomprehension. When I was daydreaming about discoursing on the differences in mentality between people from the Pacific Northwest and people from Texas I was overlooking something crucial; my students are 14 years old and couldn’t care less. When I was envisioning opening said students’ eyes to the mysteries of American culture, I was forgetting something obvious; McDonald’s, IPods, and baseball are already doing pretty well for themselves over here. However, when I was anticipating classes brimming over with fluid English conversation, I guess I just wasn’t thinking at all. As of my first lesson, my students had only been studying English for about 18 months, and I, of all people, should know that language is a vast territory of signs and symbols and sentiment that could never be traversed in such a short amount of time. As my JTE put it, my students were really “just babies” in their English ability, and I was going to have to radically redefine my methods in order to accommodate that fact.
That adjustment was hard to make, and after that first day my illusions for Eikaiwa gave way to a surprisingly harsh reality. Actually teaching these kids turned out to be a lot more difficult than dreaming about it. My lessons weren’t coherent, or they weren’t useful, or they weren’t fun, and I started to hate them because of it. My visions of walking in and teaching Faulkner were (understandably) gone, but there were other hang-ups, too. As I’m sure is the case with most JETs, giggling followed me through the hallways, silence accompanied me in the teacher’s room, and it seemed like Otherness and a sense of irrelevancy hung around me everywhere. In class, in the halls, in the teachers’ room, I was a free radical floating through the veins of an otherwise integrated body, fully out of place and unable to attach myself to anything. For the first time in my life I felt marginalized by my Americanness, by my English-speakingness, and as I passed lonely day after lonely day, my students ignoring me in class because they couldn’t understand me, my teachers ignoring me in the teacher’s room because they had no reason to talk to me, and everybody giving me a wide berth because they didn’t know how to interact with a 22 year-old quasi-teacher from Seattle who speaks only enough Japanese to make conversations awkward instead of non-existent, I began to worry that I was never going to be able to fulfill my only role as a JET. How can you be a living, breathing, human representative of a foreign country if nobody treats you like a living, breathing human-being? It’s nobody’s fault, but as a JET your most apparent characteristic is your foreignness; as such, your biggest asset also becomes your greatest obstacle. I wanted more out of my relationships with my students than the giddy waves, cautious “hallo’s,” nervous squeaks, and hasty pounding of foot-falls down the hallways that I was getting over my first few months, but in order for that to happen, my kids would first have to stop thinking of me as that strange gaijin roaming the halls of their school, and start thinking of me as their teacher, Chad.
Even though Eikaiwa was my best way to achieve that paradigm shift, change was slow in coming. In my students’ attitudes, yes, but more importantly in my own teaching methods. 3:50 and I find myself rooting around in my desk for no particular reason except maybe in hopes that the shuffle of papers will drown out the tick of the clock, and a single sheet covered in my scribbling catches my eye. Curious, I pull it out and scan the first few words at the top. “I hate lesson planning.” Uh oh. Reading further down, I feel the frustrated ramblings of a teacher with no more ideas like the inexorable pull of a black hole tugging me into the past, and all of a sudden it’s no longer almost closing time and I’m standing in front of a class of rowdy second-years, a sheet of simple questions clasped in my fists, a meaningless roar of Japanese in my ears, and a headache blooming in my brain. Shaking my head to clear out the ringing, I raise my voice to be heard over the din, and yell, “ Ok! Now, the next question! What… food….do…. you like?” The kids’ desks are arranged into rows and I’m trying to get them to play a relay game as a warm up; answer my question correctly, and you can pass your flag to the person behind you. First team to make it to the end of their row wins. Sounds simple enough. Looking out over the sea of inattentive faces, however, it’s clear that I didn’t communicate myself as well as I’d thought. They don’t really seem to get it, and I can’t help but mistake incomprehension for resistance; this class is supposed to be about working together, but, as I suppose teachers across all disciplines sometimes do, I feel like I have to battle for every answer I get. After a few awkward seconds of waiting for something to happen, one of my kids mercifully, if tentatively, raises her flag, and I immediately call on her. “Sushi.” She passes her flag, and as I scan my sheet for the next question (“what sport do you play?”) something in my brain pops and I can feel myself giving in to the existential crisis I’ve been holding off since early September. Is this all there is? Is this really what it all amounts to? Being pointed and laughed at in the hallways? Endlessly asking stupid, vapid questions that nobody listens to anyway? When’s your birthday? What color do you like? What fruit do you like? What subject do you like? Is this what they meant by internationalization, by foreign language education? Is this all I’m here to be doing? May 5th, blue, strawberries, recess, where’s the transcendent moment of cultural contact, where’s the communicating across borders, where’s the feeling that I’m anything more to these kids than a fleshy tape-recorder emitting a bunch of crazy things that somebody else is forcing them to listen to? Screw cultural contact, where’s the flesh and blood, where’s the human contact in this mechanical exchange of proscribed phrases?
