LISTEN CAREFULLY!

I am becoming very good at negotiating new classrooms. Today I moved the other afternoon one, so from next week I will teaching two consecutive classes in the same classroom. I'll be in heaven. I'll only have to cross that horrible road to the other campus twice, once each way, instead of four times, and I'll be in three different buildings instead of four.

The class I moved was one for a department that usually refuses to change classrooms, I was told, but today my room was unbearable. Not only is it too small, it is one of two rooms that used to be one larger room, and the wall they put up to divide them does not reach all the way across. There is a gap at each end. This means that everything that goes on in either classroom is clearly audible in the other.

There is another English language class going on next door. I don't know where it was last week, because I don't remember hearing anything, but it was definitely there this week. Either the teacher was very, very quiet last week (unlikely on a first day) or he was absent or in another classroom.

I discovered today that this teacher says,

"LISTEN CAREFULLY!" a lot.

Because I am an obedient person, every time he said, "LISTEN CAREFULLY!" I did. My whole class did. We heard, "LISTEN CAREFULLY!" and we all got listening expressions on our faces and went very quiet, stopping whatever we were doing. This meant we got through about half what I had planned because we spent so much of our time LISTENING CAREFULLY.

One time he said,

"THIS is important and THIS is important and THOSE are important," and was obviously pointing at something on the board, but my students looked baffled so I pointed silently at THE TEXTBOOK and ME and THE STUDENTS and mouthed his words, and my students all started laughing. Then the teacher next door went very quiet for a while, and I felt bad about it. I decided on the spot that there was too much potential for bad feeling and disturbed classes (on both sides), and at the end of a long week I am apparently not capable of reining in my worst impulses, so I would stay after work AS LONG AS IT TOOK and get something done about it. I've only met this teacher a couple of times - we used to work on different days - and I can't remember his name but he seems like a very nice man, and it wouldn't do for me to be sabotaging his class.

Or vice versa, for that matter. I think he got some revenge. At one point I had my students doing some pronunciation work repeating after me, and when I said,

"REPEAT AFTER ME!" I'm fairly sure that my students were not the only ones repeating after me. After the first couple of times they suddenly got a lot louder, and the students in the back row kept glancing back nervously and giggling. I would have asked him about it after class but he gave up before I did, finishing early, and was gone by the time I left. I will apologize next week, and tell him I won't be undermining his classes in the future.

I had spoken to my boss about the classroom situation earlier, and he said that the reason the faculties give for having the language classes in their faculty buildings instead of in the languages building is that it means the students aren't having to move around campus all the time. Instead of, say,10 teachers moving around, you would have 300 students moving around if it were the other way around, he said, and it was hard to argue with that (even though that is how it used to be, and there didn't seem to be any major problems). So I asked the students, to find out where their previous and next classes were, and discovered that only nine (out of thirty) had any classes at all in the periods before and after mine, and six of those were IN THE LANGUAGES BUILDING. (The other three were in a completely different building.)

Armed with that information, and with my entertaining but educationally distressing stories of what it was like trying to teach effectively with two teachers shouting competing instructions through the wall at each others' classes (unintentionally, for the most part), getting the class moved was a piece of cake. It still took almost an hour, though, because I had to go back to the main campus to find an empty classroom and get permission to use it, and then return to the other campus to get permission to move, repeating my story both times. I feel as though I have spent the entire day hiking, and mangling the Japanese language.

The other reason I will be happy not to use that classroom is that it is so cramped that I was squashed between the teacher's podium and the chalkboard, which means that I was forced to lean against the chalk ledge. This left chalk marks on my clothes. There is a chair for the teacher, but if I sat on it I disappeared from sight completely because the podium is so enormously high. (Not to mention wide - it blocks the lower half of the chalkboard and is totally immovable. WHO DESIGNS CLASSROOMS LIKE THIS?) So when I was standing up front I kept putting my hands back to hold myself away from the chalk ledge, and getting more and more chalk dust on my hands. At one point I moved down the narrow aisle to answer a student's question, stood for a while with my hands on my bum leaning over to talk with him, and when I walked back to the front caused great merriment because I'd left two white hand prints on my black skirt. I looked like I'd been groped. It was pretty funny, and I had to turn around slowly so the rest of the class could get a good look, but I'm glad it won't be happening every week.

There were several other things that happened today in classes that I was going to write about, but I can't remember what they were, now. I'm too tired. I do remember, however, an interesting thing that happened on the train platform this morning just before the train arrived. It was about 6.20, and the platform was not very crowded. It is quiet at that time, and I was in that sort of trance-like half-awake state that you get into when you're waiting for a train. I was standing at one of the boarding points, behind and to the side of a mild-looking man, when suddenly he sneezed so violently that his arms flung out, one leg flew up, and he kneed himself on the chin. I jumped so high I nearly went into orbit.

I have never seen anybody do that before. That guy sneezed WITH HIS ENTIRE BEING. Then he went back to looking mild and harmless, but I moved a couple of steps away. I was afraid if he did it again it would be my chin, next time.