I am an elementary school English teacher in a town called Okegawa in Japan. My students are pretty interesting people and they always have a lot to say about things. Some people might say my methods are "unorthodox", but I do not think so. I try not to think too much in general.
January 11th
Today I taught my fourth graders how to jump over sweep kicks. This is not directly related to learning the English language but it's still very important, because what if they were to get sweep kicked and they didn't jump in time and they fell? What if they hit their heads and could no longer speak or read? Then what good would all that English language education be? I'm sure you can see where I'm coming from.
I really think they should be learning these things at home but clearly they are not. They are terrible at it. So even if their parents leave them unprepared for sweep kicks, I will not. I will make sure they are ready. Ready to jump. I guess I just love too much. My therapist says that's my problem. He says my biggest problems are 1) loving too much and 2) excessive martial arts skills. I guess that's just my cross to bear.
January 16th
"So your real first name is Christopher, but everyone calls you Chris?"
"Yes. It's a shorter version. My parents call me Chris, too."
"Christopher is too hard to remember."
"I guess it's a little hard to remember."
"You should just go by 'Foreigner'. It will be easier for everyone."
"That's the name of a famous band. You should Google it."
"What's a Google?"
January 18th
Ayano asks me: "What did you eat for breakfast this morning?"
"Eggs," I tell her, which is true.
"Chicken eggs?" she asks.
"No, penguin eggs."
"Penguins?!"
"Yes, I have two penguins."
"Do they live in your apartment?"
"Yes, in the bathtub. I refill it with fresh ice each day. I feed them fresh fish. You have to, or they'll get sick."
"Isn't that expensive?"
"Yes, it is. So what I do is I let people play with the penguins and charge 100 yen for it. Then I use that money to buy the fish."
"So you're breaking even then?"
"Just barely."
Ayano was howling with laughter at this so I figured she knew I was kidding, but then after school she knocked on my door with a few other kids and they asked if they could come in and see the penguins.
January 21st
I am pretty strong compared to a 4th grader. I lift up one of their little desks with one hand and they gasp and then cheer. They ask me if I am the strongest man in the world, and I tell them yes, it is me, I am the strongest. So then we begin the process of lifting things. First it is desks, then bigger desks. Then cabinets. Children next, from smallest to biggest. At pianos I start to struggle but I am careful not to make a face like I'm struggling. That would break the illusion. I am not at all muscular.
Recently on a date a girl asked me to flex my bicep for her, and I did it and she couldn't tell that I'd done it and she laughed. Then she flexed, and I must say she had pretty killer guns. My muscles are dwarfed by the muscles of 90-pound Japanese girls. But when the 4th graders ask me to flex, they gasp in unison and talk about how it's true, they have visual confirmation now, I am in fact the strongest man in the world.
Sometimes they tell the school nurse about how I'm good at lifting things, and then she asks me to come in and help her change a light bulb that is hard to reach but not for me, because I'm also tall. Being tall and also the strongest man in the world makes me very useful for a variety of everyday chores, like changing light bulbs, hanging posters in hard to reach places, and moving cabinets. The school nurse is absolutely beautiful. If I were not as poor as I am I would buy her a very nice beach house with hundreds of light fixtures, but put very cheap light bulbs in all of them so that they were always burning out. She would have to call me over all the time to change them. That way I would never outlive my usefulness.
February 5th
Today we couldn't go outside due to the rain. Each classroom has a keyboard in it, so we dragged them out into the hallway, put them in a circle, and had a techno dance party with looped beats and stupid sound effects. I flashed the lights on and off for a strobe effect but one kid said "we are not allowed to do that, you'll get in trouble." And I said it's cool, I'm a teacher. And he said "at what school?" So I said "this school." And he said "what do you teach?" and I said "English. You have my class." And he said "Oh, I thought you just did that for fun."
February 8th
Sometimes, maybe once a month, I visit the special education class and do English language activities with them. They are the best. They get so pumped up and it's hard to keep them in their chairs, they're so excited. Today a kid ran up to me during class and charged up like he was going to hit me with a kamehameha energy blast from Dragonball. I was going to fall back and feign being blasted even though actually that kid's combat rating is way way lower than mine. But, at the last second, he changed techniques and kicked me in the groin. His mother apologized to me after school but I told her it's cool, it's my own fault for letting my combat skills slip and not training hard enough in preparation for this battle. I asked her if she thought I'd lost my edge, but she said she wouldn't know and to please take care of myself.
