Recap: January

Back from my visit home, I jumped right back into lessons. My first lesson back was a continuation of a restaurant unit. Having already taught the students vocabulary and dialogue related to a fast food joint, I decided to take on the topic of a full restaurant. There are a couple of key differences between most restaurants in Japan and most restaurants in America. First, in Japan, you almost always get up and pay at a register, while back home you usually pay at the table. Second, tipping a waiter simply does not happen in most of Japan. If it does, I've never heard of it, and I can only imagine it happening in big city restaurants that are accustomed to foreign patrons. These two tidbits added a nice element of cross-cultural education to the lesson.

Preparing for this lesson made me realize that probably 90% of the stress I feel at school is self-inflicted. I could have very easily drawn up a dialogue and some vocabulary, and maybe even tossed together a plain menu for an activity. However, I wanted to see how much better it would be if I made the experience as realistic as possible, under the circumstances. To that end, I created a handout with vocabulary and dialogue, a full-color menu with seventeen items (including main dishes, side dishes, drinks, and desserts), and an accompanying guest check. With a lot of help from the teachers, I made eight color copies of the menu, laminated them, and folded them to make them book-style menus.

The dialogue covered checking in with a hostess, ordering with a waiter, the delivery of the food, asking for the check, and paying at the table. I got kind of worried that this would overload the students, but, surprisingly, the teachers gave me the green light. For the vocabulary, I made sure to include the terms "main dish," "side dish," and "dessert," and grouped the corresponding foods under those headings to try and get it across to the students. (I did this because, for the fast food dialogue, my requiring them to order three different things--failing to specify any further--led several to order "a hamburger, a cheeseburger, and a chicken sandwich" or "french fries, onion rings, and apple juice.") One of the teachers suggested including steak on the menu, which I had thought of, but had shied away for fear of opening the can of worms that is steak temperatures. She was positive the students could handle it, so I went ahead with it.

The new food and drinks gave them almost no trouble, since most non-Japanese foods take their names from English, French, or Dutch, and so sound similar in Japanese. Grilled chicken took a little bit of explaining, as did baked potato, but that led to an impromptu and largely successful mini-lesson on "grilled" and "baked." Steak itself was easy, but rare-medium-well done by themselves produced blank stares. When I grouped them together on the board under "steak," the bright kids in class made the connection, and everyone else caught on quickly. Terms more on the technical side--like "order" and "check"--gave them a little trouble, but I got the point across with some careful charades and demonstration, plus the occasional bail-out from the teacher.

The dialogue was an adventure, but with a demonstration from the teacher and me at the beginning, we largely prevailed. "You can pay here whenever you're ready"--vitally important to learn, but unexpectedly difficult for the students to understand, given the cultural difference--was only solved by students who took the sentence one word at a time. Instead of having the dialogue deal with menu prices and making change (something we covered in the fast food lesson), which would have added another 5-7 lines to the dialogue, I opted instead to teach the students "I don't need any change." It certainly cut down on the length of the dialogue, and the face-value meaning was clear to the students. The subtler, keep-the-change meaning eluded most, however. I had to give another mini-lesson on tipping, which included the part about American servers not being paid full minimum wage, and that you should therefore always leave a tip. I'd like to think I'm helping combat the stereotype that foreigners don't know how to tip, one class of rural Japanese students at a time.

During the next class period, I had the students give performances of the dialogue in groups of four or five. One student in each group would be the server, and the others would be customers. This is where the props came in handy. As an afterthought, I gave each group a different denomination of dollars that I'd brought back with me. I gave one group ten ones, another two fives, then two tens, and a twenty. I even let one group in each class use a hundred dollar bill, something I know would be just stupid back home. Of course none of the students kept the money, though a few jokingly made a big show of folding it and putting it in their pocket. I encouraged the groups to perform the dialogue off-book, and to my delight, most of them did. Everyone was simply thrilled at the props, especially the money.

The performances were... endearing. Several groups did very well, but there were many mistakes, especially things I hadn't thought to tell them about. The most common had to do with ordering. The dialogue gave an example of one customer and the waiter, so each of the waiter's questions--order, steak temperature, drink, dessert--was answered. I broke the students into three- and four-customer groups without thinking anything of it, and lo and behold, the waiter in many groups performed the full ordering dialogue with each student individually. Because they didn't know it was wrong, of course I didn't make a big show of correcting them, but I did mention it at the end of each class, without specifying which groups did it. All in all, though, they enjoyed the activity.

Emboldened by their fascination with the currency, I asked some of the higher-level classes if they knew who was on the one, and every single student replied "Washington" without hesitating. The five produced mostly silence, but when I mentioned Lincoln, several students brightened up. A few began quoting something in Japanese, and all I could pick up was the repetition of a word that sounded like "people." Sure enough, they were quoting the last part of the Gettysburg Address--"government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." I love these kids.

Outside of school, January was pretty fun. I spent a weekend hanging out with the guys in the middle of the island, just staying inside and playing Guitar Hero. Another weekend, I had everyone over at my place for a poker night. We also had a get-together in the middle of the island with some teachers and local folks who have an English conversation group. Of course, anytime there are Japanese in the mix, the night eventually leads to karaoke. The next weekend, we went up to the north part of the island to hang out with everyone. I stayed up until 2 or 3 in the morning playing Monopoly with Evelyn.