Inglish Textbuk
It’s just over a week until I go on holiday.
Mere words or even a long drawn out bloodcurdling scream whilst yanking my clenched fists back and thrusting my pelvis triumphantly forwards many times cannot express how much I am looking forward to this, the first time in seven months I will have seen my girlfriend and taken holiday leave.
Today was one of the topics I dread in our English syllabus - The Environment. Trying to make one of the aforementioned (in previous diary entry) standard textbook lessons fun for a bunch of 14yr olds who really wouldn’t give a left testicle about ‘harmful CO2 emissions’ even if I was preaching it to them in Japanese whilst simultaneously break dancing and spraying candy from my nipples, let alone in a language in which many of them can only just about muster a monotone “aimu fainu sank yuu” at any given point across the entire gamut of their language learning education, can be exhaustingly difficult. Especially when all you can think about is “holidaysunshoppingspendmoneybeerhavesexbeer” whilst drawing trees with faces sucking in CO2 on the board.
This highlights something I particularly find amusing about the textbooks - the blatant use of the English lesson as a means of educating kids about all the shit that they don’t have time for in other subjects. The textbooks we use tend to skim round everything ‘too’ foreign, and often has entire chapters on Japanese culture such as the Ainu (fair enough), kendama, matsuri, and fricking hashioki (unbelievably, they devoted a chapter to that. A hashioki is the small stone thing you rest your chopsticks on in Japan). Don’t get me wrong, I can see the value of giving the kids something that they can relate to so as to assist learning, but there are about a million more interesting things (to the kids) from abroad that you could draw on to illustrate some topical point such as “I have a X in my bag”. This, and the excellently obvious stereotypes portrayed by the cartoon characters and their dialogue - the ignorant quintessentially blonde-haired gaijin and his ‘crazy’ fish-out-of-water antics in Japan speaking in 80’s hyperbole, educated by the Japanese guy Ken with his convenient non-race-specific name.
“So Ken, don’t have a cow! what is this? It’s a long, thin stick. Is it for my anus? Radical!”
“Haha Tom, you are a ridiculous white fool! It is a chopstick. We use chopsticks to eat food with. Here’s a candy for trying, though!”
throws candy, Tom runs gleefully off to fetch it, tongue trailing in the wind
And you would think that I’m exaggerating, but sadly, its soooo close to the truth that I want to cry blood.
