Today was my second day at school and my first day actually going to class. It was also the first day of doing my Self Introduction, which by the way, sucked big-time. It started good. I wrote my name on the board and even forced a few of the poor bastards to try pronouncing my last name, which, to my surprise, a few of them actually came pretty close to getting right. Then I did my intro to Oregon and Portland and mentioned the fact that I like anime (which they were all amused by).
On the whole, the students were cool while I was talking and seemed to actually be understanding more of what I was saying than I had anticipated. Then came the part where I asked them to ask me questions. I’m pretty sure I heard a cricket in the back of the room. This was crap – I knew they had about 10 billion things to ask but they just weren’t saying anything. I was choking hard, unsure of how to proceed. That’s when they started to hurl pencils and books at me while shouting, “Yuu suckko!!” Not really, but I could tell they were daydreaming about it. The next few classes that I gave the presentation for seemed to go smoother, so maybe I’ll get some class participation out of them yet.
To finish up, I’ll leave you with one of the simultaneously amusing and random occurances I was talking about earlier, that just don’t happen to me when I’m in America.
I decided it would be a good idea to ask one of the teachers for a seating chart of the students so I’m not repeatedly calling them, “Hey, you.” To this end I grabbed my handy electronic dictionary, typed in ‘seating chart’ and and what should pop up, but the entry for ‘sea trout.’ I was tired and it was the end of the day, so I figured that was close enough and went ahead and asked the teacher my question. In retrospect, she looked pretty confused.