Sugoi Gaijin

Last weekend, I was informed that there would be a reading test on Tuesday. I had Monday off; apparently, they have a day to respect the elderly. I though that day was in August, but apparently, that was a day to respect the deceased. So, just so I get my Japanese Holidays in order, August Holiday is for the deceased, September Holiday is for the *near deceased*. ok, I joke…

So anyways, I was told about a Reading Test, so I thought Sweet! I won’t have to do anything and I can catch up on my Japanese learning! Then, when I went into school today, I learned that reading test, didn’t mean, kids read and then answer questions, no. It meant that the kids would recite one page of this story they’ve been reading for over a week now (a four page story) and we, as the teachers, would grade them. So, I actually had to be in class today and teach bummer!. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching! It’s just, when you think you’re going to do one thing and have to do another, it kinda mixes up your schedule a bit, and being in an orderly society like Japan, I’m not used to having disorder. So anyways, I was confused by this so-called “reading test”, but this is how it went down: we’d call the students individually, ask them what page they wanted to read, they read, then we grade. The criteria was to emphasize Fluency, Attitude, and Clear Voice.

Honestly, I didn’t understand the purpose of the reading test, and I still don’t. I mean, what’s the point in reading a story outloud. It’s kinda like me picking up something in Japanese and just reading it outloud. Granted, I guess it might help my execution, but dialogue practice makes so much more sense than repitition, and seriously, English class is nothing but repitition. I read this story like 10 times with these kids, everyone should have it memorized by now. Funny how no one has yet… Oh and the story sucks too. Believe it or not, it’s a 4 page story about how America bombed Hiroshima and the characters in the story die from radiation poisoning or something. I’m not joking. The English story in the textbook is about Hiroshima in WWII. I’m so glad the kids’ English sucks so bad and I’m also glad that they’re Junior High kids; they’re apathetic, so I got through this story without any anti-american sentiments!

So, we’ve already gone over the ground rules and how we want them to put some emotion and emphasis on the story, instead of reading it in the classic monotone, mute voice (oh the monotone voice, it makes any story that much more exciting!) So the first girl comes up and reads this sentence outloud…I can’t remember exactly which sentence it was, but it went something like this: “On the morning of that day, everyone lost their lives.” But when she read it, she put the wrong kind of emphasis on it; she read the story in a very cheery tone of voice, so when it got to the part where people were dying, I just burst out laughing :lol:.

The class started to laugh too, cuz they thought I was making fun of her, but her tone was just waaaaay off for this story. The teacher gives me this look like, “Why the hell are you laughing?” Obviously, they, nor the girl had no idea what she said (the teacher knew though), all they saw was me laughing hysterically. I had to stop the story for a minute, I was laughing so hard. It just seemed so wrong for this girl to make it seem like she was giving a positive spin to a japanese boy listening to a lullaby as he died due to a nuclear fallout. She made it seem like a good thing. Mad props to her for trying though, I gave her an “A” for Attitude (which coincidentally was one of the grading criterias :lol:)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 19th, 2006 at 8:03 am and is filed under In School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.