Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

My lessons have developed from stilted, forced affairs with conversations beginning and ending with unanswered questions like, “Did anyone do anything interesting this weekend?” into frenzied free-for-alls with instructions like, “OK, Miho, you are a reservation clerk, and Aki, you want to book a flight to Brazil, but Miho, you don’t have any tickets to Brazil. None! Sold out! So you have to suggest alternatives and come to an agreement. You have one minute! And…action!”

There have been good times. I’ve had my pet students who have made teaching both rewarding and hilarious. They usually tend toward the aged and slightly senile. I just relate to them the best. There’s 150-year-old widow Reiko, for example, with her cropped and slightly off-center wig, heavily powdered face, and crimson lipstick that gives new meaning to the term “coloring outside the lines.” She takes English classes because she wants to keep her mind sharp. Her favorite thing to say in English is “I’m very old,” which is always followed by a squinty giggle and appreciative laughter from anyone else in her basic-level class who had understood what she’d said. Once a week, she says, she goes to Ginza with her dog and has tea and cakes at an outdoor café. She has never invited me along, though I have longed for a washi paper invitation to arrive in my mailbox complete with calligraphied Japanese characters and a small watercolor of her and her Chihuahua. I could bring the doggie biscuits.

Then there is Fumiko, who is about sixty and roughly half my height, with fat little fingers and huge tombstone teeth, which she flashes constantly in a giant smile that takes up nearly half her face. She paints all of her clothes herself with swirling floral designs or wispy animal figures with huge eyes, and she goes to visit her dog’s grave every Wednesday. Though she’s been coming to Lane for years, her English remains horrific. She’s at an intermediate level, which she arrived at solely because the teachers felt bad that she’d taken all the lessons in the beginner level about five times each.

I knew I loved this woman the first day I taught her. I was teaching a lesson about expressing obligation-e.g., “I have to go to the store” or “I somehow have to come up with five grand for my dealer before midnight or he’s gonna kill my cat”-and we were doing a listen-and-repeat exercise in which I make a statement that the students then turn into a “why” question, in order to practice those treacherous interrogative forms.

Turning to Fumiko, I prompted her with “He had to go visit his mother.” She replied, “Why did he have to go…bank?” So I repeated the sentence again, and she said, a bit thrown off and confused, “Why…bank?” I smiled benevolently, sage-like, and said, “Visit his mother,” while rolling my head to coax the correct answer out of her.

“Why did he have to go to…” she began, looking around at the other students nervously. (Come on, you’re almost there, oh my God, Fumiko-just say it, say it and save us all!) “Bank?” (Argh!)

Now there comes a time in a lesson when the teacher realizes that no amount of correction is going to help. Too much will make her nervous, distracted, and may embarrass her in front of her peers.

“You really want him to go to the bank, don’t you?” I smile, walking over to her and lovingly tapping her shoulder with my hand. “OK, let’s just send him there. He can visit his mother later.”

Right on cue, she said, “Why did he have to visit mother?” I want this woman to move in with me and paint all my clothes.

Over the past year of teaching, I’ve had to contend with the extreme shyness of Japanese students in an English conversation class. Forever concerned with maintaining equilibrium, they have an almost pathological aversion to speaking out of turn, disagreeing outright, or giving the wrong answer. It can make for a precarious environment for teaching English conversation since in order for my job to be performed with any degree of success, I need to get the students speaking without scaring them away.

To teach English as a foreigner in Japan, one must do daily battle with the complex and often frustrating elements of the national psyche that don’t exist in the American mind. For one thing, in the school system here, the classroom atmosphere is one of absolute deference to the teacher. Their word sensei has connotations that our English word teacher does not. Sensei communicates respect and acknowledges the teacher’s role as imparter of wisdom and knowledge. (By contrast, our teacher , to many American students, is just a fancy word for target .) Students are discouraged from speaking out without first being addressed, and if they do speak out, they’d better have the right answer or they will be reprimanded. It’s all about one-way instruction, teacher to students. The student is not so much taught as indoctrinated.

It’s the exact opposite of the American school system, where children are encouraged to speak too much, the result being that we Americans never know when to shut up. Just look at our talk shows, our love of using cell phones while driving, our chatty reality shows, and our obsession with bumper stickers expounding our beliefs in God, political candidates, the genius of our honor students, the righteousness of guns, and living simply so that others may simply live. We Americans excel at giving too much information. The Japanese excel at not giving nearly enough. So the idea of a classroom where students are not only encouraged to speak out but required to do so leaves many of them confused and scared. And not just due to their fear of a foreign teacher. They are also dealing with their fellow Japanese, who will most certainly judge them. If they speak too enthusiastically or answer too many questions, they will be seen as arrogant and a show-off, a protruding nail in need of a good whack-down.

At first it didn’t bother me that it took a good fifteen to twenty minutes of my asking questions to a deadly silent classroom before they would relax and start talking. But when you deal with this lack of responsiveness day in day out, it starts to make you a little touchy. It’s not that they don’t want to talk. It’s that they don’t want to talk to you . Slowly, my insecurity has crept toward mild and now pronounced paranoia, and silence has become my albatross. If I have to sit through another miserable eerie quiet brought on by a question I’ve asked at the start of class (“How are you?”/“What did you do last weekend?”/“What’s your problem?”), there’s no telling what I might do. Then, one day in a basic-level class, the meltdown.

Things began promisingly. When I first looked at the attendance sheet before class started, I was surprised and thrilled to see the name Maria Gonzales listed among all the Yoko Omimuras and Naoki Moritas. After asking around, I’d learned that she comes from Mexico and is married to a Japanese man.

“Wow…Maria Gonzales,” I said to myself with a sigh, my brain racing with exotic and stereotypical images of forbidden dances, all-night fiestas, and tequila shots passed around the classroom. It had been so long since I’d considered a name like “Maria.” It sounded so zesty, vibrant, full of life. My classes could certainly use some color, some spice, some Marrrrrrrrrria.

The only time I’d had a Mexican in my class was a few months earlier. Boy was he a stud. His name was Diego Martinez, and he couldn’t speak much English, but it didn’t really matter because none of us were listening. He had the sex appeal of several South Pacific Islands. I think the word is “smoldering.” He’d made my classroom hot to the touch. For two hours we swooned, hanging on his every mispronounced and misused word. We didn’t get much done in that class, but we all definitely learned to love Mexico.