As you may have noticed, I post here infrequently. That’s because I’ve decided I want to talk to you only when I’m cheerful. I don’t want you to see the panorama of my life. You don’t need stuff about overwork, underpayment, being dumped, being bitterly homesick in a strange town, having no idea where I’ll be living next month, yadda yadda yadda. I want to do my best to entertain you, so from this moment onward (or until I decide otherwise) I will write only effervescently.
Remember when Toto tore the curtain away from the Wizard of Oz? I almost did that today. I was talking with one of my students, having quite an interesting conversation. Her comprehension and speaking are pretty good. But something was bugging me. The problem was that I don’t like talking to someone I can’t see. She’s Saudi and wears a traditional veil, so the only thing I can see is her beautiful eyes (with two-foot-long eyelashes, even). I had a terrible urge to rip away the veil. Is that really a nose under there? Are you wearing lipstick? Do you even have lips? Are they like those of a guinea pig?
And I couldn’t help but wonder: if one doesn’t have beautiful eyes with long lashes, what does one do? Hide everything except the part you don’t mind people seeing? I’ve often wanted to disappear under a veil and robe. If I could show just one thing, what would it be? The web between my second and third fingers on my left hand?
In my US Society & Culture class, I decided to teach a lesson on baseball. Most of my students are Japanese, so I figured the topic would be a — you know — home run: easy to engage people in something they love. Strangely, they claimed no knowledge of the sport. Nothing I did or said helped: a sea of blank faces, with a dab of sleeping.
The next day I wanted to abandon the topic like a rat leaving a ship, but I’m supposed to be a teacher and not a rat, so I had to stay on board. First I found a video of Harry Caray singing Take Me Out to the Ballgame. “Do you want to learn an American song?” I asked. “No,” they chimed in unison. I made them do it anyway. It is not in my nature to tell people what to do, particularly when they’ve said they don’t want to, unless you’re my child and I’m asking you to clean your room.
You know what? By the end of the song, half of them were laughing. I’m sure it had nothing to do with a middle-aged American waving her arms about and screeching at the top of her lungs [actually, the bottom of the lungs, since the register was too low] … and it’s ONE, TWO, THREE strikes you’re out! I’d brought peanuts and Cracker Jack for verisimilitude. They’d never had either, and liked them.
You know how we count “one, two, three” on our fingers in the U.S., right? Oh, come on. You do too. One is the index finger, add the middle for two, and so on. In Japan it’s different. One is the index finger, just like us. But two is the index and little fingers.
I love that kind of stuff.
I still had half an hour to kill. Play ball! I gave them each a slip of paper inscribed with a baseball position (in English) and told them to go to their places. I expected chaos. After all, they’d said they know nothing about baseball and were uninterested. To my amazement, off they ran to their proper spots, one even correcting me on where the shortstop should be. The pitcher threw my stuffed squirrel that G2 gave me, and the hitter used an extended arm for a bat. The classroom is so small that runners had to go only four feet to the next base. The umpire made calls. The crowd cheered. The popcorn vendors held up a popcorn bag. The teacher in the next classroom probably wanted to shoot me.
Where is the language-learning in all this you might ask? Do I have to answer? Actually, I pretended that our focus was future and simple past tenses, but that’s a bit of a stretch.
I may suck as a language teacher, but at least I try to have fun.
In Japan they don’t have a traditional baseball song like we do, but they have songs for particular players. I convinced Naoto to sing me the song about Nishioka:
[Still techie difficulties: you have to hit play, then pause, then play again, to see this video.]
[flashvideo filename=wp-content/video/nishioka.flv image=wp-content/video/nishioka.jpg /]
Maybe I shouldn’t say this: Molly convinced me to look at OkCupid, a free online dating site. Before the concept was invented, I vowed never to do it — not for any judgmental or moral reason. I think it’s a fine idea. But for me, it’s like I used to think about antidepressants: if we can’t figure it out for ourselves, without intervention, then — well — shame on us.
With OkCupid you start answering a lot of generic questions: what would you think if your significant other did x? I was tired of lesson planning for the evening, so I opened an account and starting answering questions. With further encouragement from Molly and G2, I filled in a few profile questions. I got a “wink” from someone whose profile said, I’m a big man, and in the right places, if you know what I mean. One man wrote something about that I seemed hesitant and maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. Jeez: busted on a dating site. How pathetic is that. Within seconds I no longer existed on OkCupid; I deleted myself. Soon after, I got a plaintive e-mail from someone: Where did you go? It was Molly who wrote that.