Okay, so… I never needed a bike in New York. Cars, trains, buses, taxis, and walking have worked perfectly fine for me. Once I arrived in Japan, however, the “useless one” convinced me that I need a bike for school transportation. Surprisingly, she was right about something and I’ve been using it for school ever since. The bike has been in fairly good shape, the occasional tire that needs more air, whatever, no problem. It’s been in good shape up until three weeks ago when I got a puncture in my tire. Before the puncture, I was slowly able to tell when my bike needed more air when it was harder to peddle and it felt like I was biking over rocks lol. 
So! I was heading back towards my school after I bought some water at the convenience store, when all of sudden it became UNBELIEVABLY difficult to peddle and it felt like I was biking over giant rocks that were all conveniently put in my way. I go back to the school and I realized, damnit! I got a flat tire! Luckily for me, there’s a bike shop right across the street from the convenience store so I walk the bike there. He tells me that, yep….there’s definitely a puncture (-.-), and that it’ll take an hour for him to fix it. I’m like great! After I drop the bike off I wait for right before lunchtime to get it. I get it back and it felt great! Like I was biking on water! XD There’d be no way that my bike would ever have any problems again!
…..Last week I was biking, and it went right back to that feeling of biking on rocks! I’m like, wtf! I thought these bike shops had people that can FIX BIKES, not just take the rock out then go half-assed on everything else. I’ve also grown to quickly hate that sensation. So I get a little irritated, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I thought that it was just another instance of the tire losing air, and I had to just get the bike pump that’s in the school. So! I ask an office lady about the bike pump, she asks why, then I explain, that there’s no air in my tire. One office lady gets up and walks with me to ask where the bike pump is, and we ended up finding out that the bike pump is in my office somewhere lol. I was like, “Oh.” So we get the bike pump and walk back to my bike. Before that however, I tell her to feel the tire and confirm if it needs air. She feels it and goes, “Arara!” lol, so yeah…I need air.
She goes inside to get her shoes and the office ladies ask what’s wrong. She tells them, “Tatum-sensei has a flat tire!” and two more office ladies jump up to see my bike lol. What the hell are they doing? So with three office ladies outside at my bike, they all feel the tire and murmur and agree that yes, it is flat lol. Another office lady, after feeling my tire went, “Arara!” lol They ask me if it’s a puncture and I said that I don’t think so and how two weeks ago I went to the bike shop because I had a puncture and it was fixed, but now it’s messed up again so I don’t think he did a good job. They start murmuring again after that and agree that yes, he didn’t do a good job lol. So while one stood and watched, two office ladies helped pump air in my tire. This isn’t uncommon. If I ask for help, the office ladies stop whatever they’re doing and take care of what I need. I honestly think that most offices and businesses in Japan would collapse if there weren’t office ladies. SOMEONE has to have information, right? Lol
So, after they pump the back tire, they look at the front tire, go “why the hell not,” then pump that one lol. After this happens, we’re standing around, talking about my bike, when the new vice principal sees what’s going on and walks towards us. Now, I don’t think I told you anything about the new vice principal, just know that he’s a hell of a lot better than the last one and knows English. He may be Europhile, but he’s a nice guy. So, he proves that by walking to us and asking what’s wrong. He feels the back tire and he goes, “Hm…this needs more air.” The office ladies are like, “Noooo vice principal-sensei! We think there’s enough air in there!” He ignores them and tends to the back tire. Then after squeezing the tire, he takes off some metal thing, which takes all of the air out the tire, wasting the efforts of the first two office ladies. Then, resolute, he freakin’ flips my bike upside down and starts manhandling it. I’m like, “????” and the office ladies are like, “!!!!!” Despite all that, he starts asking for tools, while he tries to pull the rubber part of the wheel off. So, if you’re keeping score, there are 4 Japanese people around my bike.
He struggles with it for a while, trying to pull the wheel thing off, while directing the office ladies to do stuff. While he’s doing that, a Japanese language teacher comes up and just stares in amazement of what’s going on. I don’t know why she decided to stop and stare either. Then she walks away and goes to do whatever she initially planned to do. 
