The Dork Who Fell To Earth

Been back in the US for three days, maybe. The jet-lag is making it a little tough to tell. I suppose I should be appreciative of that garrulous old jerk who helped me stay awake for most of the flight by rambling on and on and on about his travels, opinions on LAX, family problems, plans to sell his house and dealing with hagglers. Whether I was reading, eating, writing a letter or listening to headphones, he very kindly kept me from falling asleep. Or reading, eating writing a letter or listening to headphones in peace.

Anyway, now that I'm back in the US, I'm having a little trouble. Maybe I should have been prepared for some of what's hit me lately. I mean, between what the Grade School Role Model wrote down, what Esporion told me, and what my Dad laughed about from his own experiences, these sensations shouldn't have come as such a shock. But here I am, and they are somewhat shocking. Nothing here looks much like what I've become used to seeing. Nothing anyone has to say makes much sense to me, unless they're referencing something five years old.

This is going to be... unsettling.

I'm in trouble...

Leave aside the fact that I've got about 50 hours until I'm supposed to have all my stuff packed up, all but 30 kilograms of it shipped and my apartment cleared out so I can get on a plane. I'm going to have to try and shake 52 months of being able to do and say almost anything I wanted to in public. Generally, most folks here didn't have high enough listening skills to follow my speaking speed and enough vocabulary to follow the content. Especially when I got off on rants about miscegenation being one of the only acceptable options for introducing non-Yamato protagonists into domestic graphic narratives (alluding to the tendency for foreign-type characters in Japanese comics and games to be given some Japanese ancestry as a way of making them more palatable for local audiences.) But apart from obtuseness of topic, I could usually talk about whatever the hell I felt like most of the time; even if people understood, I wasn't expected to follow those arbitrary rules of society that make it okay to talk in a cafe about the societal problems of bulimia, but not to talk about vomiting all over a valet parking sign in Las Vegas.


But I'm going to have to give up that sort of freedom, since people will no longer just dismiss my antics as those of "just another abnormal foreigner." Once I'm back in America I'm going to have to try and re-learn how to live in a society that could need a guide for How to Laugh Naturally on Cue.

Really, are you people serious? Some western people, probably Americans, put this together, and now you expect me to live in a place where there's a need for instructions like this?

3. Pay attention to your surroundings so you can judge when it is appropriate to laugh. When people are jovial and smiling, it's probably a good time to laugh. But when people are being serious or somber, it's not a good idea. If you see everyone else laughing, join the party and start laughing yourself! Even if you don't know exactly why you're laughing, you can call on whatever you thought of in Step 1 and feel like part of the crowd.

This ain't going to be easy...

I'm so short, I could parachute off of a dime

I've got one week left. And following the principal's request, I still haven't told any of the students and most of the teachers that I'm not coming back after summer vacation. But tomorrow is the 1st semester closing ceremony, and I'm supposed to break the news to everyone tomorrow.

So now the question arises: how much do I tell them? The truth is usually best, but it's also not often convenient. And I would like to leave at an intersection of the civil/respectful curve and the avoiding-unneeded-pointless-blather curve that has high values for both.

Just a thought.

Evidence of... Intelligent life? On Earth?

All right, this is another train of thought thing. But it struck me as interesting. In trying to write that last post about the test translations, I had to find a page explaining what a "Somebody Else's Problem Field" was. And since from even back before the old days of Hypercard on the Macintosh SE, it was considered cool to connect ideas with little clickable buttons, most of the pages had connections to other related topics. Like Bystander Effect, the Milgram experiments, mimicry (both biological and social), the Stanford Prison Experiment and groupthink.

But one of them had a rather odd phrase which I had never heard before: “incestuous amplification.” It seems to refer to the part of group thinking in which most people in the group tend to acknowledge only that information which reinforces the mutually accepted positions or beliefs, then continue in supporting those positions/beliefs based on all the supporting information they've got.

But what struck me during my search for a definition was that it was used in a discussion on a blog written by a "liberal Quaker" and publisher. Since I really don't eat much oatmeal these days, Quakers really don't cross my mind so often. But this page had some surprisingly thoughtful posts, including a couple on dressing plainly.

