Gossip

Today I ended up on the train with three colleagues on our way home. I had to get off first, to change to another line, and just before the train started slowing down for my station one of my colleagues suddenly remembered a bit of essential gossip she thought we might not have heard yet. She told it quickly so I would not be left out of the loop, and I appreciate it deeply. I now know a little more (but not nearly enough) about a very strange professor who used to invade my classes.

He WAS a tenured professor at the university (my students had told me so, and I thought they must have made a mistake), but nobody is quite sure if he'd actually been given any classes. He certainly didn't seem very professional when I met him. I thought he was a homeless person who had somehow wandered onto campus and into my class in an alcoholic fantasy. But he claimed to be from Tokyo University, or to have graduated from Tokyo University, or to be on a transfer from Tokyo University, or something like that. Whatever it was, I was supposed to be impressed. He spoke English, but it was a strangely garbled and very fast version of English that never made sense, quite. He was full of confidence and this worried me.

I deeply resented him walking into my classes like that, but put up with it because you never quite know who it might be, and you don't want to make enemies of tenured professors if you are a lowly part-timer. Everybody knows we part-timers are not real academics, and not real teachers. We're just replaceable bits of equipment. Tenured professors, on the other hand, are living treasures whose every word is sacred and who might get you fired. You learn to be careful.

This guy stopped invading my classroom after I frightened him one day. I did it very nicely. He had wandered into the room, as he was wont to do, while I was in the middle of erasing something from the board in order to write something new up. The students were working on something but looked up at the interruption. I asked if I could help him, and he said no, but then sat down next to a student, pointed at the mostly erased board, and asked interestedly and loudly what it meant. He wanted attention, and was getting it. My students had stopped even pretending to work.

What was on the board didn't mean anything, of course. It was mostly erased. It said something like:

page 44 th
s a sele
ne and de
hich fo
te a par
u thi

I was getting a bit tired of this guy. It was the fourth or fifth time he had interrupted this one particular class of engineering majors, and I was starting to feel picked on. He would sometimes just sit down and stare at me, grinning, or other times start chatting to a student, in Japanese, or to me, in English. He was disturbing and creepy and disruptive and I didn't know what he was doing there, and when I asked what I could do for him he would brush me off by telling me not to worry, he was just checking things out, just carry on, carry on. The first time, after he'd gone, I asked the students if they knew who he was, and they said he was a professor. They didn't know what he was a professor of. (I only found that out today - he was a P.E. professor. I didn't know it was possible to be a P.E. professor. Perhaps I misheard.) I asked the students if they thought he was a little strange, and they had to think about it. This was the wrong question. To students, professors are strange by default, here. To expect a professor to not be strange was too novel an idea for them to comprehend.

So when he asked me to explain something that didn't make sense, and when I overheard one of the students whispering to another about how good his English was, and he obviously overheard it too because he looked all smug and twitchy and expectant, I decided this guy had been getting up my nose for long enough. I decided that if he wanted an explanation of something that had nothing to do with him, I would give him one.

So I told him, in English, at great speed, all about a journal article I'd been reading on the train that morning. It had nothing to do with what was on the board. It was about memory and cognition, was heavily scientific, and was written by a neuroscientist. I had only understand it vaguely myself, but that didn't stop me. I fixed him with a manic eye and speed-babbled with enthusiasm, waving my arms around and using all the really big words I could remember from the article whether I could pronounce them or not. I interrupted myself several times to ask him, confidentially, as a fellow teacher, if he didn't also think it was an astonishing bit of research and wasn't it relevant for us all, as educators? We should be taking it into account when we teach our students, I said. Didn't he think so? I waved vaguely at the garbage on the board and told him that this was what I was trying to do here, and what did he think?

He was lost from the first sentence, and all he could do was sit there nodding dazedly and agreeing with me. I burbled on happily, asking him for his agreement every couple of sentences. He didn't want to admit in front of my fascinated students that he didn't understand a word I was saying, so he tried to look intelligent, but the panic in his eyes grew. This inspired me to greater flights of pseudo-scientific fancy, and I carried on as he stood up and came to the front of the class, turning his back to the students so they couldn't see his face and the growing alarm all over it. When I finally stopped for breath, beaming at him expectantly, he pulled himself together, shook my hand damply, said, "Yes, yes, yes, very good," a lot, told me I was doing a great job, and left.

There was silence, and the students stared in awe. One of them asked me what we had been talking about. It sounded so very intellectual, and he hadn't understood a word.

"Sugoi," he said. "His English is very good." Then he added somewhat wistfully, "My English will never be good like that."

"Yes, it will," I said. "It will be better, if you study a little. He didn't understand anything I said."

The students gaped.

"I didn't understand it either," I added. "But it sounded good, didn't it?"

I laughed happily (he'd gone!), and they gaped some more. Some of them started laughing as they understood what I had done, but they were a little shocked, too.

"Never mind," I said. "Let's get back to work. I don't think he will be back."

I was right. He never did come back.

That was a couple of years ago, and I had forgotten about him until today. But when my colleague was telling us about a professor who had been arrested for drunkenly attempting to kidnap a woman and her child at a train station at nine o'clock in the morning, something rang a bell.

"Gawd. He sounds like that guy from Tokyo University who used to interrupt my classes," I said. "He was nuts. Kidnapping? What happened?"

"It WAS him!" said one of my other colleagues. "I heard about it, too, and there was something about him being from Tokyo University. Oh, so you've met him! I heard he speaks English really well..."

The doors of the train opened and I had to run for it.

I hate it when that happens. KIDNAPPING? I'll have to call my colleague tomorrow.

I love gossip, and Japanese universities have the best and most bizarre gossip ON THE PLANET.


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