So, the vice principal is still trying to get the tire off when the Biology teacher walks up. He’s all like, “So….what’cha guys doing?” Then one of the office ladies tells him that Tatum-sensei has a flat tire and even though she went to the bike shop two weeks ago, she’s seemingly having more trouble. He goes, “Heeeeeeh.” Now, this sound means a lot of things, just like “arara” and “uuwa.” “Heeeeeh” means shock or surprise. The weird thing about that sound is that they wrap their lips around as if they’re saying “oo” but they make the “heh” sound. Try it! They do this a lot when they’re told new information or something interesting and “arara” is more similar to “Oh No!” and I’ll describe some more whenever they come up.
Come to find out from the vice principal, the rubber thing for the air was twisted and that’s why I wasn’t getting air in my tires properly. Then he asked who did such a terrible job with my bike and I tell him the bike shop next to the convenience store. “Simply terrible…” he says. So, while he was trying to put the tire back onto the bike, the Biology teacher actually needed the vice principal to look over and approve a form or something, and that was why he was hanging around. So, the vice principal gets up, takes the form, and the Biology teacher automatically takes his place in putting the tire back on. A couple of minutes later the vice principal comes back down and helps the Biology teacher finish the job. So yes, there are 5 Japanese people hanging around my bike because of a flat tire lol. Yeah..ALL of them obviously had nothing to do and decided to pay extra, special attention to my bike lol. 
After they get the tire on, the Biology teacher leaves, one of the office ladies go, “Oh! There’s no one in the office!” and one of the office ladies goes back in to man the office lol, and the vice principal starts bragging to the office ladies how he’s a regular bike fixer, while the other office ladies are like, “Whooa..Vice principal-sensei can do ANYTHING!”-.- Don’t feed the ego, ladies! In any case, after the wheel is back to normal, he properly pumps air in the tire, and he says that it’s good as new. I’m a bit skeptical, despite all that lol, but he told me to give it a test run. It feels great! It’s like biking on air! So, afterwards he pretends to charge me 10 dollars but then points out since I’m helping “his” kids for the English speech contest (the rock star cicada, and Chisaka-san), that he’ll help me out with this….they’re MY kids, you butthead -.-. In any case, I’m very grateful for his and the office ladies’ help and I thank them, while they go back to doing nothing… Why do I have the feeling that I helped them more than they helped me? lol
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Lol Well okay…I’m exaggerating a bit. He was selected to be a model by his teacher. If you met Keith, you’d know that he doesn’t really like being the center of attention. Most of these people here have never seen a cute black guy from New York so he gets an outrageous amount of attention and people coming up to him daily asking for pictures and wanting to talk to him or kids emulating him. Not only does he deal with that on a daily basis while heading towards the studio, but all of this month, he has to sit for two hours and get stared at and drawn by everyone in the studio lol. However, it’d make a good addition to his resume, yes?
He was telling me about it and it’s pretty much how most of those art modeling sessions go: he walks in, sit and hold still for 25 minutes, take a break for 15 minutes, and continue on until the 2 hours are up. Yes… he keeps his clothes on -.-. I haven’t been there to see it in action, but he has told me quite a bit about it.
Most of the people that attend are the regulars at the studio, but we’ve never met them because they come on different days. Also, they are Japanese people who have traveled! So, that means he’s been meeting a completely different type of Japanese person. There was this guy with purple hair and he asked Keith in good English how old does he look. Keith said 40, but he actually turned out to be 70. Like, what the hell? Lol I have a feeling he asks people that all the time so he can surprise them with the answer.
There’s another lady who loves Keith’s hair and would ask him a ton of questions on how he got his hair to “do that.” Lol Eerr…nature and genetics?
He, of course, gets a lot of compliments, ranging from “beautiful boy (!!) to handsome face...err…not the ones I was expecting, but they embarrass Keith all the same lol. They also told him that they wish they could meet more black people like him in Japan. They also told him that they want him to bring me one of those days and gave us some candy out of kindness. Wow. I was ALWAYS under the impression that you cannot change the minds of Japanese people. Simply on the principle of how you’re not the first foreigner they have seen, so most Japanese people have already decided what they’ll think and feel about you before they have even met you. Terrible? Yes, however unavoidable.
