I post today with the proud news that Megumi is not a crazy, and in fact, when I told her about some of the behavior of the religious right and increasingly popular Christian beliefs in America, her response was, "I cannot believe that". I came upon this discovery when, in a moment of sheer "I'm pooped" I slipped and found myself explaining my personal spiritual beliefs and admitting I do not believe we came from Adam, that the Bible is truth, or in the existence of any afterlife. Her reaction? She was a bit shocked to hear I believed in evolution but said she was glad to hear my opinions and had no intention of forcing her beliefs on me. When I told her this was not as natural a reaction as she thought it was, she was very surprised.
And of course her family feeds me handsomely and I enjoy singing with her, even if she knows a billion more old American folk songs than I do. They really are just lovely people, and though when I initially jumped into this relationship with her it was with great anxiety and almost as much to avoid souring our work relationship as out of fairness to her as a person who had not wronged me, now I am pleased and excited to see how our friendship will develop. Her passion for music is incredible. She's going to teach me how to make a CD of music box music using a cell phone. Wonders never cease.
Today I've been studying education. Joined a facebook group for other English teachers in Japan and looking forward to that support.
Yesterday at Usuchuu was pretty good- the kids who like me in first year seem to like me even more (especially that way quiet girl who I was sure would never talk to me... Now, not only does she greet me with a smile, but will talk casually with me and seem pleased about it. That's awesome), the third years are still being tortured with memorization practice that kills a part of me inside every time I'm in the room with it (The star English speaker of the class had the worst time of the dash to memorize and recite three new pages of unexamined English in twenty minutes, foolishly trying to understand what she was saying or, god forbid, speak the language instead of aping noises- one would think this might tip off the teachers that something about the lesson is wrong), and the second years were so completely unmotivated they could blow away on a strong breeze.
I couldn't do anything for the third years but try to memorize the passage myself, crouching down to recite it with them where they'd let me, and telling said star speaker that it was ok if she didn't learn the meaning during this span of time, just to learn the sounds. She was pretty upset by this but the best consolation I could give her was that this memorization stuff wasn't important. My new experiment of the day came in the form of talking to the two worst second year boys- the first who wouldn't even look at me until I started wiggling my fingers in front of his face and generally being a pest, who wouldn't talk to me until I asked him if I was gross (to which he jokingly agreed) and then threw out guesses as to why ("Do you dislike long hair?" "Oh, I hate long hair." "How about glasses?" "Totally hate glasses." "Ah, I must be pretty awful then." "If you are or not... [implied- I don't know]"), asked him for his name (which he denied me and I accepted it as a secret), tried talking to him about video games, which he denied playing, and then went to try a similar tactic on the other boy. His response was to completely curl up with his head in his arms as he claimed to hate everything, and I pushed a little bit more, but didn't want to stress the kids out so much as incite a little interaction, so I backed off. They made fun of me some more with each other, but now I've got a strategy and poked a tiny hole, so we'll go from here and try not to make any big mistakes that might cause damage. This was before my asshattery but I was surprised during class when they were being awfully disruptive and actually listened to me and quieted a while when I raised a finger to my lips and said, "Be quiet. クラスメートは勉強しようとしているから、be quiet." When the main teacher says anything she's mocked and the chaos continues. So that they quieted tells me that order does exist in the wild, it's just the inneffectual efforts of this one educator they refuse to tolerate.
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