February 15th
At recess, over the loudspeakers, they play a music box playing "Let It Be" sometimes and honestly I almost did not include this in this reflection. I said to myself, how profound, another anecdote that appeals to the reader's potential connection to The Beatles. But give me this one. It is perfect. It is so perfect and so pleasant that occasionally I just about lose it.
February 18th
Today we got a big character suit delivered to the school. It's the town's character, Oke-chan, this big yellow furry guy who carries a sign that says "Okegawa" on it. He is pretty cute in a generic kind of way, and the kids have taken to trying to draw him from time to time.
Oke-chan's head is about three feet in diameter and weighs something like 50 pounds. If one were to wear the Oke-chan costume (including the head), in which one's vision would be largely obscured, and if one were then to trip on something, or be pushed (like say, by a seven year old child), or be hit with a stiff breeze, the chances of serious neck injury are pretty high. Most of the people who have tried can't even stand up with the head on.
The school board paid a positively outrageous amount of money to have the Oke-chan suit made to our specifications but now that it's here nobody can actually use it, so it's under a tarp in a maintenance room.
February 23rd
I mentioned a boy in the special ed class who likes to hit me with pretend energy blasts before. Today he did it again in the hallway and so I fell back against the wall when struck by the invisible energy blast and cried out that he was just too powerful. His homeroom teacher saw this and requested that I stop pretending to be hit, as he has now grown so confident in his powers that he is doing this to strangers in public places.
February 26th
The kids have to be at school around 8:00, but class doesn't start until 8:30ish, so they get a sort of warm-up recess before school. We always blast music from the PA system while this is happening. Often times, we play the Back to the Future Soundtrack. When I'm running late to school and the music is already playing, I like to ride my bike faster and pretend it's a Delorian and I am circumventing being late by going back in time to the night before and telling myself that I do not need to watch game shows until 2:00 AM on a school night because it is just not worth the trouble.
March 3rd
Today the third graders learned how to play American football, sort of. We played on the soccer field and the soccer goals were the end zones. At first there were a lot of incidents with children throwing the balls into the nets and shouting "GOAL" but we got past that. They run everything out of a shotgun formation and there are about fifteen passes per play in various directions. Usually every other play is a Hail Mary and the receiver drops the ball, then picks it up and keeps running and we just let this slide because, come on, it's pretty cute. Anyways, I guess that part is mostly my fault. I base most of my football knowledge on John Madden Football '95 for the Super Nintendo so I have told them that the best way to win is to run a Hail Mary each play and to spin around a lot when other people get close. They asked me why it was called a "Hail Mary" and I told them a little about Catholicism but when they asked me what that has to do with football I had to admit that I really don't know. When I said that lots of NFL players cross themselves in the end zone and give props to God one of them said "that sounds stupid, they should be thanking the guys who blocked for them" and I had to admit that that was also a pretty good point.
March 28th
Lately a lot of new kids have been showing up at school. Since it's the end of the school year anyways they are not joining classes, but they eat lunch with us and play outside on the playground. I swing with them on the monkey bars and play freeze tag and we don't talk about why they're here. Sometimes some of them will suddenly burst into tears and sit under a tree and stay there for a long time. The other kids will always fill me in. "His mom died last week," they'll say. So of course they're sad. They are here because they have nowhere else to be, staying with relatives or family friends. They are earthquake and tsunami refugees, the lot of them, escaped a bit south down here where we were less touched by all of it.
When something a little kid doesn't like happens, they often complain about how it's unfair. Especially if it's something dumb, like not letting them go to recess early on pretty days. "We have to do this quiz first," I'll tell them, and they'll groan and say it's unfair. I tell them sometimes life is unfair and you just gotta do what you gotta do. This week I keep seeing these tsunami kids and thinking a lot about fairness. Yesterday a woman accepted her children's graduation certificates on behalf of her two missing daughters. I tremble when I think of how unfair that is, but I carry on. The kids do the same thing. They cry for a bit, then they dust themselves off and run back on to the dodgeball court. At least we've got our health. I am not a particularly nice man; I am sort of vile in the way a lot of us secretly are, but I love these children and seeing things like this feels like being struck by something very heavy and very dull.