Phase 3

It feels to me as though my time at home in Washington this summer has been divided up into three distinct phases.  Phase One revolved around my Japanese class, which consumed nearly all of my spare time and attention.  Phase Two began several days after my class wrapped up, when Ben came home.  He'd been in "Teach for America" training in Phoenix up through the first week of July, and came home for a quick rest before leaving this morning for Kyle, South Dakota, where he will be teaching this coming year.  Phase Two involved a lot of down-time (since that was what Ben needed the most while he was home), and a lot of time spent in fellowship with folks from my home-church, Wiser Lake Chapel--to be precise, a Tuesday evening potluck and discussion lead by Ben, two weeks' worth of Wednesday evening softball games/barbecues, a Wednesday morning prayer meeting and, of course, both a morning and evening service this past Sunday.  It was a relatively uneventful 10 days, but provided a chance to catch up on rest after the intensity of the class I took (and really, the end of the school-year at CAJ, which had been followed closely by my summer class).

When Ben's Ford Explorer turned out of the driveway early this morning, Phase Three began.  This will last until I fly out for Japan on July 30.  It will be a quiet phase, with my brother away, my sister working and my parents leaving for several days next week.  It will be a time of reflection on what has been, of preparation for what's to come--both my return to Japan and the impending school-year.

Summer is a precious time to me, and each year, I wonder if I am really making the most of my summers.  Recently, someone commented that I must really like taking pictures of sunsets--as a matter of fact, I will drop what I am doing to go outside and watch a summer sunset from the field behind the house.  To stay inside when such a breathtaking show is taking place would seem a waste.  So, I go outside, and I watch, and I take pictures on the off-chance that at least one of my pictures will do justice to the scene I am enjoying.

At this time in my life, I am managing to straddle two worlds with relatively little hassle: the ceaselessly interesting and rewarding career that I'm building in Japan, and the abundant natural beauty and much needed family-time of Washington.  I realize that the way things are now is likely impermanent: I doubt I'll always live a routine of Christmas and Summer breaks spent in Washington with the rest of the time in Japan--inevitably, something will change.  So, for the time, I treasure this arrangement and hold fast until the next phase begins (not just of my summer, but of my life).

Imagination

"At last, we meet again... Ganon, king of thieves!"

I am Link, the hero of time, and I have scaled snow-capped mountains, fought through dark forests and crossed a treacherous ravine high above unforgiving rapids to reach this moment, this showdown to end all showdowns.

The beast Ganon lifts his head, tongue lolling obscenely, and a taunting sneer curls his lips, revealing yellow fangs.  This intimidates me, but I approach, unwilling to let the fear conquer me.

"You have stolen the mythical Triforce for the last time, you vile pig monster.  Now draw your weapon, and meet your maker!" I draw the legendary Master Sword and brandish it.

Our 10-year old Belgian Terveuren, Tango, is not amused by the sight of her 8-year old master yelling at her and waving around a dull machete, so she trots past me and back through the stream that I just put so much effort into crossing.

"Ohoho, a coward, are we?  Come back and fight like a man!" I call after the slovenly beast, who has beat a hasty retreat and somehow cleared the ravine in 5 seconds.

"Probably dark magic from the Triforce of Power", I mutter to myself.

I have no option but to give chase.  I sprint along the ravine to the rickety rope bridge that spans the chasm, and deciding that this is no time for caution, I bound across the bridge, which sways and creaks uncertainly below me.  Far below, I can hear the rushing of the rapids, warning the brave and inviting the foolish.

The logs that I had placed across the shallow stream are, unfortunately, more IN the water than they are over the water and are, as a result, somewhat slippery.

"GAAAH!" I'm nearly across the bridge when the rope snaps under the pressure of my footfall and for a brief, sickening moment, I am in free-fall...

Then, I catch a shrub that was, most fortuitously, jutting from the otherwise bare rock-face and I climb the cliff quickly, finding the right foot-holds and hand-holds on the first try.  Hoisting myself back onto solid ground, I spy the retreating form of the despicable Ganon disappearing behind a bend in the path ahead.  

"Stop in the name of the law of Hyrule!" I bellow, and decide that this is the time for a new strategy.  I sheath the legendary blade and take my bow from across my back.  Deftly, I draw an arrow from the quiver, string it, and pulling back the arrow, I aim high above the tree line.  I adjust, noting that the wind seems to be strong today.  If my aim is true, I will stop Ganon in his hideous tracks, and have done away with the shroud of evil that has darkened the land as of late.

My bow-string is made of slightly too much barn twine, and is not at all taut.  The arrow that I'd made by whittling a point onto the straightest twig I could find in the woods falls lamely to the ground at my feet.

"Drat!  I've misfired.  That never happens--it's dark sorcery, that's what it is.  Curse you, Ganon!  Curse you from the dizzying heights of Death Mountain to the bowels of the underworld from whence you came!"

