Emotional

I’m feeling really emotional today. It might be because I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night. I went back to sleep quickly, but I still remember the dream because the emotion was so strong. I was wandering through campus at Grove City College, and remembering all the great memories, and feeling sad, even desolate because the possibility of having these experiences was gone forever. To be honest, in my waking mind, I don’t feel like I made that many good memories in college—most of them were in the first semester, and that was probably because so many things were new and exciting.

Anyway, it made me theorize that some people feel certain emotions more strongly than others, depending on the person. I think the emotion I feel strongest is nostalgia and loss. I don’t really get angry, and I can’t think of a time that I was extremely happy or excited, and as mentioned before I don’t feel a strong sense of love or lust.

I thought that before school, but since being at school today I have felt some strong anger. I’m really frustrated at the lack of instructions in my job. Part of it is my fault, because I don’t seek enough clarification, but the teachers are busy and I feel like I’m imposing on them already by giving them the expectation that they must speak English. Furthermore, I don’t understand the purpose of my work some of the time, which makes the instructions more difficult to follow, and also causes me to feel like I’m not really accomplishing anything. I’m also annoyed because Japanese people are always asking for comments, but I don’t even know what that means. Upon asking for clarification, I was told, “your feelings”. But in general my feeling today is frustration, and I’m not going to tell that to the students.

So I’m also frustrated by the expectations of English proficiency in Japanese schools—they want their students to know so many grammatical structures and formulas even though most students struggle with the most basic sentence. By the third grade (ninth grade equivalent), most of them have maybe 100 words in their vocabulary—how can they do a debate, or even communicate effectively when they are so limited? But for the sake of tests they are expected to form the conditional clauses and participle phrases. It’s because the Japanese way is to teach it like math, because that gives correct answers and relies a lot on teacher-imparted information. But in math you only have to memorize the numbers and then at most a couple of characters for each concept. With a language there is so much more involved, you can’t possibly expect to progress in formulas at the same rate! Ugh, consider me triggered.

In first period the third graders had a debate. First of all, the topic was rather vague—living with robots, is it good or bad? The debaters couldn’t decide on the definition of a robot, which (I would think) should be the most fundamental step. Several students couldn’t speak clearly, and frequently the other team didn’t understand what was said. Then I checked a bunch of essays in which the majority of the students couldn’t write “His name is __” correctly. I’m really discouraged.

Tonight I have a drinking party with the male teachers at one of my elementary schools. Unfortunately it isn’t near Shiojiri station, and it’s supposed to rain tonight which makes cycling unpleasant at best. I’m not supposed to cycle anyway if I drink alcohol, but I could cycle to the restaurant and then walk the bike home if it isn’t raining. Google says it’s a 45-minute walk, and with the temperature as cold as it has been lately, that sounds a little miserable. But that’s probably what I will do.