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.

I know, I know....

Sorry everyone... It's been a while since I updated my blog. I know, I know... I'm lazy. Actually, I've been kind of busy lately with some projects at work, so I've been too tired to go here and update it like I should. I'll do a better job of it, I promise.

Anyway, now it's my summer vacation here in Osaka. Today I visited Nihongo Club for the first time in 3 months! It was good to see everybody again. For those who don't know, Nihongo Club is a volunteer Japanese teaching group where you can go and talk and learn Japanese. I went there for several months before I got my new job with ECC Outsourcing in May. I had a good time there, talking to some of the people I haven't seen for a while. But my former teacher, Mrs. Ishida, wasn't there. How sad. Maybe I'll see her in the winter vacation, if I'm not travelling.

Is this a Japanese high school?

Well, several weeks into my high school job, I can say that I've been very very surprised. In the U.S.A., we always hear about how Japanese high school students study all the time, how good they are at math, science, etc. The people that tell us that have never been to the high school I'm working at. In their classes, some students sleep, email friends using their cell phones, curl their hair with curling irons, read comic books, listen to their Walkmans, put on makeup, play with their little sticker books - anything except pay attention to the teacher. And this goes on every day, in just about every class I have.

Part of the problem is that teachers don't discipline students for those kind of actions. You can be sure that if I listened to my Walkman in class, I would have been in detention or something. But the students at my school get away with it. I don't know why the teachers don't do anything about it, or can't. But obviously they're embarrassed about it. The teachers that I team-teach with always say, "Herman, we're very sorry. Don't think this is a typical Japanese high school. Don't believe these are average Japanese students." In other words, this school is a special case.

To be fair, my high school is about an hour and a half by train from Osaka, in the countryside. These students don't expect to be much when they are adults. Many of them have hard lives: poverty, family problems, peer pressure. They don't have the motivation to study hard. So that's probably why they behave that way.

Still, I'm surprised every day I go to school. It doesn't bother me that much. It just makes my experience more interesting.

May 2004 - This is me during our visit to Iraq. Hahaha... just kidding, y'all. This is the Arabic section of Tokyo Disney Sea.

May 2004 - On the monorail at Tokyo Disney Resort. Check out the shape of the window. 

12 June 2004

Let me update you on what has been happening in the past month. Well, I left my old job, and I got a new job. I'm working as an English teacher at a high school! It's definitely more interesting than my old job. I'm the only foreign teacher in the high school, and the students love me just for that fact. It's cool to be in a Japanese working environment. But let me tell you... it's not easy teaching high school.

In other news, I got a new working visa, so I'm set here in Japan for the next few years. Things are looking pretty good right now.

April 2004 - Here's a picture of me at a local temple during cherry blossom season. 

This is me on a train in Japan sometime in 2003. 

Welcome to My World

Hey everyone, welcome to my blog! Basically, this is a website that I can easily update and share with you what's going on in my life. There's not much here yet, but as time goes on, I hope that this page will bloom to life. So please, be patient!

Just a couple of disclaimers:
(1) My parents, grandmother, and other family members see this blog, so I'll keep it clean (no 4-letter words, etc.). Please do the same with your comments.
(2) I talk about my girlfriend a lot, but she doesn't want her name to be mentioned on the internet. (Maybe she's embarrassed to be mentioned along with me... can't blame her.) Therefore, she will only be called "my girlfriend" here. If you know her name, don't mention it here, either. Also, if you know me very well and you don't want your name to be mentioned here, drop me a line and say so.

Talk to you later.

- Herman