I search my pack for a tool that might just save the day... surely there must be something that I have forgotten.

"YES!  PEGASUS BOOTS!" I exclaim, retrieving the fabled footwear from my pack.  The Pegasus Boots endow the wearer with extraordinary speed.  

Using more barn-twine, I tie two cardboard wings to my muddy rubber boots and begin to run as fast as I can.

I feel as though I am flying, that my feet are like the hoofs of the winged-horse of myth.  Except, the myth has been born into glorious reality on this day, as the boots carry me swiftly across a journey that had taken oh, so many days to make the first time.  The terrain changes below me, from cliff, to moss, to marsh, to sand, to field... and then, in front of me:

"GANON!" I gasp, coming to a sudden, yet graceful halt.

Tango lazily walks in a small circle three times, and then plops down on the grass for a nap.  

The beast teeters, and collapses before my eyes.  As its bulk hits the surface of the earth, a mighty quake rocks everything around me, but when the shaking stops--stillness.  Perhaps it was the chase did him in.  Perhaps it was fear of the legendary blade, or the wrath of my bow.  Perhaps it was the power of the seven sages.  One thing, and one alone is clear: I have defeated the beast; I have defeated Ganon!

I draw my blade and wave it in the air triumphantly.

"Long live Hyrule!" I shout, and the sky seems to clear all of a sudden, the despair and gloom lifting with the demise of the grotesque Ganon.  I sheath the blade for what may be the last time and the giant, revolting carcass of Ganon disappears in a puff of smoke.  When the smoke clears, I spy the fair Princess Zelda, waking from her enchanted slumber.  I kneel before the princess.

"M'lady.  I have slain the ferocious monster, Ganon, and freed Hyrule from the grips of evil.  I do not ask for anything in return, no reward, no land, no kiss.  My sole request is that you rule with justice and with goodness."

Tango, who seems relieved that her new role involves no yelling or machete-waving, licks my face forcefully, and with no shortage of slobber.

I withdraw, revolted. 

"Uggh, Princess!  I said 'NO KISS!'"

The End.  Because it was dinner-time and I had to go inside.

ヤッター！ (...I guess?)

The good news: I completed Japanese 202 with an A!

The bad news: I'm not satisfied with an A... not really.


I guess I should be proud of the work that I did--after all, I was allowed to join the class despite the fact that I had not taken two prerequisite courses (Japanese 103 and 201), and had actually forgotten a significant amount of the grammar and kanji that I learned in Japanese 101 and 102 several years ago.  This handicap meant working extremely hard to get caught up in the early days of the class, and constantly having to do extra work throughout the course to fill the gaps in my understanding.

In this regard, I was successful, and this is what is reflected in my grades.  Not only did I relearn the kanji and the grammar that I had forgotten, I learned at least 64 new kanji (not counting the kanji that I had to teach myself in the process of catching up), as well as decent amount of new vocabulary and grammar points.  I feel like my ability to read Japanese silently improved the most, as I'm rapidly growing in my ability to decode kanji and see kana as groups of words, and not just individual characters.

However, my real purpose in taking the class was to gain a higher level of comfort in both my listening and speaking.  This is where I feel dissatisfied.  Though I know a lot more words and phrases than I did when I started the class just a few weeks ago (and can therefore recognize more words and phrases while I listen), I still sort of freeze up when I'm listening to Japanese spoken at normal conversation pace--in other words, the knowledge I've gained has not helped my confidence much.  Likewise, I am still very unsure of myself as I try to speak Japanese, still very self-conscious.  Perhaps it was the natural consequence of being the only student out of the three in the class who did not take Japanese 103 and 201, but my classmates were much more fluent in their ability to read aloud, much quicker to respond when asked questions.  My speech is filled with a high amount of stammering as I mispronounce and try to self-correct, pauses as I stop to think about which grammar to use and an air of hesitation that betrays my fear that I am speaking incorrectly.  This is very tough for me, as I pride myself on my expressiveness and fluency in the English language; I'm not used to struggling to express myself verbally.  And even though I grew in my ability to read silently, reading out loud has proved more challenging as I am so concerned about pronunciation that I still read the kana character by character and have to stop and think about which reading of the kanji I need to say (knowing what a kanji means while reading silently and knowing how to say it while speaking out loud are very different, as it turns out).

My professor was very patient and encouraging through all of this, and I appreciated her teaching style. I can't blame her for my lack of self-confidence--she created a safe and supportive environment, and I never shied away from trying to speak--I just became more aware of my limited ability.  Two weeks is a short amount of time and maybe too short to really see the fruit of speaking and listening practice, so maybe I am being overly hard on myself.  In any case, it is clear to me that simply having an A on my transcript for what now comes out to almost two years of Japanese is no guarantee that I will be able to speak or listen effectively.  I've got the knowledge--it's up to me now to USE that knowledge; to get out, away from CAJ and practice constantly; to practice enough that each conversation feels low-stake, so I do not need to panic about errors in my speaking or gaps in my listening; to constantly be asking questions and taking the steps to get back on track when understanding falls apart.

