opinios

Okoru!

Who needs Japanese exams?

Today I knew that I had reached a point where my command of spoken Japanese is at a high level: I had to get angry at some students.

I don't know if you have heard a Japanese man get angry or not before. It actually sounds really cool. It is difficult to represent here but I'll try. A phrase like:

Nani o yatte'irundayo? (What the hell do you think you're doing???)

when shouted out by a native speaker of the language, just rolls off the tongue like poetry (although you probably wouldn't think so if it was being directed at you!) Really though, Japanese borders on the romance languages when the r's get rolled and if you can detach from the scary, intimidating factor that the guy is angry, it sounds very gutteral and masculine. And very rewarding.

I say 'man' because Japanese is a unique language in that it differs so much between male and female ways of saying things. And Japanese women would rarely use the kind of gutter talk that rough Japanese boys throw around. It's a bit different to Australia where the sheilas can fuckin' swear with the best of the bastards, mate.

So anyway, I had to teach a class today that is normally taught by Mr Suzuki (my idol as he is an absolute legend at getting angry in class). I normally wouldn't teach this class but he had to run off and deal with some student crisis so I was left this brat pack. Two thirds of the class are diligent but a group of smart-arse boys in the corner just wouldn't shut up and refused to write even one word on the paper in front of them (today's activity was an essay writing exercise entitled "My Best Friend").

It's funny because as a teacher I now realise that getting angry is all part of a controlled system that you have in place, and you are actually in control the whole time, even when shouting at someone. How good a disciplinarian you are is all a factor of how convincing your act is, and whether you can pull off the pretence that you are really pissed off at the student when actually you just want them to do their work.

At least that's how it is for me. But I'm not a hot-head by nature.

I nagged them and kept reminding them of how little time was left in the lesson to write their masterpiece, and I tried humiliating them by commenting how they were "carrying on worse than a pack of grandmas". I really raised my voice and shut a few of them up as they had never seem me like that before. It seemed to silence them for a couple of minutes, but soon enough they were back at it. They ducked out as soon as the bell rang, skipping the formal greetings that we usually have at the end of class.

But I know that I had succeeded because Mr Suzuki was in shock that I had got the worst offender, too-cool-for-school Tsuchiya-kun to at least write:

"My best friend is..."

Try getting the examiners of that stupid Japanese exam I sat to achieve that!