Student Hilarity

(Big Danger in Little Osaka #26, 2009)

Unless you do something horribly wrong, being a young, foreign teacher at a Japanese high school automatically makes you the coolest and most handsome/beautiful person in the building. When I walk down the hallway, guys high-five me and ask me to hang out with them. Girls giggle when I walk past and yell “naisu gai!” or “very very hansamu!”  I’ve been asked out on dates and even had marriage proposals. While I’d love to claim that I really am that cool and handsome, this seems to be the default experience for foreign teachers in Japan. Still, it’s a kind of nice, though slightly surreal, boost to the ego.

There are some things about me that my students still find fascinating/confusing. They often ask if my hair colour is natural, obviously unaware that no sane person would dye their hair ginger. “Yeah, it’s natural, ” I reply. “And your eyebrows?” “Yeah.” “And your facial hair?” “Yeah…” And so on in this fashion, inevitably ending up in the general crotch area. I also get compared to an assortment of Western celebrities, including Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp. (I guess all white people look the same?) I once had a girl stop me in the hallway and yell “Oh wow, Stevie Wonder!” I politely informed her that Stevie Wonder was actually an old, black dude, to which she enthusiastically replied "Yes!". And yes, there are still students who get confused about where New Zealand is, including one who thought that it was a state of the U.S. (“Isn’t it near Kentucky?”)

Of course, it’s hard to tell if these students are genuinely naïve or just subtly taking the piss. There are definitely some who intentionally try to make me laugh, which can derail a lesson completely. Guys often blurt out random, completely unsolicited English phrases during class, including such gems as “I want to go to nudist beach!”; “Previously on Prison Break!”; “Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! You should see a doctor!”; and the classic “OH… MY… FACE!” A student once leaned over to me and murmured conspiratorially: “By the way… I am Bruce Willis.” It can be hard to recover from something like that. I also see a lot of unintentionally hilarious English in students’ written exercises. I generally don’t like to make fun of their mistakes, although the time a girl wrote “last week, I ate out my family” (missing a crucial ‘with’) has to be shared. A friend once asked her students to write about their future, and one wrote that he wanted to become a teacher. His reason? “I want to come in a human.” I can only hope that he was going for something slightly nobler.

In fairness to my students, I should point out that there are plenty of kids who can speak good English, don’t go all gooey at the sight of a Westerner and are generally switched-on about other countries. They’re cool people, but sadly not as much fun to write about.