Phallic Fixation

I can't think of any other way to put this: the male students at one of my schools have a penis obsession. But not with their own...with others'.

These kids are down with O.P.P. and groin grabbing is a regular occurrence. Its like the equivalent of wedgies in the states. Except it's not done by bullies, it's done by friends to one another. And it doesn't appear to be sexual. It's just...done.

This has been my first conscious taste of culture shock. Sure, I've been surprised by things here and there, but nothing truly shocking. This, however, was electrifying. And that's even after living in San Francisco for a year and a half.

But I'm not one to judge. And I really wasn't paying it any mind at first. But in the last few weeks, some of them had been setting their phallic fixation on me.

On 2 separate occasions, students reached for my crotch. Thank God for my quick reflexes, because had they succeeded, I may have lost my job. And on 3 other occasions, students tried to ask me about my stature. One guy just kept saying "You. African American?" and throwing an exaggerated cack in a b-boy battle manner. And then another one brought out a ruler...

Anyway, its rare times like these that I'm glad some of my students don't speak English particularly well. Because the bits and pieces of their broken English were so dilapidated, I could easily act like I didn't know what they were asking me.

But I'm staying alert. Because if I do my job well, then they'll be asking me with grammatically correct sentences in no time.

Teaching English with Freestyle Fellowship

I had a lesson this week over the SVO sentence structure. That class is in the middle of learning different ways to construct sentences so I wanted to make it easy to remember this specific type. At some point, Freestyle Fellowship's "Hot Potato" popped into my head and an idea was born: use the words of Aceyalone, Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E. and Self Jupiter to teach it!

First, I gave some background on Hot Potato and taught them the hook from the song:

Hot potato, pass the potato (x4)

After they got the words down, I taught them tempo and tune by leading the class in chorus and metronomic claps. I couldn't get them dancing but I did get some enthusiastic claps and a few head bobs!

Next came some rounds of Hot Potato. I paired them up and gave each group a "potato" to pass back and forth while singing their newly learned song. And then I snuck in the grammar.

While demonstrating Hot Potato with the JTE, I visually broke down the sentences "I passed the potato", "I passed JTE-Sensei the potato" and "JTE-Sensei passed me the potato" into their SVO components. And before I could ask them to make their own sentences (relative to their groups), some already had! I checked for their understanding (e.g.,"What did you pass?") and found that many could create and understand SVO sentences. After a few more rounds with newly paired groups, most of the class could. Success!

I wonder if Freestyle Fellowship ever envisioned this?

First Day of School Recap

First Day of School:

6am - Woke up simultaneously by the town's bells and my own alarm. Looked outside and saw a beautiful day.

6:05 am - Remembered it was the first day of class. Got excited. Feeling good, feeling great.

7am - Got ready to go. Clean shaven and decked out.

8am - In the ride and driving to school.

8:25am - Parked at school. Feeling kind of anxious. Where'd that knot in my stomach come from?

8:30am - Sitting in a teacher's meeting not knowing a single thing being said. Feeling pretty dumb but it makes me think about how my students may feel when they don't understand me...

9:00am - An assembly is held in my honor. Wait, what? All the students and teachers congregate in the gym and I am formally introduced to the school. I give a speech in English to introduce myself. And the crowd goes wild like Hollyfield has just won the fight. Hey, maybe I shouldn't feel so nervous after all...

10:00am - First class. Most of my lessons this week will be class introductions so I just put on a smile and talk loud and slow. Confidence always pays. They looked half scared, half excited. I told them about myself, my family, my college and my hobbies. Then I taught them how to do the robot. They loved it! I felt half man, half amazing.

11:00am - rest of the day - I had 3 other classes today and please, believe the hype: I had heard that we'd feel like celebrities here but I didn't realize they'd seriously treat me like a superstar. The kids were so excited to see me. They'd run up to me in the halls and wave frantically from afar. I was apparently able to tame one of the loudest and most rambunctious classes just by being there. One girl asked to take a picture with me (I politely declined).

Afterschool - I walked around, talking to as many students as I could. I wanted to come across as friendly and non threatening as possible. I asked them about themselves and their club activities and joined in wherever I could: handball, volleyball (missed all my serves), band (played the snare), computer club (got served in a computer game) and so on. I sat in on a student council meeting and then told them about my high school back in the 90's.

This, I found, was a great approach. Students became even more receptive and liked that I was taking an interest in their hobbies and activities. I let them teach me Japanese to show that it's okay to not know a foreign language and that it's a learning process.

Just like high school in the states, students here are afraid of making mistakes, especially in front of their peers. So I wanted to start encouraging them early on. If I make them comfortable it'll be easier to teach them.

All in all, I gotta say it was a good day.