Yet another step · 2:53am April 22nd
Surprisingly, I didn't have time to write this on Friday and the weekend came and went, so here we are.
I started working again even though school has been going for about a week now. Interestingly, I don't seem to have much to do in spite of the school I'm working at now being about as big as a college. For reference, There are about 7 classes per grade level (in Japan middle school covers 7-9th grade) and about 30 students per class. simple math tells me that this is about 200 kids per grade and there are about 50 teachers to boot. For a building that sees about 600 people five days a week, it's surprisingly clean and well kept, but I suppose that's what happens when you have the students clean it at the end of every day.
On the one hand, it's nice to have so much down time. Last Monday, I did approximately nothing for my job but answer emails and meet some of the staff. Where every moment of my life in school was scheduled at the elementary schools, here it's like: "Oh, we don't have anything for you to do right now, so you can just hang out." It is a very I have so many individual hobbies because I don't think I could survive if I didn't. However, on the days that I did have class, it was fun to do my little introductions.
This is a more urban area and there are a lot of staff here that speak english. There are about five english teachers, and three other teachers who speak english (maybe a bit more fluently than the english teachers, oddly enough). It's refreshing to be able to actually talk to more than one person. However, there is one particular teacher who is a bit too nosey because man, it is hard to get her to stop or go away after she starts. I don't think I've ever dealt with this back in the US, so it's a bit strange to me.
Speaking of English, one of my main duties here is to grade papers, journals, and tests. My ability to read Japanese helps a fucking ton because sometimes they just give up or don't bother looking up how to spell things and just write in japanese. Correcting sentence structure is fun when they write about whatever they want, but sometimes, they copy examples and there was a sentence they were writing that was just plain wrong, but only because of a miscommunication.
E.G. "There is Proper Noun in our town." I spent about an hour crossing out "There is" and moving "is" after the noun as my correction, but after talking with the teacher, she's just going to re-explain this so they don't use "There is" with proper nouns anymore, since that's not a thing people say. Another example was an english test I graded. There were two questions that had problems with the question itself, one more detrimental than the other. This was about using past participle so things like "it is known, it was done, he ran/drew/etc." The first was just brought in versus brought to, in was on the test and to was the correct word. The second however made the 'correct' answer wrong. the sentence was
The baseball game ____ at 7PM.
You might be thinking "started" to fill in the blank, and that would be fine, but the word they were being taught was "begun" so the sentence straight up doesn't work. It took me a minute to figure it out and I went back and filled in the right word (an answer key would've been nice), but I needed to talk the test over with the teacher later.
It's one thing to not be taught, but it's another thing entirely to be taught wrong, which has me a bit worried, since it's only been two weeks since the year started. I haven't run afoul of anything in the text books yet, I fear the day may yet come.
Speaking of taught wrong, that's my operating principle here because, holy shit, I do not know the rules and forms of my own language at all. I imagine most people don't, but it's especially damning for a self proclaimed writer. Does that convince me to learn them though? Eh, not really. My problem isn't that I use the language wrong, per se, but that I can't always explain why I'm right. I always feel a little bad for the first few people I grade because the objective isn't always explained clearly, and I have to go through a few before I figure out what exactly they're supposed to be doing.
The most fun things to correct are the journals because, man, the things they come up with. It's fun to get a little peek into their personal lives, especially when they write about their favorite things, but because Japanese is written effectively backwards for english speakers, you get some funny sentences.
Moon Cafe in the there is delicious cakes and lunch. But, many people are there.
of course, in japanese, this is a correct sentence
月喫茶店に美味しいケーキと昼ご飯があります。でも、たくさん人があります。
But translating it directly leads to the above in English. My favorite ones are when they have all the right words for a sentence, but they're just all over the place, or like, it's cave man speak and they're missing a bunch of articles all over, which is also kinda okay in Japanese, but still caveman speak.
On another note, I've been playing guitar for a few minutes in the morning before school, and suddenly, its starting to make sense to me. I have like, two favorite Pillows songs which I used as the book/chapter title for Dash/Rebecca and Fluttershy/Shyanne in Star Overhead, Hybrid Rainbow and Funny Bunny respectively. While these have more complex parts to them, they both have two guitar parts (because the lead singer also plays guitar on most songs) and one of them is usually just chords. I decided I'd try to learn Funny Bunny first since I actually know all the words to the song. It's got a lot of chords in it and I learned several new ones for this, but I can at least play all the chords in the correct sequence. I don't know why, but doing just that really made something click for me. Oh, this is how it works.
While I'd never experienced it myself, this is the feeling I try to describe in Star Overhead. I don't remember if I did this in the fimfic version, but when somebody plays a meaningful chord (Usually the book's main character) it's accompanied by a short poem about the flavor, the color and the texture of the sound. e.g.
Like the flavor of dark coffee, bitter, hot and hard to swallow. Like the color of a cream-filled draft, soft and milky, warm and understood. Like the sound of a hard truth hitting your ears how a hammer nails a coffin.
and often followed by 'the chord rang out.'
Big moments, epiphanies, realizations, the final resolution to something, they show up a lot through out the books, and it was kinda like that.
Whenever I go back and reread stuff I wrote, it always feels kinda prophetic to me because, most of the time, I write from imagination with little experience and research to form a foundation for what I'm saying. Then, when I finally go experience whatever, it's like, 'Oh yeah, I wrote about that.' I'm sure there's a blog or two from yester year buried in here about this very topic, but it always goes this way and I'm surprised every time. Little delights I suppose. Course, I also write a whole lot of dark stuff so I'm counting my blessings here.
I never did end up going to that thing from the other blog because, well, the first chance I had I got nervous and bailed, and the second chance it was raining pretty hard and I was not about to walk 30 minutes in the rain to meet new people. There was a lot of rain this weekend actually, and I didn't do a damn thing. Maybe that was a good thing since sleeping is hard and I tend to not get very well rested during the weekdays, but I always feel bad about it when I just laze around for days. It's just something about being at home in my chair that makes it so hard to work on anything. One of these days, I'll move into a place where I have an office room to work in so that I can separate tasks more easily. Whatever it is, It's super easy to work since I've come to this school.
Anyways, that's all for now. The final chapter of Volume 6 is edited so we'll be moving onto the second pass here soon.
Until Next Time~
-KCZ