Also, based on some ignorant people that I’ve met, who will continue to say negative things about non-Japanese people despite one in their face; that’s what I thought. Especially after this warm treatment, Keith could go outside and some other Japanese old lady would be scared of him because he has a foreign face. For the people willing to see the good in foreign folks (also known as, the non-ignorant, well adjusted Japanese person), it will all depend on whom they meet because these particular ladies have never met any black people before Keith. From now on, however, they’re going to be kind and sweet to the next black people they see. Trailblazing FTW!. lol
This is mainly a pictures post, so please look at the pictures!
I’m helping out another one of my students for the same competition. This one, however, she’s practicing for a different category. I’m not too sure if her category includes awards, though. She was selected by the teachers because she’s so good at English, but she secretly told me that she didn’t want to do the speech she has. I was shocked because…ya know… it’s her speech, so how could she possibly not want to do the one she picked? Oh..right…she didn’t pick it; one of the teachers gave it to her. Sigh. This is exactly why I try and make the students pick their own speeches because I mean based on her attitude, it’s clear that she would rather do a different one. Sigh.
So, it kind of showed when I would give her the same pointers as Kenta-kun (The Rockstar Cicada) and while he absorbed it, internalized it, and show me that he’s listening by using my corrections, Chisaka-san would make the same mistakes over and over again, at the same parts of her speech. Er….okay, but I’m just going to make the same corrections, while just explaining them in different ways. When teachers talk about whether or not a student is good English that usually just means that they do their English homework very well in comparison to other students. You would have never known if you heard her complain about how difficult the speech is, even though Kenta-kun has a much harder one, in terms of pronunciation and vocabulary level. At the same time, I can understand why she is not as excited about it, simply because the speech wasn’t her choice. 
She would constantly ask me how Kenta-kun is progressing and would ask how often he comes and practices she immediately gets all competitive and always goes, “Okay! I’ll do my best!” and work that much harder. I just don’t know why she doesn’t do the speech just for her own benefit lol..but I’m not going to knock her motivation. I can safely say that she’s doing a lot better than when we first started and she’s trying to break out of the “katakana” way of speaking English. Katakana English is just Japanesing English. It essentially used to make English words easier to pronounce for Japanese people, but I mean, they should pronounce it in the way it’s supposed to be pronounced. Every other language requires that you try to sound as natural as possible, not settling for pseudo-English. For example, “I love the view from here,” in Katakana English is, “Ah-ee rabu za byuu furamu hee-ya.” That’s not English!!!
........ I think I’m going to do a class on proper consonant and vowel pronunciation. Yeah, I’ll do that when school starts again. Now, I’m well aware that there are plenty of different ways to speak English, simply because there are so many different languages in the world. HOWEVER, most of those other countries more than likely insist on sounding as natural as possible. I know that most students write words out in katakana so it’d be easier for them to pronounce, but that isn’t how it should be. Why? Well, the Japanese language doesn’t distinguish l’s from r’s and b’s from v’s. Even their way of making the v sound is “bui.” What’s that!!! You know….I’m gonna stop here since this isn’t the main focus of this entry lol.
In any case! After she got tired from using so much English, we usually end up chatting. She’s quite bright and simply adorable (like most students at MY school ☺)! I asked her about her other schoolwork and how she has been doing. She’s always complaining about things being “too difficult” or “troublesome” but she has no choice but to do it. The students here have a lot of homework to do during the break…which would make sense if they didn’t have to come to school during summertime! She and the other students have an outrageous amount of school homework. She has to do about 10 pages of Japanese, 20 pages of English, 10 pages of Biology, and about 15 pages of math problems.…kinda makes your high school summer reading list seem like fun, doesn’t it? lol
I look at all the work she has to do and she tells me, quite honestly, that she hasn’t finished it, nor does she want to….like most high school kids. I sympathized with her, but she’s well aware of the fact that she will be tested on all of those subjects in the first week when she gets back, so she NEEDS to finish that work. Then she says, “Hey sensei! Since we’re speaking Japanese and you know so much kanji (-.-), me and everyone else thought that you must be some sort of a genius. You can LITERALLY do anything right?” I immediately get suspicious, but then I realize that she ACTUALLY thinks that because then she whips out her math homework and asks me to help her!
