out of the frying pan

once in a while, i am called upon to actually do more than just pronounce a few words. this past week is an example. you see, while i have enjoyed assisting the english teachers here in yokogawa, i have recently begun to become, well, bored. no offense intended towards any of the remarkably talented individuals with whom i have had the distinct pleasure of sharing the podium...but i was having trouble keeping my eyes open in class, to tell the truth. my third cycle through a pretty dry textbook was beginning and i was starting to feel the heavy drag of another hot, humid japanese summer. along with that, my partner in crime, kayo yamanouchi sensei, had recently been blessed with the lodging of not one but two tiny humans deep within her belly. fittingly, she moved back to her home town in order to prepare for the pregnancy and i was presented with a new teacher, mr. homan, with whom i thought i would be ending my term here. mr. homan had retired from teaching a few years ago but was brought here to fill in as an emergency teacher while the board of education figured out what to do. he had been hoping that they would ask him to stay on until the end of the year, but, chotto sadly, they rather abruptly decided to let him get back to his retirement. that was last week. one day we were talking about how i don't speak like an english chap and the next day we were saying "sayonara". so it goes.

to make a long story short, i had been expecting to come in to work on tuesday to meet a new teacher, work with her for my final 5 weeks, and then move on to bigger and better things. however, i went to the office on monday for my "lesson-planning" time (i mostly just drink coffee and read time magazine and grit my teeth) and my supervisor told me that there was some kind of vague "unfortunate circumstances" and that the new teacher wouldn't be coming for some indefinite period of time - could be a few days, could be a few weeks. all of a sudden, i went from being a bored, semi-conscious human "repeat-after-me" machine to a full blown but poorly trained teacher. no lesson plans, just a text book and some flash cards with words like "useful" and "common" and "hamburger" (which i tried to change to "veggieburger" but the kids didn't get it) was all that stood between me and a room of 41 seventh graders. my mission, should i have chosen to accept it, was to make them learn the plural forms of nouns, the infinitive and present perfect forms of verbs, and the correct pronounciation of it all whilst sweating profusely in the 85 degree, 90% humidity of the mid-june rainy season.

so needless to say, i have been a bit busier than usual.

but nevertheless, i guess i ended up making this short story long...