Down with pants!

Down with pants!

It's days like the other day when I'm grateful for my appreciation for the absurd. Adam Sandler, Matt Groening, crazy mumbling vagrant at UPenn who used to talk into his shoe as if it were a phone... I salute you! You have all made my life that much easier.

My most difficult student is also one of my most advanced, so I don't so much teach her as talk to her (it's a group lesson of two, but she tends to dominate). During that 70-minute argument often misconstrued as a class, we're supposed to discuss a different article every week. Usually the article gets about five minutes of our collective attention.

The problem student is a habitual complainer. She's a grandmother and her daughter, who is pregnant, will be giving birth in a month. I don't understand why, but her daughter, son-in-law, and their 1-year-old will all be spending the next two months at the student's house. This causes her no end of displeasure, and she has no reservations about telling us about it ad nauseam. Please bear in mind that this is the same student who, with a straight face, attempted to persuade me that "child abuse originated in America."

Last week we were talking about who knows what, when we ventured into the topic of whaling, which I know very little about. My student complained that America unfairly exerts its will on Japan by preventing them from whaling. Her argument was that, "It's not fair for them to protect the whales just because they think they're cute and cuddly." She was, of course, dead serious.

"Well, I believe they're an endangered species, so there are only so many left. If Japan were given the freedom to kill whales as it wanted, there would be no more whales." But I wasn't 100% sure of their status, so, leery of launching into an argument I couldn't adequately defend, I promised to look it up. I then discussed a recent article I had read in the daily paper about how the world needs to cut back on harvesting tuna, to which she immediately was able to relate.

So the other day, after looking it up, I was able to tell her with reasonable assurance that many whale species, if not all of them, are endangered.

"Who says they're endangered?"
"What? I looked it up. A wildlife organization."
"Really? Show me the website."
"I'd be happy to!"
"Well I don't think they're endangered."
"But... there have been studies -- there are only so many whales left. If you continue whaling, they will all die."
"I think they're wrong."
"Ok, but that doesn't matter [yes, I got a little snippy]. I imagine it's possible for there to be some sort of conspiracy, but it wouldn't make sense. There are only so many whales left, and if you keep killing them, there will be no more."
"Ok, forget it," she said, waving her hand.

For about thirty seconds, I couldn't believe the sheer idiocy of this woman. Sure, all of the studies and surveys could have been faked. Yes, 99.9% of the whales could be playing pachinko in an underwater resort, and will sometime in the next few years emerge, rub the sleep from their eyes, and say, "Oh crap, what day is it? I gotta get to work!" But this was 10 minutes into a 70 minute lesson so I shook it off and continued. After class, I mentioned it to Mrs. Eh, trying to curtail any damage in case a complaint were to be lodged, and I told her I was afraid that the student didn't much care for me. Mrs. Eh told me that all of the teachers have had problems with her, and she thought the student was actually fond of me. Sometimes, she said, the student comes in during the afternoon just to chat and she and her co-administrator get very nervous because the lady's just that unpredictable.

Some things here just don't make sense.

Another thing: the skirts. Almost all students from grade school through high school are required to wear a uniform. For girls, this means skirts, even in the dead of winter. It's looks pretty darn cold to me, even if they do sometimes opt for tights (many of them don't, and opt instead for shortening their skirts to be more slu... fashionable). I wholeheartedly believe that the skirts are a major contributing factor to the rank lolita-ism prevalent in adult Japanese males. It's like the Catholic schoolgirls fetish in the US, minus the Catholic, and it's ALL of them. So I figured: "Remove the skirts, remove the problem." And then I realized that the entirety of the straight Japanese male population would love that plan. Maybe just a skirt-pants swap is in order.

And another thing: misguided first impressions. Big O, who I initially thought would be a major character, is a flake, and has strange political notions, not to mention his social habits. And I've discovered that Two-Face, despite my absolute loathing of her mannerisms and seemingly constant patronizing, may in fact be an ok person. It's really hard to tell. Oh well, naught to do but continue learning.