Back to School

This week I started teaching at the high school again, after a good summer break. By the way, summer break was nice. I didn't do much, but you know, those are sometimes the best kind of vacation. I needed to just relax.

The high school hadn't changed that much. The bad students still behaved in class, and the good students were still too shy to say anything in English in my class. One thing that I did notice was that a lot of the girls have started to call me Kevin Lyttle. I had no idea who Kevin Lyttle was until they started calling me that. (If you don't know, he's that soca singer with that song, "Turn Me On", which, surprisingly, is popular here in Japan.) Both my girlfriend and I think that I look absolutely nothing like Kevin Lyttle. But most of these students have never seen a black person in the flesh before, so any black guy looks like Kevin Lyttle to them.

Even so, it gets on my nerves, because (a) I don't look like him at all, (b) it's not just one girl that's doing it, it's a huge number of them calling me that, and (c) they do it every single day. You'd think they'd get tired of it.

Oh, and while the girls call me Kevin Lyttle every day, the boys are worse. I've been at that high school since May, telling everybody that I'm American. But even here, in August, the boys insist that I must be from Jamaica! I know why they do that: (a) I'm black, (b) their idea of an American is someone with blond hair and blue eyes, and (c) reggae music is popular with the boys at that high school. Still, it bothers me.

Enough ranting. By the way, I do like working at the high school, if you can't tell.