Students of Oyama

Today's entry is dedicated to those who showed up to class today. I don't know if there was a celebration that I didn't know about or what but only about half of my students came today. Maybe they finally found out that I'm slowly trying to take over Japan, one language school at a time. haha anyways. I will tell you about two students.

The first, imagine a thin elderly lady (thin is actually a nice word to describe her, she is more like a twig) with short grey hair, stained teeth, large English vocabulary, but has no idea how to make a sentence. It's like listening to a puzzle, she speaks and I put together the pieces. Well on with the story... Today in class we talked about heroes and all the different kinds of heroes there are. So she told me what she thought a hero was and then she proceeded to tell me about the most significant hero in her life. This hero is her Jr. High teacher (I guess it would be similiar to a homeroom teacher in America) and she described how this teacher touched her life. So in Yoko's (fake name but I don't want to get fired) first year of Jr. High she absolutely loved school, every moment of it from recess to doing her homework. Then when she entered her second year something about her had changed, and she started to be disruptive in class, quit doing her homework, and blew off her friends. (Keep in mind that I'm translating her English for you, and that this story is partly my creation, well not my creation so much, but just pretty much all the I could understand) After a while the teacher started to become concerned about Yoko's behavior and told her to stay after class one day. Class ended, all the other students left to go home or wherever they go, and Yoko stayed. The teacher then expressed her concern to Yoko and she wondered why there was this sudden change in behavior. Yoko had no answer, so she began to cry and cry and cry. The teacher was patient and attempted to comfort her. And I guess from then on she was back on the straight and narrow. Strange hero to me but I guess my definition is a little different.

Let me tell you a little about this student. I think she is in her mid to late 60's and she knows nothing expect for how to be a house wife. The only people she currently knows are her husband, close relatives, and the people at my school. And man does this lady LOVE to talk. She could talk for hours if you give her the chance, but no body would have any idea of what she's talking about.
After the story about her teacher she told me another story about when she was moving into a new house and some men tried to pull a scam on her and her husband. Supposivly, the men came to the door (while they were moving in) and asked them if their house smelled funny. The men explained that the dehumidifier or air conditioning (I'm not quite sure what it was but anyways) was broken and that they happened to have one in their truck that they would gladly install for about 50 bucks. To make a long story short she didn't believe them and she thought something fishy was going on so she called the company to come take a look at it, and it appeared that the men had cut off the power supply to the piece of equipment. Rumour has it that these men had been doing this all around town. The funny thing about this story is that, Yoko considers the employee that came out to take a look at the equipment, a hero. Well, maybe it's not quite funny in a humours way but interesting that she would think that.

Alright for the second student, and I find this guy very interesting. His name is "Onizuka." Onizuka is in a class of 4 and he never really has the courage to speak up in class. And because the other 3 students were absent today he finally got his chance, and wow I couldn't get him to shutup. So first let me give a quick background. He is a 50 year-old school principle with three kids and he told me that he hates his boss. haha. I find Onizuka interesting because he told me today that he wants to open his students' eyes to the world and show them all the wonderful and terrible things that are going on but due to government regulation he is prohibited from teaching anything that is not approved by the central eduation authority. We talked about WWII and how he thinks that America made the right decision by dropping the bomb, actually bombs, because he felt that it saved Japanese lives. He believes that if there had been a main land (actually it's more like main island envasion) envasion of Japan that many Japanese people would feel defeated and would have commited suicide. And for that reason alone, America was in the right.

Side story: He told me that his mom had worked in a factory in WWII making airplanes, and that when her factory heard the news about Okinawa, that out of fear of being raped, all the women cut their hair really short. I guess the only distingishing difference between Japanese men and women is their hair. Haha just kidding. But, I thought that was interesting.

Well, this concludes today's lesson on how my job is too easy and I get paid too much to listen to old people talk.