The past month or so has featured a couple of small surprises. The first one came from the realization that young children can have crushes on their teachers. It popped up in front of me when a six year-old girl drew a likeness of me on the board next to a princess (who I presume was supposed to be her). Add all the little hearts she drew in to fill up the empty space and yes, I got the message. Luckily her mother was there to keep an eye on her that day so that drawing had a short life. As things turned out, the mother had already planned on bringing her daughters to our school on a different day so after the switch I no longer have that situation to deal with.
The other one came about last week. The father of one of my junior high school class students came by one evening to pay his daughter's monthly lesson fees. I was teaching at the time so I wasn't there to overhear the conversation he had with our office manager. After I finished teaching our office manager mentioned something from the conversation she had had with him. She had asked him how his daughter was doing in my class. His answer was positive but he went on to mention what had happened to her at school. Apparently her English teacher, who our manager discerned is Japanese, had admonished her by remarking that her English pronunciation was too good in comparison to the rest of the students in that class. So now the girl has to put in the effort not to sound out of place when using English at school. My office manager opined that she couldn't believe that such a comment would be uttered in this day and age. Likewise it caught me off guard too. I had completely forgotten about the expression "The nail which sticks out gets hammered down".
Enjoy your pop rocks, sir.
15 years ago
2 comments:
Ha! Her accent is probably too good in comparison to the teacher's as well. Japan isn't the only shaming culture; still, it's hard to learn of a case like this where excellence is stifled and unwelcome.
Good on you, Derrick, for doing a great job with her accent. Maybe you can find a way (without direct criticism of the idiot teacher, of course) to encourage her excellence and to ignore her English teacher's ridiculous remarks.
Thanks for the comment Lynda. Yes, it's business as usual for that student in my class. She doesn't resort to using "katakana phenomes" there. I like her as a student. She was in a bit too deep ability-wise when she started but she's made good progress since then.
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