Google giggle

Today I typed the word anagram into Google, and got an interesting 'Did you mean...?' suggestion.

It's back!

Mr Deity is back!

Nora

It seems that I am behind the times with these. Several million people have seen the videos already. But I can't help but be impressed, and if you haven't seen Nora the pianist, you should.

Nora's dedication to her art, her intense concentration, and frequent practice has paid off. She has become a (YouTube) star - and for good reason! Like most self-taught musicians her music can be unconventional and somewhat unpredictable, but it is passionate - and she is developing a style all of her own.

Go Nora!

You are being followed...

By . . . an elevator?



I don't know why this sign made me do a double-take, and turn around. The English is perfect. There really was an elevator behind me. But the elevator was not looming and chuckling evilly over my shoulder, about to swallow me up and take me deep down underground somewhere to some mysterious and terrible place where ... why am I even thinking like this?

Given that it was a perfectly accurate sign, why did it make the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up?


In other news, I have been sent home. Classes are cancelled all this week because of the swine 'flu outbreak. Students were unflatteringly ecstatic. The Osaka governor, on the other hand, wants to curtail my unexpected holiday.

Soaked but unhurt

I thought for a moment I was reading The Onion.

But I wasn't.

Two men who allegedly dumped water on pedestrians from the 11th floor of an apartment building have been arrested and their bucket confiscated, police said.

Knights of passion

I was marking tests today. A lot of the test was dictation, and I was not too fussy about spelling as long as it was close, as the point of the dictations I did during semester was to develop listening skills rather than writing. One misspelling pulled me up short, though, mostly because of the image that popped into my head. It was a dialogue that came from the unit in the textbook about booking a hotel, and my student had written this:

I'd like a room for two knights.



(I wanted to illustrate this blog post, but I'll need a lot more practice before I can draw a knight.)

What would a real teacher do?

The bird in my last post reminds me of an experience I had when I first started teaching. I hadn't been in Japan very long, and had no experience of teaching language before coming here. I didn't know what I was doing, and was amazed that anyone would give me a job. They seemed to think (and still do) that anyone who speaks a language can teach it. This worried me (and still does), so I read as much as I could find about how to teach, and talked to other teachers, and tried not to rip off the students too much. But I still felt like a fraud, and frequently the thought would pop into my head, What would a real teacher do right now?

This was one of those occasions. (I think I may have written about it before, but perhaps on my old blog. I can't find it now, but if you have have a moment of déjà vu reading this, that's why.)

I was teaching at a conversation school, and one of my classes was a one-to-one lesson with a university student. He was very, very shy. In fact he was so shy I used to wonder why he was there at all, because he could hardly speak even to the secretaries, in Japanese. In class he barely raised his head from the textbook, and getting him to speak above a whisper was almost impossible at first. I realized that he would make no progress if he didn't trust me, so was as kind as I knew how, and gently tried to coax him out of his shell. It was about a month before I even saw his face, he kept his head down so low.

A few months into our lessons some progress was being made. Occasionally he would volunteer a comment that wasn't something he was reading from the textbook. Now and again his voice rose above a whisper, and sometimes he even looked up from his book. We had reached the chapter in the textbook about pets.

"Do you have a pet?" I asked him. The question was in the textbook.

"Yes, I do," he replied.

I was encouraged. Maybe he would talk about his pet.

"What kind of pet do you have?" I asked.

"I have a bird," he said.

"What kind of bird?" I asked, and he reached for his dictionary.

As he started leafing through the dictionary, I continued to question him.

"Is it a canary?"

"No."

"A budgie?"

"No."

"A parrot?"

"No."

"Is it a small bird?"

"Yes."

"What colour is it?"

"White."

"Does it sing?"

"Yes."

Then he found the word in the dictionary, and looked up. He even smiled. I glowed with pride. What a good job I was doing! The shy kid was actually smiling!

And then he came out with his first ever entirely independent English sentence. It was a good sentence, too. It was grammatically and semantically perfect.

"I have a white tit, and it sings!" he said.

I had one of those moments.

What would a real teacher do right now? I thought, as I stared at him, goggle-eyed with a suppressed snort.

Today I told an experienced teacher about this moment, and asked him what he'd have done. He was entertaining, but unhelpful.

"I would have said, 'And what's wrong with the other one? Does it only hum?'" he said.

I must confess that I hadn't thought of that response. The horrible temptation I'd had when it happened was to lift my shirt and declare, 'Well, I've got two, and they don't!' I'm glad I didn't, but it would have been a language lesson to remember. (It probably would have also traumatized the boy for life.)

What I ACTUALLY did was to stare at him for a moment, compose myself, and say, weakly,

"How nice. Let's move on to the next page."

Tune-up and an oil change

I was just looking at the notebook I used while I was in NZ, and discovered this little note to myself:

'Oil change.' Ha ha ha!

Funny how all it takes is a few words to bring a whole scene back to mind. Let me explain.

I had been visiting one of my brothers, a very religious one, and after a couple of difficult and awkward days (which felt a lot longer) it was finally time to leave. My sister-in-law, who is equally godly and sanctimonious, took me to the bus stop. With her was her 14-year-old son.

I said my goodbyes and climbed onto the bus. I went about halfway back, which is where I try to sit on buses (less swaying around = less likelihood of getting motion sickness). In the front on the opposite side was an elderly couple. The woman was very chatty; her husband less so, although he looked perfectly happy. He seemed a placid sort of fellow.

After a while it became clear the bus wasn't quite leaving yet, so my sister-in-law climbed laboriously onto the bus to talk with me a little more (probably to ask me yet again to translate some Bible scripture into Japanese and record it so her kids could learn Japanese, or something equally insane). However, she didn't get a chance to speak to me. She made the mistake of greeting the elderly couple, and got snagged.

"Nice day for traveling, isn't it?" she said, smiling at them patronizingly. "Are you going far?"

This provoked a detailed explanation of how far the couple had come and how far they were going.

"We're doing the grand tour of the country," said the woman. "We wanted to do it before we get too old. My husband is eighty-one, and I'm not far behind. We're having a lovely time!"

My sister-in-law looked at the husband.

"Eighty-one?" she said, loudly and slowly. "You don't look eighty-one at all!"

(When my sister-in-law talks to elderly people she talks the same way as she does to small children, and it is teeth-grindingly awful.)

The old man grinned.

"Oh, he's doing pretty well," said his wife. "I take good care of him. Every three months I give him a tune-up and an oil change, and he perks right up!"

She threw back her head and laughed and laughed and laughed. The old man nodded, still grinning.

"Works every time!" he said, proudly.

My sister-in-law stared uncomprehendingly for a few seconds. Her be-nice-to-old-people smile froze on her face. Awareness dawned slowly, and with it, horror. Her son was standing right behind her, and was almost doubled over with silent giggles when she remembered he was there and turned to check if he had heard. He rearranged his stance to 'innocent boredom' just in time.

I waited to see what she would say.

She turned back to the old couple again, aghast, and opened and closed her mouth a couple of times. Then she finally said, weakly,

"Oh. That's nice."

And it was. It totally made the whole trip worthwhile.