Next April will mark the first graduation where I will have known the students from the time they nervously and excitedly crossed the threshold of the school for the first time until they tearfully and optimistically cross it for the last time. And, man oh man, am I going to be a wreck come that [...]
After my dismal defeat two years ago, last year I tried another strategy. If I couldn’t get them to change the playlist on the strength of the songs I was suggesting, I thought maybe if I could somehow defame the songs or the artists that sang them then maybe they’d be a little more open to my recommendations. So, [...]
I work at two Junior High Schools, alternating every two weeks. And since each school has 3 grades and ideally 1 Japanese English teacher per grade, I work with no less than 4 and no more than 6 Japanese English teachers each year. Some years (like this one) one of my school’s incoming first year [...]
Saturday I was sitting with my student in the outdoor cafe of a Starbucks in Tokyo. It was a beautiful day…perhaps the last warm day of the year. We’ve been meeting every Saturday for over 3 years now so it’s less a teacher-student relationship than a friendship. I usually don’t do much on Saturday afternoons, and he’s pretty [...]
Life here in Japan has slowly but surely re-wired my sensibilities as well as my expectations of people; in particular, kids. So that now, what wouldn’t have even been picked up on my radar a few years ago, sets off all kinds of bells and whistles: people dropping trash in the street, talking loud or talking [...]
From our first meeting on, this had become our routine: I’d come to the class a little early and catch him rattling windows with his vociferous screeching and menacing other students…upon seeing me, he’d stop whatever he was doing, holler, “LOCO-SENSEI!” and run-jump into my arms, all hugs and an irresistible quality. Having routines with [...]
A little about Matsui-kun. I remember the first time I met him. I came to the class prepared to do my usual introduction lesson, where I talk about myself, in the simplest English possible, while showing pictures of my family back home in the US. In most cases this is the first interaction with a [...]
My eye caught the hand movement and spotted the projectile as soon as it left its source: Matsui-kun (not his real name). Takahashi-sensei (not her real name), the other half of my teaching team, was writing something on the board, her back to the class. She didn’t know she was a target. She probably couldn’t imagine being [...]
Fade in: Sunny morning, Brownstone and tree-lined street in Bedford Stuyvesant Brooklyn NY. On the corner, a group of 6, sharply dressed men and women are congregated. They are JEHOVAH’S WITNESSES. They huddle momentarily then split into two teams of three. One group crosses the street and, parallel to one another, both groups proceed up the block. At [...]
As I laced up my boots preparing to leave my house, I realized that the noise that had awakened me an hour earlier than my alarm and the sound I’d been trying to ignore all morning was the patter heavy rain makes on galvanized metal, like the kind on my neighbor’s porch roof. I turned to my right, in the vestibule, and [...]
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Raw Like Sushi