Welcome to March everybody. The infamous month in a JET participants life when nothing ever happens.

Seriously, I feel like my life is like a television set stuck on a repeat of "Leave it to Beaver." Everything I do I've done before, and all of it is a little bit lukewarm.

Every weekday:

Wake up in a freezing room? Check.
Do absolutely nothing at work? Check.
Drink entirely too much coffee? Check.
Walk home in the rain? Check.
Eat an inordinate amount of carbohydrates for dinner? Check.
Take a 45 minute shower? Check.
Pass out reading with my neck at an awkward angle? Check.
Can't ever read the goddamn mail? Check.

Every weekend:

Come home from work on Friday planning not to go out and thereby not spend hundreds of dollars? Check.
End up going out and spending hundreds of dollars? Check.
Kill my liver and kidneys? Check.
Wake up on Saturday morning on someones floor, cold and a tiny bit angry? Check.
Promise yourself not to go out on Saturday night? Check.
Go out on Saturday night until 8am, totally unnecissarily? Check.
Wake up Sunday in your own bed a tad more angry and twice as broke? Check.
Go to a five hour play practice for which you have five whole lines (One for every hour)? Check.
Decide to pass the time in between your five whole lines drinking one beer with Geoff that then turns into six or seven? Check.
Wake up on monday morning for work with a lingering hangover? Check.


March is so tame that everybody leaves. Literally, the entire JET population will be leaving for a full fourth of it, not only because it's easy to pull for days off in March, but also because I think a lot of people are totally burned out. I, for one, could use a change of scenery.


Staying out until 7am is a lot less cool than you may think. The last train is at 10:50, the first is at 6am, and somewhere in between senior year of college and now I started hating sleeping on people's floors. It's pretty much a matter of simple mechanics. It's not like I'm doing something mind-blowingly awesome that makes me forget the time completely and I look up and go "Holy Hell! It's 7am!

7am is all to rarely something that "sneaks up on you." Its usually more something that you have to fight dearly for. My quality of life would improve drastically if the JR rail system offered even one all-stops-included train between the hours of 11pm and 6am. I suggest at 3am. 3am is around the time I look at myself in a bathroom mirror and go, "what the hell am I doing?" I would prefer to have this onset of soul searching whilst passed out in my bed, so I don't have to think about it and can instead go back to trying to fly.

I have had a few fun times staying out that late, true, but I can tell you right now that nothing happened after 3am that hadn't already happened before it. If by 3am you have not at least started to do whatever you wanted to do, it ain't happening. It's like that one saying I just made up right now: You rarely need that last hour of the night.

And yet anything worth doing always happens after 11pm. Thus we have a real problem on our hands, a problem I spend a lot of time thinking about. In March. Because I am so very, very bored.

Incidentally, my statcounter has tracked a large number of hits on this site back to the Toyama Prefectural General Education Center, which, if I'm not mistaken, is where the Toyama JET top brass reside, so a hearty hello to Corporate! I hope you enjoy my lighthearted jokes about not working, beating my students, and binge-drinking! What a joker I am, right? heh heh.

A lot of people ask me if I'm afraid of what might happen if teachers or administration were ever to read my blog. I tell them that what I say needs to be said. The Japanese education system is severely lacking, my JTE's are the first to say so. There is a reason that performance levels of the Japanese are dropping well behind those of kids at similar educational levels in China and South Korea, and why Japan is losing some of its quality professors to the Universities in those countries; it's because the Japanese education system is dangerously flawed. You simply cannot pass everybody through indiscriminately. There are going to be consequences. It is not enough just to get in. In fact, experts say that in 20 years the whole country of Japan is going to explode! People need to know these things!

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I love the people I work with, and I love the students that put any effort into anything whatsoever. I'm not the greatest teacher, but if the JET program wanted good teachers they would have asked for more hours of teaching experience logged. Let me open my handbook here to find the current number required...

ah, here it is: None.

The portion of kids that harmlessly sleep, while worthless, are not a real problem for me.

The portion that I write about on this thing are the ones that actively work against my attempts to teach them and that beat on retarded kids. And them? Well, we all know what I think about them.