On the awesome side.

When you're constantly reading literary works that exist on the truly profound and awesome, it's difficult to write something yourself and be able to deem it worthy of popular consumption. I prefer to write articles more on the interesting side rather than just publish a day to day journal. Both because I think I take into consideration the probable readers of this blog and the wanting to not give a bland summary of routine events. However, the likely result of striving for such is that my posts focus on either the subjects that irritate me to no end, or the truly awesome occurrences that just happen. Thus far, I feel the former make up a majority of this blog so I think this post should be dedicated to the later.

While being an ALT in Japan is by no means on easy occupation in terms of mental health, there are certainly times where it's truly gratifying. I'd have to be insane or at least completely anal to expect every one of the students I taught to be perfectly on par with their desired skill at English. Fortunately, I don't expect any such thing so long as they learn something of my lessons. One such case, a middle school student of unfortunately little aptitude in English at this stage, but has an awesome personality and ability to recognize a further purpose beyond school teachings. During a lesson, I see him and another more English-gifted student conversing and motioning in my direction during a pair project. Eventually, he waves me over. The gist of it is that using a combination jap-eng dictionary, his partner`s skills, and his own natural cunning, he had written "I have reached the limit of my strength, vacation please? Yes/No."　This made me happier than an ALT probably should be in this situation. Unfortunately, remembering my responsibilities as an educator and role model, I had to circle "No" but with much apology and understanding. He gave an exaggerated slump and bit of mock despair and I walked off chuckling. He did ask me again after the class had ended and I gave him a very enthusiastic `yes` and smiles all around.

I`ve never expected any of my students to have a solid grasp of English based on nothing but bad textbooks and my own shoddy teachings. Problem is, it`s hard to convey this to the students when you don`t know enough Japanese to do so and explaining in English kinda defeats the purpose, it seems.