First, a few stats for all of you.

I just spent 16 hours over the past 2 days in a seminar.

Yesterday was the First sunny day out of a string of 15 straight days where the Japanese weather service recorded a significant amount of rainfall in my area during daylight hours. Once again, that ratio stands at 1:15. Today, of course, it has been pouring for the past 16 straight hours.

I just recieved a school lunch bill for 19,000 yen. Once again, that is a bill for 190 dollars for mediocre lunches. I have been given exactly 1 day to pay this.

In the past 9 days I have bowled 12 different games at Toyama Golden Bowl. Of these 12 games my high score was a mediocre 153. Shameful.

In between classes, since I can't really talk to anyone, I often read. To date, in Toyama, Japan, I have read, either at work or at home, a total of 25 novels, encompassing 7,383 individual pages.

I still have 1 lingering bruise from a nasty hit I took on the side of my head during a kendo practice that was 23 days ago.

I have been asked to make the entire midterm exam for 80% of the classes in which I teach. I have done this gladly because I think 1 more iota of workload would flat-out kill my supervisor.


First, a word on the seminar. It was boring, for sure, but some of it was actually insightful, if not into the world of teaching, then at least into the minds of other JET's. For instance, in the Life After JET lecture, I learned that absolutely nobody (at least in my section) had a concrete plan for their lives post-JET. Very, very few people had even a vague notion of what to do. I am now of the opinion that practically every single JET that I know is running away from something (family, debt, relationship, career, school, etc. etc.) and is perfectly content to do so until the day that they die. Can't renew your contract here? Sign one somewhere else, preferably very far away from home. Don't like teaching in Japan? Try Australia. Try Spain. Japan not wierd and foreign enough for you? Go to China. By all means, do not go home. Do not start a career, keep passing GO, keep collecting 200 dollars, never purchase any houses, just keep running, never stop for more than three years, for the love of GOD do not settle down!

Some ideas I heard for post JET life in the seminar:

1. Foreign Service
2. Peace Corp (2 year commitment)
3. Peace Boat (go around on some hippy commune boat teaching people how to speak English for a year)
4. Roadtrip Australia
5. Roadtrip Japan
6. Roadtrip Europe
7. Work at a ski resort

All of which offer completely stable lives, secure in the long term. (cough)

But then, I guess the idea is that we don't need no stinkin' stable life, right? We're the carefree youth of the world! Just try to tie us down suckers! We will run with the wildabeasts in Africa! We will swim with the dolphins of the sea! We will treaty with backwoods tribes in the Appalachians and the Amazon! We will learn the secrets of the ancient forest peoples of Inner Mongolia! We will one day look around ourselves at 35 years old and go "Oh, Shit!"

Further evidence of this "flight or flight" instinct amongst JET's was the abhorrence many of them had when the final speaker of the conference, in her speech, mentioned that she thought women should get married around 30. You should have heard the barely supressed outcry of femenine voices in that auditorium. Thirty? Are you kidding me? I'll be climbing K2 at thirty! I can't get married! When asked why the speaker thought this, she simply said "It's a matter of the woman's biological clock," meaning that thirty is the best age for women to have children. After this age it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive and bear a healthy child. This is a medical fact, of course, but I got the feeling that it didn't really fly with many of the JETs. "The greatest job a woman can ever have is that of a mother," the speaker said. I don't think this went over well either. If she had said "the greatest job a woman can ever have is that of a deadly ninja assassin, right alongside her current partner," she might have been better recieved. Alas.

Moving on, you read the above statistic correctly, I have indeed been spending a significant portion of my time creating tests for the vast majority of the classes in which I teach. This is a pain in the ass, for sure, but far be it from me not to find the silver lining of the cloud. You see, making the tests affords me certain opportunities: I have chosen what to cover and what not to cover, I have chosen how to ask the questions, I have chosen material that is actually important, material that the students need to know, etc. etc. etc. However, far and away the single greatest opportunity writing these tests has afforded me is this: I have specifically engineered each test so that the students I do not like will fail it.

Now before you get all huffy, you should know that the students I do not like are the bad students. In all likelihood these kids would have failed it anyway, I simply came along and have guaranteed this. Trust me, these people need to fail. They need to repeat the grade. They have serious academic issues that they need to seek help for. And who are you to tell me that I can't play favorites? You wanna sit there and tell me that there aren't students that you like more than others? Sure there are. I give everybody a fair shake, but at Koho, about 1/4 of the kids chose to walk away. Fine by me. Repeat the grade, suckers.

Sure maybe 3 students in 1o will ever go on to college. Sure most of these kids have a lifetime of factory jobs to look forward to, in which they will never use a foreign language. Sure many of them can't even speak Japanese that well, much less English, but if you care enough to show up, try to learn. Otherwise, don't even bother. Become like poor Kazu, a very bright 15 year old student in my 1B class that mysteriously dropped out of school the other week:

"Where is Kazu?" I asked.

"He quit school," Obata replied.

"You mean he transferred somewhere else?"

"No. He's done. He's going to try to get a job. I think he can!" Obata said, enthusiastically.

Sure he can, he's a bright kid. I guess we'll never know what he could have done, though. We threw his nametag out today.