In other words, I'm going to need to be proactive.  This is so tough to do when the safety of an English-speaking community such as CAJ is so comfortable... but it's been 3 and a half years since I moved to Japan, and with each day that goes by, I become more and more embarrassed about my woeful inability to communicate and to understand in the way that I wish to.  It's time for a change in where and how I spend my time outside of school.

Getting sick in June... what is this?

Whew...  What a week that was... It seems like my immune system is timed precisely so that I do not get sick all that much during the school-year.  In fact, I've never missed more than a day of teaching consecutively because of illness... and in 3 full years of teaching, the number of full days I've missed because of illness can be counted on two hands with room to spare.  Unfortunately, this precision comes with the drawback of inevitability: I know that I cannot hold off illness forever, and often I get sick on the very first day when I have nothing to do--typically, that is the first day of vacation.

The same was true this year--though I'd been back in Washington for almost a week before the cold I'd been fighting finally caught up with me, I'd managed to stay quite busy with class up until that point.  So, last Saturday, though I rejoiced at my first day off in a while, I knew as soon as I woke up with a sore throat that I wouldn't be able to fully enjoy the rest.

One week later, and I am on the tail-end of the cold.  I'm still not feeling 100%, but I am pretty sure I'm almost out of the woods (I had to knock on wood after I typed that).  It was a miserable week, though--due to the intense and fast-paced nature of my summer Japanese class, I decided that I could not afford to miss a single day of class, and so wound up working through the worst of my cold.  Not a good start to the summer, and it definitely played a part in my deciding to not register for Japanese 203, which runs through the month of July.  On top of all that, the weather this week was unseasonably cold, blustery and rainy.  While this eased my conscience for staying indoors more than I would have otherwise, it definitely added to the distinctly un-Summerlike feeling of the past week.

Now, with my cold finally easing up, July (and hopefully clear, sunny weather) about to begin, and only 3 days of class left, I can look forward to the vacation that I've needed.  Maybe the contrast will help me to enjoy the coming vacation even more.

The First Week of Summer

It's been a week since I last posted anything, and quite a lot has happened:  For starters, I packed up and moved out of my apartment, and put my stuff (packed into several suitcases) in storage so that I can move into a new apartment when I return to Japan.  I'll be living on my own starting in August, so that will be a big change.  Second, I flew back to the U.S. on Monday.  This actually didn't feel like all that big of a deal--it was my 16th flight across the ocean, and having only just done the round trip a month ago, my internal clock was more or less prepared for the change.  Jet-lag has not been bad at all this time!

Then again, part of the quick adjustment could have to do with the fact that I started Summer Quarter at Western Washington University the day after I got back.  In fact, before I even went home on Monday, I stopped by WWU to fill out and submit an application for summer registration.  Thus, for the 3rd summer in a row, I am a student again!  This summer, I am taking Japanese 202.  It is a 4-credit class, and it meets from 10:00-12:50 every week-day, for 3 weeks.  Today, Friday, we took our first unit test, which marked roughly 1/3 completion of the course.

I am incredibly grateful to be taking this class, but honestly, I have never struggled so much just to keep up and get by in a single class before.  The trouble is, I only took Japanese 101 and 102 two summers ago.  I did not take Japanese 103 and 201, which are both technically prerequisites for the class I am currently taking.  Furthermore, I forgot most of the kanji (Japanese writing characters) and grammar points while I was in Japan, due to my rather narrow application of my language skills (mostly going to Tully's).  However, I spoke to the professor before class on Tuesday morning and she agreed to let me sit in on the class and see if it seemed doable.  And, it did seem doable.  There are only two other students in the class, and both of them have had a gap since their last Japanese class (they took 201 last fall).  That said, they are both leagues ahead of where I am in their ability to recognize and read kanji.  They are also familiar with grammar points I never learned.

My vocab keeps me in the ball-game, though.  Turns out I have a pretty broad base for Japanese vocabulary!  Still, each day is a struggle.  I can now sympathize with my students who have learning disabilities that target language processing.  I feel very impaired and slow as I try to read passages from the textbook, halting as I try to recall which kanji I am looking at and how it should be read.  I also find myself taking long stretches of time in the middle of speaking simply to think about what I'm saying, how I need to conjugate the verb, and what phrase I must use to end the sentence.

My time outside of class is not much easier.  I've spent about 6 hours already just catching up on kanji that I missed--that's in addition to assigned homework!  All told, it has eaten up my free-time (but kept my brain working and kept me from the grips of debilitating jet-lag).

