Friday, June 11, 2010

Ninja training and teaching english

For those of you who were wondering, I have not found a place to practice Ninjitsu yet. A typical morning for a ninja trainee/English teacher usually involves either sleeping until 12 o clock and missing the morning completely, or waking yourself up really early to work out only to find that you could have slept till 11 and still got your work out in. You then boil some dumplings and watch the Mummy Returns for the 5Th time that week.
After two viewings, 20 dumplings, and an inner battle to resist going to the 24 hour McDonald's that is right next door, 3 o clock finally rolls around and you cast aside your ninja stars and pick up your text books. The next hour and a half is crucial. Preparing your lessons. This might seem easy to the untrained eye, but looking at a lesson entitled "Banana" (That's right, you guessed it, the lesson is about a dog.") and trying to find a way to make it remotely interesting to a bunch of middle schoolers is no easy task.
Interesting or not the 6 hours for two classes goes by and you and your fellow trainees meet for the walk home. At this point, one of two things happens. A teacher decides to internalize the complaints he or she may have about the students and simply go home to eat more dumplings/ chocolate, or the teachers gather to go out and complain about the students together over Korean BBQ. At this point I'm pretty much the BBQ master.
Some people may be reading this and say "hey Jason! Ninjitsu is only in Japan!" While that is true I must say however that Asian cultures do tend to mix a bit. For example, I've been here three weeks and I've heard the saying "the nail that sticks out gets hammered" twice from two different people. This is a Japanese saying, and it's also from one of my favorite movies. 2 points if you can guess which one.

Jason

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