Filed under: Entertainment, Teaching | Tags: English, Harry Enfield, Playstation 3
Taken directly from todays first grade mid term test.
Tom: Some hamburgers please.
Staff: How many?
Tom: 4 Hamburgers, 2 fries and one small coke please.
In what situation would someone go to an eatery and request a non-specific amount of hamburgers and then rapidly expand on the initial request when prompted? Only stoners have that kind of mentality, is this closet support for low level drug abuse or just poor English? It needn’t necassarily be either, as the English is actually grammatically without error, it just suggests a lack of thought. As far as I am aware it is usual to specify the amount of burgers required prior to purchase in Japan also, unless I have been making a cultural faux pas for the last two and some years.
Anyway, today my Playstation arrived back intact with fancy new white box to contain retail box, although my plastic bags I used to protect the unit were not returned. I must say I’m impressed with the turnaround, I only sent it over on Thursday evening, so assuming it got their Friday it must have been fixed almost immediately as Monday was a national holiday. A round of applause to Sony for after service support. Which is far more than I’ve heard about Microsoft and their apparent disdain for people with a non functioning X-Box.
In international news, old school sketch show artist Harry Enfield offends the Phillipines.
Apparently the Phillipine government have labeled him a racist for this. I don’t know so much about that, but I am happy that Harry Enfield and Paul Whitehouse are back on TV, I remember as a primary school student being allowed to stay up late every week to watch “Harry Enfield and Chums”. Perhaps he’s not cutting edge funny anymore, but some of the characters that pair came up with are timeless:
Rowley Birkin: How I would love to grow old.
Tim Nice but dim: Oddly gave me a new found respect for the nobility.
Larry and Lance: The hilarity is anyone who’s ever been to a town maket has met these guys.
I enjoy the final line of Enfields wikipedia entry: In October 2008 Enfield was accused of racism by the Philippine government [4]. The claim involved a skit on the BBC show Harry And Paul where a man encouraged his “pet northerner“ to mount his Filipina maid. It is not known whether any northerners were offended.
I thought it was a rather flattering portrayal of the average notherner personally.
EDIT:
Just found the last ever episode of the Fast Show with the “omni-sexual” fashion clerks and young Jonny Depp: Cracking stuff.
Filed under: Daily life, Teaching | Tags: AGoT, Battlestar Galactica, English, jobs
In so many ways to keep this blog updated. I always feel busy these days, or if I’m not busy I feel like I should be, leading me to feel guilty about rambling self righteously on my blog.
However, in keeping with the “fuck Gareth” approach that has dominated Japanese weather ideology for at least 2 years, it is far too humid for anything else today, the crew of the good ship Galactica would have sailed right on by this planet in search of another had they seen the humidity guage. Battlestar Galactica is something I’ve gotten into, in fact my two main vices at the moment are Mr. Theo Thourson’s fault,
1) Battlestar Galactica
2) A Game of Thrones CCG.
The former is awesome. I’ve been through a string of addictive big budget dramas in recent years, “24″, “Dexter”, “The Wire”, “LOST” etc. but of them all Galactica has surprised me the most. It didn’t have to be good to get viewers, the cult following would guarantee it a lengthy run, just take a look at the new Dr. Who, it’s fucking awful, and yet despite lead actors dropping out every 5 minutes it is still going strong. However, the makers of BG obviously said “Fuck this. Let’s make a high tension, involving Sci-Fi drama and not fill it full of pseudo-science and plot holes”. I applaude it.
The latter of my 2 vices is not something I am good at, or get to do enough. I have never played a CCG before, having always been a nit too skeptical about Tragic: The Saddening (not my joke) to jump in headfirst. I have been playing against Theo for a couple of months now on an almost weekly basis and it has to be said it is great fun, although I have yet to beat him so much as once. I could make excuses for this, but the biggest issue is probably my own incompetance – I recall cringeworthy moments of simply not reading my cards correctly and bungling things like and oaf (the incident of the misread military and power challenge is burned into my memory). But, it IS a great deal of fun, so much fun that I’ve spent ludicrous amounts of money on cards already, of course, reading the books makes things far more entertaining. Reading the books is something you should do, so buy them.
I’m thinking a lot more about my future these days. I’m being careful to do “thinking” rather than “worrying” as Baz Luhrmann once put it “Worrying about the future is about as effective as trying to solve algebra buy chewing bubblegum”. What do I want to do? Now there’s a question. This can be put quite simply. I want to go into TV/movie production as per my degree. There are a few issues with this, the biggest being that rather than being a guy who can speak English as a talent, I suddenly go to being a guy who can’t speak Japanese very well, not a desireable quality in an employee in Japan. Also, outside of my degree I have no experience in the field at all. I’m trying to think of ways to converting my English into a saleable skill, the most obvious field that comes to mind is educational TV or location documentaries (assuming said locations are in English speaking countries).
The other far too obvious option is teaching English. Now don’t get me wrong, I do like teaching English ……generally. I have good days and bad, the busier tends to be the better. This is the first job I’ve had where I don’t get up in the morning resenting the days ahead in some way, although I occaisionally come home resenting it happening but that’s to be expected. Too much free time wouldn’t be a problem if I were to work for an English education company out here, chances are that the company don’t want me laying about anymore than I want to be laying about, it’s all about the turnover after all. Theo made a good point a few weeks back when saying “you should do a job in which you help somebody every day, at least then it will be bearable”. This applies to English teaching at least, it’s not like I’ll be working in a sales or retail environment, however it feels like I’m kind of falling into it by happenstance and I’m keen to avoid it.
The real question is “Do I have the will power to chase my dream come what may?” It’s a big question, and it would be terribly easy to fall into the trap of taking the easy door rather than battle on through the shit to get what I really want. Whatever happens, I guess telling people what I want to do is kind of the first step, at least that way I’ll have some
In the dilletante world of ELT (English Language Teaching for the acronym unfriendly) there is a curious emphasis placed on the use of singing in the classroom. As a man falling into the “not-quite-2-years-of-experience” category of journeyman English education I’m in the unenviable position of being listened to by no one and expected to listen to everyone else when it comes to the matter of how to go about teaching. The point is, for those of us who aren’t going to spend the rest of our lives warbling away in musicals or bursting into song whilst communing with the checkout lady, I think it’s really all rather pointless. There are some small merits to teaching certain specific songs to learners, Heads, shoulders, knees and toes is useful for remembering all of about 8 body parts – save the irritating side effect of children then not realising that “and” is a seperate word from “eyes” causing them to go through life pointing at unfortunate gaijin saying “andeyes blue!”.
Some revolutionaries have realised that traditional songs like “Mary had a little lamb” are mostly useless on a grand scale and tried to come up with songs more useful to speakers of English, the most famous of which is probably Genki Richard. He however also fails on a spectacular scale. The ground breaking song below takes about 15 minutes to teach and results in (a portion of) the kids shouting the words “Thankyou” and “Take care” appropriately throughtout the non-sensical clamor.
In case the students had any apprehensions about whether or not it was ok to use basic greetings across all seasons he helpfully included a handy guide in there.
Here’s how you teach “Thankyou” and “Take care”.
Thankyou = Arigato
Take care = Itte Rasshai
FINISH
And I did it all without the aid of an entire gym, sound system, assistant teacher. miming and accompanying music.
I think what irritates me most is this tripe is actually successful. This said, I met the guy once, he was quite nice. Like a cocker spaniel is nice. I wanted to rub his head and say “whosagoodboythen?Richardis!Yesheis!Yesheis!”
