It’s 4pm, school has finished, but the staff room is ever abuzz with
teachers. To my left, Aizumi sensei graces a trio of sweat-smeared colleagues with
two rigorously sweeping hand fans. On my right, Akubara sensei works the tape
measure to see how, in millimetres, his height compares to mine. And in front
of me, the vice principal stamps my work log before writing in the comment box,
“Hot Matt!” Yes, hot Matt. Gochu’s vice principal makes the most of his
rudimentary English.
I thank him as he returns the journal, and begin to head
out. “Matt!” he calls after, and the sternness in his voice makes me wonder
what dastardly thing I’ve done wrong. I turn to him, showing no fear; then, finally, without
any give in his single expression, he says, “Easy come, easy go.”
Wise words. I tell him so.
“Wise?” he responds.
“Smart.”
“Wise, wiser, wisest?”
“Yes, that’s right!”
“Matt, Matter, Mattest?”
“Uhh...” I scratch my head. “We’ll get there.” Surely. I mean, that is what I’m
here for, right?
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| Sensei's feedback is never taken for granted. |
The average day at school is both seamless and straight
forward: there is a class, then there is another class, then there is another
class. If I’m with the same teacher for more than one of those classes,
each of them is the same, just with a different set of kids. On a good day you
might say the final set gets graced with a very polished duet from me and the
JTE. On a bad day you’d say we sound like drones.
But even when our team-teaching is amazing, it is also,
simultaneously, not. Due to a combination of excessive heat, excessive height
and ever-increasing (bordering on excessive) hunger, by the third or fourth
period I begin to feel light-headed. Class becomes a mission of searching for
excuses to walk around the room or lean against flat sections of
wall. Seriously, I’m no longer thinking about what the students are doing or what the teacher is saying;
I’m devising schemes that will ensure I don’t faint for 50 minutes whilst all
the time looking normal.
It's funny in hindsight; it’s not so
funny in class as I'm wondering when hindsight will be the only sight I have left.
But then the class finishes, it’s lunch time, and, as I sit
down to eat, I learn anew that without the four-hour suffering, my stomach would not
know heaven.
One perk is that I don’t have to prepare my own lunch: it’s
all provided. Students and teachers each get a handsome helping of rice, soup,
salad, and... well... to be honest, I often don’t know what the fourth thing is. Today
I’d thought it might be onions, or shrimps, or some strange deep-fried insect
that tasted like onions and shrimps. I shrugged and ate it anyway, but
it was none of these things. It was bitter cucumber.
Other times it’s fish, or pork, or some unrecognisable thing
to which I shrug and devour all the same. A yearning stomach does not
discriminate.
There’s also a carton of milk, which I'm still
getting accustomed to consuming with lunch, but which is fine because, for all
those times when the food doesn't sate my appetite, the milk does its job convincing
my stomach that it did.
On that note, a friend from back home asked me what the
low-light is. I said the hunger. Another asked me the highlight. I said the
food. Such is the world we live in.
I mean, yeah, there are other low-lights, like the time the
teacher left and I proceeded to read half of a story before realising I was
meant to get the students to ‘repeat after me’ with each line; but that was
only a lowlight until I remembered all the times I could’ve made a fool of
myself and didn’t. In the end I felt quite victorious.
But that’s school. I’m actually home as I type this.
Procrastinating. Really I should be doing the dishes, cleaning up the plum wine
that spilled in my fridge, and, I dunno, making dinner or something. I’ll get
to one of those things now. Easy come, easy go.
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