Wait, wait, wait. My being here is SO completely unrelated to your math homework lol. Not to mention, foreigners speaking Japanese DEFINITELY doesn’t make that foreigner a genius. Also, what does my speaking Japanese have to do with any mathematical knowledge?
So, after laughing, I explain that it’s likely that I have no idea how to do her difficult math proble--- wait! I looked at the problems and realized that, after drudging up what I can remember from high school, I can actually help her! It was only multiplying binomials, quadratic equations, linear equations and multiplying fractions. Phew! I was expecting some outrageous SAT like math, but it wasn’t bad.
Unfortunately, I don’t know much math related Japanese so I had to ask her some questions before I can actually help her. Her main issue though was that she makes little mistakes so while her work is correct, the final answer would be off. Also, she didn’t really seem to understand the fundamentals of multiplication and division. As in, she would know HOW to get to an answer, but couldn’t explain it to me. Like no, 25 over 25 is NOT zero and no you can’t divide anything by zero, a negative minus a negative is still negative, and the best way to do most of those problems is to remember that you’re searching to isolate the x. I also taught her FOIL for the binomials since they don’t use that method here. Why don’t they use that! After I helped her out with math, she tried to push Biology on me and I chuckled before pointing to the door, telling her to leave because it’s 1pm during the summer and she’s at school with her uniform on!!
I tried to break things down easily for her because she refuses to see her math teacher about it. I completely understand lol. He’s a jerk. I told her that she should get a group of her friends together and do math and science in a group. It’s the easiest way to properly do your work if one of your friends knows how to do it, right? She says that she’ll try and get them together, but she doesn’t know if they’d want to meet up just to study. Okay…lol. 
I remind her that it’s summer and how she’s still in her uniform, so she needs to go home, change, and go have fun somewhere. She agreed but she didn’t have any idea of where to go. I mention the giant amusement and games place that Keith and I always go to. It’s 10 minutes by bike from our school. It’s an awesome place to play the newest arcade games or do coin pusher, crane games and pachinko. One floor is completely dedicated to bowling, since apparently it’s gotten quite popular here. It also has a pay section in which you pay 10 dollars for 3 hours of arcade games and sports like rollerblading, golf, badminton, pool, basketball, darts, fishing (!), soccer, tennis, archery and they even have a batting cage with pitching practice at the top floor. They also have a relaxation and spa section where you can change into some slippers and sit down in an expensive massage chair with the other people in that room and just watch tv. There’s also a giant kids section where there are more of those awesome massage chairs for the parents. However… her eyes widen and she quickly shakes her head and freaks out, telling me, “No! No! No! That place is way too dangerous and scary! Tatum-sensei, do you really go there?! Aren’t you bothered by the people there and do scary people come up to you?” You know?.…I’m going to just leave that alone lol.
Well…of course not in a literal sense, but I’m preparing him for a speech contest in September. There are different sections of the speech contest, his is just a recitation, but he still competes with other students in his category. When he first came to me, though, it was quite awkward. Another teacher and I decided his speech. I mean at first the silly teacher was trying to force him to pick something from “An Inconvenient Truth,” and I frowned at her so hard! -.- Like what are you doing? That’s obviously her interest; forcing him to talk fiction about the environment won’t go over well with anybody, especially the JET judges. I tried to explain that his book is only meant to scare people like her by using sensational imagery, but then she misinterprets what I was trying to get at and said, “Yeah! It’s very sensational right? I mean he was able to gather so much information!” ….sigh. Anyway…no. No, I will not let you use one of our students to spread sensational environmental fiction. Just… no.