Although I had some vague notions about why the Amish dressed that way, I was unaware that practicing Quakers had rules about dress. And the way some people were thinking about those rules was really surprising.

No, let me be honest. The very fact of that thought surprised me. It never occurred to me that Mormons on the road would question their outfits. Or that Catholics would have any serious discussions about coordinating the outfits. But here were a group of people putting serious thought and discussion into what was essentially a tenet of their faith. They were actually grappling with the issues, and not just claiming that prayer would solve it all and continuing to do whatever they felt like.

It came as a bit of a shock to me. I've long known that I had some preconceptions about practicing religious types. But now I'm going to either going to have to re-evaluate my prejudices, or else be more specific when I start in with the slurs and epithets, which could take some of the sting out of them.

"Man! That's exactly the sort of thoughtless dogma I'd expect from one of you!
... except for the theologically inquisitive Quakers, Orthodox Jews and Jesuit-trained scientists."

Testing, among other things, my patience

It's time for the last big exams of the semester before summer vacation. I'm sure you remember what it was like from the student side of things. But what never really crossed my mind was that on the teacher side, quite apart from the drudgery of grading however many dozens of tests, there was still a need to actually make the damn things. I mean, someone actually has to sit down and type in an essay with all the place names blanked out. Or compile a list of vocabulary for the class, and then choose then 10 most important (or arbitrary) terms. Or copy pictures of music scores, compound microscopes, dymaxion projections of the earth or that picture of the old Greek dudes hanging out after classes, and then make up questions about them. I realize now that it's not a particularly easy task. But it is done to try and accurately assess the degree to which the students have learned, retained, guessed at or copied from someone else the material covered in class. The point, as near as I can tell, is to check what they know.

Which is where my student from Ghana runs into some trouble.

Given that she is learning Japanese on the fly here, she is in the situation of being able to understand more than she can express. Usually it's easier to learn how to listen and read more quickly than how to speak and write well, especially in a foreign language. Which means she can't fully express what she knows. At least, not without a translated edition of the tests. Which is more or less where I come in. Her homeroom teacher (who also teaches English) and I have been translating the midterm tests for her.

Now, I can understand most of the teachers who have classes with this kid not making much extra effort to help her. Most of them speak no English and have no training in second-language education. For them, there's almost no precedent for having a student who can't understand their language. Or sure, they know tons about students who just don't understand their explanations, diagrams or need for classroom discipline. But most of them will erect a Someone Else's Problem field around her and get on with their days. And honestly, they don't have to give a damn about her in class. It really doesn't affect them if she fails or not, generally she is very well behaved so there's no discipline problems, and anyway she's all foreign and stuff.

But I'd have thought they'd give a crap about their coworker, her homeroom/English teacher. Since she's the one who has to translate the tests into English, and that she began asking them for copies of the exams around three weeks ago, when they put off finishing their tests until, say, 8:15 PM on the night before exam day, their behavior is really saying "whether you stay up all night translating or she can't understand the test doesn't matter to me one iota."

Of course, since I'm the one who helps the English teacher with the translations, you'd think I would be included in that blow-off. But my work hours really don't matter to them so much. And anyway, it's not that big a deal. First off, these tests only happen twice a semester, so naturally anyone who is inconvenienced can just take one for the team. And besides, I don't really need to be taken into account anyway. 'Cause I'm all foreign and stuff.

And now, a moment of silence...

I think, since we seem to live in an age where every act that is even moderately lamentable seems to merit a memorial, we should institute a new one to be celebrated on July 4th. We can all gather around and celebrate the memory of whatever freedom or constitutional protection we seem to have lost, sacrificed or given away out of pure stupidity in America in the last year.
There could be a short speech from someone on, say, the freedom from unauthorized search and seizure. Then a video montage of people looking the other way while state and federal judges piss all over the constitution, followed by a weenie roast and fingerprint/retinal scan party.
We could even call it Independence Memorial Day, in honor of what we so quickly and proudly sacrificed in exchange for the privilege of living in a star-spangled police state.