Friends will stay with you
no matter where you venture
for people matter
Today was definitely an interesting day, despite the fact I didn't actually do anything really out of my normal daily routine. I enjoyed my classes today, as we worked on phone conversations. One of the exercises involved students putting phone conversations in order. I wrote my own phone conversations for them to read and order. For the informal conversations I used common situations in Japan, such as meeting a friend to eat sushi. For my formal conversations I chose two situations, making a reservation at a restaurant and making an appointment with the doctor. In each conversation I referenced one of my best friends. I used the name Dr. Huang in honour of my homey Paul "Ubiquitous" Huang who is currently in med. school at Queens University. For the restaurant I used the name "Nomad", which will be the name of my best buddy in Vancouver Taylor Burnham's restaurant when it opens some time this year.
I hope that using their names brings the same good fortune that other recent efforts in my classroom have. If you're unaware I'm fairly superstitious when it comes to my sports teams. I was quite disappointed that the Jays got swept by the Yankees recently and realized that when the team was on an absolute tear at the end of May and early June I had been putting up some Jays decorations at home and in my classroom. I had been planning on using a couple more Jays pictures for some lessons later in the week, so I decided to put them up yesterday and today. Low and behold the Jays won both days, with some rather fortunate plays going their way.
If you don't believe my classroom decorations could have an effect on a professional baseball team half the world away (which is pretty rational), then at least appreciate this story about superstition and my classroom. In Vancouver early this year a student asked me what a voodoo doll was. To explain I drew one on the whiteboard of a student of mine who had a good sense of humour and had been giving me a hard time. He was a skateboarder and always carried his board around, so I drew the voodoo doll on a skateboard. Then I demonstrated the use of a voodoo doll by drawing pins stuck into his shoulder and some fire around his hands. The class thought it was a very entertaining drawing, as I actually made it look quite a lot like him. The next day, he didn't show up for class and sent a message to another student in my class to explain. He had fallen off of his skateboard the night I drew the voodoo doll and hurt his shoulder and both wrists. He even went as far as to say his wrists felt burnt because he had scraped them on the asphalt. I thought my class was playing a trick on me and that it was pretty funny, until they convinced me they were indeed telling the truth. When the student eventually got to school later that day I saw his wrists and could tell he was in bad shape. I felt so bad and gave him a gentle hug right away. He told me it was not my fault, because he didn't believe in that kind of stuff. I had never fully believed in voodoo dolls either, but that whole situation definitely made me reevaluate my thinking. So there, incredibly anecdotal, but hopefully entertaining, evidence that what you see in Paddy Watson's classroom can have an influence on the outside world.
Switching from that eery story to another, after work that night I was walking around Ikebukuro in an area I pass every day, very near the station. I crossed a crosswalk that I cross at least a few times a week, noticing before I did that a large crowd was gathered outside a couple of restaurants and a store that face the street. I took a peek over everyone to see what they were looking at, but I wish I hadn't. On the sidewalk, there was a dead body. There were tons of police cars, ambulances and firetrucks around and they were closing off the block and connecting streets. News crews were also beginning to show up. I later found out that a man had crashed his car into the sidewalk and a storefront, killing one woman and injuring seven others. The driver had been on drugs, something that is pretty rare in Japanese society. My students filled me in on what had happened. They said it was the first news story the night it happened and the next day. While they all knew he was on drugs, interestingly, they did not know what drugs or anything more about it. It was a sad thing to witness, especially in such a safe country and a little bit worrisome considering it happened in an area I frequent. At least I can't draw any connections between my classroom and the incident.
Today made me think about how much people matter, so below I have posted a great little scene from the movie Brassed Off. It's got a great line in it, which was used at the start of the famous Chumbawamba song, "Tubthumping", which led to my title.
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