So then whenever I asked him what he wants to speak about, he’d just cock his head to the side with his head down so I won’t be able to see his face…..okay. Wtf do you want to speak about? lol It was so frustrating for me because HE’S the one that's going to be standing there in front of all those people when that day comes, so I don’t want to force a speech on him if he doesn’t want to do it. I’m not okay with picking something that I would think he likes. I want to know what he likes. He mentions Harry Potter and how he has most of those books in English so I said great! Then I tell him to pick his favorite section of any book, take a 3 minute passage from it then bring it in. Seems easy enough right?
Next day, he comes in with a sad face and lets me know that he couldn’t find something because he gets tired when he has to read all that English. lol…what? Well I can understand what he means because I get tired of reading Japanese newspapers. So he indirectly left it up to me and the other teacher. It just felt inherently wrong that another teacher and myself made this kind of decision for him, but he didn’t say anything! Sigh. It was clear that we had no choice in the matter, so we looked for something for him to do.
Some English books here have little passages in which you’re supposed to guess what or who the speaker is based on the speech. As I was flipping through the books, I found a story of cicada that’s a flirtatious rock star. It’s simply one of the cutest things I have ever read. It’s done so perfectly well! The cicada rock star brags about how he did the underground scene for a bunch of years, how he is in an intense competition with the other chump cicadas because they have the nerve to think they are rock stars, how he’s hot and that no one sings like he can. Of course you’ve noticed this by now, my student is nothing like that rock star cicada, but that’s what is so funny about it! 
He said it was too difficult, but then I pointed out that since he’s smart, there’ll be no trouble and that I’ll help him. When he first read it out loud to me, I realized that I had to turn him into a rock star cicada for a month and a half. I didn’t know if he even wanted to go that far, but then he told me that he really wants to win. So, I taught him “rock star” hand gestures and natural movements that coincide with his speech because I warned him that just standing there and reciting what he practiced isn’t going to win the judges over. I also helped him with his confidence and helping him give off the idea that he’s the best cicada on the planet. I explained that this rock star cicada is arrogant as hell, like most human ones, and he’d need to aggressively get that point across when the day comes.
Somehow we got into a conversation about music, then I started talking about Pete Wentz from Fall Out Boy and how he has the typical attitude of an arrogant rock star (without having any real talent), while the ACTUAL lead singer, Patrick Stumph, doesn’t embody a rock star at all. I mentioned it in passing, but then the next day he tells me that he really likes Fall Out Boy (!!) and he would like to hear more bands of the same genre that they are in. What the hell lol. Okay! Sweet! I think stuff like this is necessary though, to help him get into the mindset of a rock star cicada since the whole passage is written the first person view so clearly the speaker is the cicada. 
Then he asked me about accents and how singers with accents sound. I had him listen to The Klaxons and some of Corrine Bailey Rae because of how you can hear their accents when they sing. He wasn't able to pick up on it so I helped him out by pronouncing the differences in some of the words. He caught on quickly after that!
So, before I realized it, my cute student walked off with burned albums of Fall Out Boy, Panic at the Disco and My Chemical Romance while I’m sitting there wondering if I came on a bit too strong with the whole music thing. lol But it’s okay! He told me that it’s his favorite genre of music and it’d be “amazing” to hear it in English and it’d be good English practice for him. Oh…okay then. lol
He’s been progressing so well! It’s so obvious that he really enjoys what we’re doing and likes pretending to be a rock star cicada because he reads his lines with such confident arrogance! Lol I told him as long as he keeps his new found arrogance for the cicada, then he’ll be fine. The main problem that I’ve been helping him with is how to put emotion in his words since English isn’t spoken in a monotone, especially with a rock star cicada as well as how to pronounce certain words. I’m so glad that he’s taking this seriously; well then again of course he is because he signed up for it. 
It just makes me nervous because I know he really wants to win but we are an agricultural high school. There are a lot of academic high schools in where English is treated as serious business because most of the students in those schools are heading for college, and English knowledge is necessary for college entrance exams. So, there are students who already sound like native speakers and will have no trouble with consonants and vowels, but we can’t be pessimistic.
If he wins in his category, he gets to be in the news and that is the main reason for his hard work… just to be recognized. Well then damnit, if that’s what you want, I’ll try and make you as natural as I can! Stick with me kid, and I’ll make you into the most arrogant cicada rock star that the contest has ever seen! lol