Where was any of that? It may have been my fault for not approaching them correctly, but in the depths of winter, in the middle of classes like that, I guess I didn’t feel like the Eikaiwa or JET Programs were worth much at all.
But they are. I wish I had a moment to call out of my memory like a thunderbolt from the sky that would punctuate that point with a hail of sparks and a sonic boom, but the shift from Eikaiwa as a waste of time to Eikaiwa as the best use of it has been accompanied by nothing so dramatic. All I have are faces and names: Shiori, Shunya, Shuhei; Ryo, Ryouji, Ruri; Hirokazu, Hirofumi, Hiroyuki, Hina. These names and dozens more summon up smiles and something that seems like communicating. Something that feels like that authentic moment of human connection I was so craving while officiating robotic row relays in the wintertime. Ultimately, I’m left with the realization that acclimation is slow to come in the most comfortable of situations, and being cast in front of a group of teenagers who can’t speak your language isn’t comfortable at all. But acclimation comes, and as I’ve gotten accustomed to the mob of children I find in front of me on an almost daily basis, their numbers have seemed to dwindle, their shadows have shrunk in the lights of the florescent bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and they look a lot less like enemy hostiles and a lot more like regular old kids. Kids with personalities, kids with quirks, kids with hearts; weird kids, cool kids, hopelessly shy kids, brilliant kids, struggling kids, but all kids just the same. I don’t know what’s changed except for the date on the calendar, but somehow it is kids I now see staring back at me in class instead of unresponsive, kid-shaped automatons. I see life in them now where there’s never been any, light in eyes that are usually glazed-over, and I can’t overstate the significance of that change. My teaching methods are still by no means perfect, but I can work with kids; I can’t with robots.
I wonder if this warming trend isn’t indicative of something else. Maybe they are starting to see me as Chad, instead of that American guy who tries to teach them English. Maybe after eight months together my nationality has been subsumed by my humanity, and they just see me as that guy who tries to teach them English. It’s 4:10 and as I gather my things to leave, I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t the heart of internationalization; not necessarily effacing cultural identities, but seeing through the local trappings that make us citizens of a nation and seeing into the universal traits that make us co-residents of a globe. Are we there yet? Have I shattered misconceptions and ethnocentrisms and all sorts of other paradigms on the way to turning Maruzuka Junior High into cultural enlightenment on Earth? Ha, eight months and I’ve hardly had a moment to breathe, let alone blow down that house of bricks. I know I’ll never have a conversation with my kids that isn’t a little bit jerky, awkward, or grammatically suspect, but even if English is a vast territory that I’ll never see them cross, the road to not looking at each other as gaijin is short, and as long we can travel it hand in hand, as it were, one Eikaiwa lesson at a time, it’s one we can see the end of together.
If you're still reading this, god bless you.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Entertain me
I sit in a cubicle all day thinking about magma and lava and eruptions. Somebody write something and give me something else to think about! I desperately need some sort of GBN distraction.
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