Live from Japan!

I learned a very important lesson this week. Losing my temper with a Japanese student is a complete and total waste of time. The more I lost my temper and my cool, the less I was able to speak slowly and clearly. And the less I was able to speak slowly and clearly, the less able the student was to understand why I was upset with him in the first place. As the process continued we just had a complete and total meltdown where we both walked away from the interaction totally frustrated with one another and not having learned anything.

It all started during a lesson where I am beginning to teach the students how to play one of my favorite games, Apples to Apples. Aaron and I chose to teach this game because there is a lot of communication and arguing that has to be done to play, which makes it a great way for students to practice and expand upon their communication skills. Anyways….

The cards provided with the actual game set are simply too difficult for most of my students to understand, so first we needed to make our own cards with nouns and adjectives on them. I asked each student to make 3 adjective cards and 10 noun cards. Since they were making them, without using their dictionaries, I knew that they would be on-level and easy enough for all the students to understand.

Two students in one of my first-year classes were feeling lazy and a touch ornery, so they decided to write the same noun on each of their 10 cards (making a total of 20 cards with the same noun) and the same adjective as well. Obviously this was going to negatively impact the way the game would be played, and also the set-up activity I had planned for later on in the class. I went over and explained to them that all the nouns had to be different. I was using English that should have been able to understand, but they didn’t want to try and they didn’t want to do the task. So, instead of listening to me speak and doing as I asked they kept shrugging their shoulders and saying, “Wakkaranai” (I don’t understand).

This is a tragic little trick that students will sometimes play. It isn’t that they can’t understand, they can. It is that they don’t want to try, or they want to avoid doing the task that is being asked of them. It often means that we end up in an endless loop, with me re-explaining the expectations using different English and the students parroting their “wakkaranai.” Usually I am able to brush this off, but this week, with the stress of an upcoming presentation and a multitude of other work responsibilities (I only have 19 days left), I wasn’t able to.

We did the loop a few times, each time I got more and more frustrated at the students until I eventually (with a slightly reddened face) threw up my hands and walked away. I think this is really the first time that I have given up on trying to communicate with a student in my entire time at Gifu Kita, and I feel really badly about it. I know that as a result of my frustration my relationship with these two students has been damaged. At first it made me feel really horrible, wondering if I would be able to repair it. But then I realized that I only have two more lessons with them and I may not be able to repair it, but that also may not be the end of the world.

I wonder if this is the phase of pregnancy or end-of-job life where I just don’t give a rats ass. I just want to get the job done with and move on to the next thing. Sure, it would be better if I was able to do so mostly successfully, but at this point I am also realizing that I am becoming more and more limited in what I can do, and that that is probably ok.