Young man, old dog

Today was a day almost a month in the making: a triumphant return to the land of the gainfully employed.

For the past month, I was Ahab.  But instead of "hast thou seen the white whale?" my quarry was far more elusive: "hast thou seen the white-people employer?"  And for like three-quarters of it, the reply was always the same: "nay."  My wife, ever my humble Queequeg, lugging around the coffin of I don't know let's say companionship.  But after a back-breaking, oar-cracking month, it appeared on the horizon. 

Excuse me as I break with my shitty Moby Dick metaphor to metaphorically shit my pantaloons in pure terror. 

For two-and-a-half years, I had been employed with the same eikaiwa, teaching the same lessons, from the same books, grinding the same structure that had been drilled into the lot of us since day one.  An interchangeable part in the English factory--and lest you think this description is the bitter rambling of a jaded ex-employee, my trainers reiterated to me and the rest of my training class, word-for-word, to "follow the structure... so students can transfer schools and not notice the difference."

Meanwhile, in the present, I managed to get on with a cram school in Kyoto prefecture.  Pretty good gig.  Pulling down two Gs a month and some sweet bennies and I can't even pretend this is a good job but at least it keeps me employed and honoring the terms of my visa and not get deported so just pretend I added a third positive characteristic to the list.  Still, money's money and the living situation the wife and I are currently in doesn't really insist much of our finances.  At the very least, I get to do my part to rob Japanese children of irreplaceable moments of fleeting youth.

Seriously.  I'm officially one of the bad guys. 

All of the horror stories you've ever heard about Japanese cram schools are absolutely true.  This one's a bit more "edu-tainment"-oriented than most, but it's hard to stay edu-tained when mean old Mr. Merican's dropping 10 pages of homework and a monthly book report on a class of nine-year-olds.  Unfortunately, the manager clearly stated that if we don't assign homework after every class, the parents edu-plain.

Since embarking on this month-long journey of trying to find a job at a place where they don't abuse children, the chill of a spectre long buried in the depths of my consciousness has wrapped its bony fingers around my throbbing, irritable bowel, nesting sick and squalid in my stagnant guts. 


It's the crushing grip of a realization made long ago and suppressed for an equal duration:  I have absolutely no skills.  I don't mean that in an "aw, don't be so hard on yourself, Merican" way.  I mean it in a Napolean Dynamite way. 

Don't get me wrong; during my time with my old company I learned the encumbrance limit of my own sanity.  I learned how to be unphased by corporate and intra-office political bullshit.  I learned how to continually lower my expectations of the fundamentally good and redeemable nature of mankind--not that I'm bitter.  If you recall, I already said that I wasn't, and I certainly wouldn't have repeated myself unless I really meant it.

The problem is that an eikaiwa career teaches none of the most basic, rudimentary skills necessary to actually teach a class of children.  What it did teach was structure.  Rote, mechanical, useless structure.  Like teaching a dog to shake--the dog doesn't understand the meaning of the gesture, simply that it is his task to perform on command.  The week-long period of training at the start of a contract was little more than a glorified obedience school.

The enormity of it just makes me want to roll over and play dead.

And now, poised at the brink of this latest undertaking, I can't help but feel like the sheep in wolf's clothing, ready to be torn to shreds should my cover drop.

Today, I visited my new school for the first time, met my co-workers, got a feel for the school, did the usual first-day stuff.  It was a fantastic experience, but a decided departure from the fanfare that accompanied my arrival (and that of the foreign teachers who followed) at my old job.  I mentioned to my wife how I drew little more than a casual "hey" when I walked through the doors for the first time as a member of the staff.  A former eikaiwa employee herself, she pointed out that foreign teachers at eikaiwa are typically spoiled, put on a pedestal, essentially calves being fattened for when the time comes to repay the outpouring of generosity.  And suddenly it all clicked.

Yeah, this place is different.  We're not monkeys in the zoo.  We're actually supposed to be teachers.

Hopefully reality won't deign to blunt my enthusiasm as it did with my previous job, although admittedly that's what reality tends to do best.  But as the terror and anticipation of the beginnings of a new life play tug-of-war with my innards, the din of their quarrel is almost mute beneath the thundering joy at the opportunity to return to the classroom next week as a teacher--for the first time.  Seriously, I've been bored as shit.

And really, really poor.