We knew this might happen...

And so it did…

I’m in a struggle… my struggle is with Ms. 1st year… it so happens that she is in charge of the English department… I’m also in a struggle with the PTA…

A few weeks back, Mr. 2nd year had this brilliant brainstorm. He split up the 2nd years into three groups; slow, medium and fast. He gave the slow group to Ms. 1st year, he took the medium group, and he gave the fast group to me.

The trick that made this so revolutionary is that he let them choose which group they wanted to be in…

So I’m prepping a game for my fast group. It involves little cars on a race track… they have to change the “Be” verb from one tense to another and then they can roll a die and move the car that many spaces (It’s a little more complicated than that, but you get the idea): Thus I say: “He was a doctor…. FUTURE TENSE” And they have to reply: “He WILL BE a doctor” to get their little car to move. First team to the finish line wins.

Hey, it’s my first game, so it’s not terribly creative yet, and nothing explodes… but I figure I had time…

I was wrong…

First, the PTA cannot stand for the fact that there will be a group that will be learning faster than the mentally retarded children in our school, so all three groups will be moving at the slowest groups speed… thereby effectively eliminating any benefit to being in the “Fast” group.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough… Ms. 1st year has pretty much poo poo’d any games… because that’s not the Japanese way. I have to drill these things, you see… I have ideas, but Japanese children aren’t the same as American children, they have more discipline (Ouch…that hits near home, doesn’t it?)…

Of course, she’s conveniently missing the fact that half her children are asleep before her class is out… at least they are sleeping with great Japanese discipline…

Now, for tomorrow, well… the game was set up and is already in progress… so she can’t stop that one… but I may not be so lucky next week.

Everything about this job is really really good; The kids are cheerful, happy, I already feel accepted by some of my staff. The city I live in is quaint and quiet, and I like the school in general…

But if the next three years will consist of me standing in front of the class reciting the text in the textbook 16 kagillion times, I may have to consider a mid-mission reassignment…

Which would really suck… Because everything else is so very good…

Perhaps this is a lesson I need to learn: How not to teach a class…

Who knows…

The saddest thing is I am starting to see Mr. 2nd year lose his drive too… She’s getting to him as well…

Now, I'd like to add that Ms. 1st year is a sweetie, really... but she's a hard-line sweetie. Really nice to talk to, makes jokes, etc... but everything ends with "I'm so sorry but we can't do that..."

*Sigh* Well, I have my work cut out for me, don't I?

---Me.