Despite the sheer uphill battle involved in merely attending and knowing what is going on in class, the experience has been of inestimable value to me.  In 4 short days, I feel like my understanding of the Japanese language has almost doubled (which I guess it has, if you count all of the vocab, grammar and kanji that I'd learned two summers ago, forgotten, and now remembered).  I now know the meaning and proper use of phrases like "toomoteimasu" (I intend to/I think), "nakuchaikemasen" (must do), "nikyoumigaaru" (to have an interest in)--all phrases that I'd heard before... but until this week, they had been a jumble of syllables that held no meaning to me, and in fact stood in the way of my recognizing other vocab and grammar that I did know.  Now, these syllables, which seemed so chaotic and random before, mean something to me and the Japanese language has come into focus for me just a little bit more.  It reminds me of trips to the eye doctor, as they switch the lenses in that giant viewfinder, and the view becomes sharper and sharper.

Though the class is indeed muzukashi (difficult), I can already feel the benefits.  I don't think I've ever dedicated myself so fully to a single class, especially one that was a struggle for me.  I tended not to do quite as well in math and science when I was in high school, but I never felt like those subjects had much direct application to my life, or long-term importance to me, so I never put my full weight into pushing through them.  With this class, the importance is clear to me and I am willing to do whatever it takes to understand (regardless of grades--I couldn't care less about whether I end up passing or failing; that's not what's important to me).  I wonder how I can get my students to this point in Humanities and English class--the point where they feel the subject is so valuable that they would do whatever it took to fully understand (and not just get a good grade).

Anyway, it will be a good summer (though it already feels as though it might speed by)!  I might not be writing as regularly, but I do hope to write at least once or twice a week... stay tuned!

Questions about home

In three days, I will be in the air, flying over the Pacific.  Considering that I was in Washington just 3 weeks ago, this year has held more back and forth for me than usual.  It's always so bittersweet to take this trip, regardless of which way I'm going, and typically the trip causes me to wonder just where home is for me. 

What has been revealed to me so clearly this year is that home is where God leads me.  This year has been tough in ways that other years have not been: knowing all year that one of my only other guy friends here would be leaving Japan at the end of the year, trying to get back into dating and questioning whether I'll find "the one" here, dealing with various frustrations in and out of the classroom...  In the face of challenges, loneliness and disappointment, my gut instinct was to ask "Is this really supposed to be home for me?"

Here's what God has shown me: if my definition of home depends on friends, if it depends on always feeling comfortable and successful, or depends on the possibility of finding my future wife, then I am way off-base in my priorities.  If those factors become the ultimate goal in my life, or in my mind the ultimate source of fulfillment, then I am not truly living a life of humble service and worship. 

Rather, home is where God leads me.  Even in the frustrating and challenging moments, home is where God leads me.  A colleague of mine who has been at CAJ for many years as the choir director often tells me that because our citizenship is in Heaven, we are enabled to live in a variety of places.  What a reassuring truth.  I have slowly been detaching myself from a mentality that defines the usefulness of a place by the potential from friendship, relationships and always feeling comfortable and realizing that I simply need to follow God, for where He leads, I find my true home.  This is incredibly freeing... with this in mind, I do not need to wonder or worry if I am where I'm supposed to be, or if I'm supposed to be somewhere else.  I simply need to trust that because God has lead me to a place, I can treat that place like home; put down roots, settle, engage, and simply BE where I am.  Rather than feel torn between places, or doubtful as to what home means, I should rejoice in the gift of several homes, and trust to follow when God calls me to follow and stay when God calls me to stay. 

Year's End

Being a teacher makes for a weird sense of time and routine.  Beholden as I am to the school calendar, I find myself referring to "the end of the year" a lot these days.  This has made for interesting moments in conversations with people outside of the CAJ community: when I say I'm busy because the year is almost over, they look at me as though I'm insane, or at least temporally discombobulated.

Yet, it is undeniable that the end of the school-year has more literal significance to me than does the end of the calendar year.  The transition between 2011 and 2012, as with most other years (needless Y2K panic aside), was mostly symbolic.  Not much changes between December 31 and Jan. 1.  However, a lot can change between June and August.  Students grow and so do teachers.  I find that the opportunity for reflection, forward planning and learning that summer provides is precisely the kind of foundation that gives goal-setting traction.  New Year's Resolutions often fail, and I think part of that is because the process of setting resolutions is hastily done and lacks the care and thought that goes into summer planning for teachers on vacation. 

Some argue that this is too long of a vacation, too disruptive to student learning.  Perhaps this is true and perhaps American schools should reevaluate the length and structure of the school-year.  I'm not about to upset the apple-cart, though--I am ready for a vacation.  I spent roughly 16 hours of my weekend grading and then maybe 5 more hours over the past two days finishing up my grade-books.  I submitted my final grades earlier this afternoon and then promptly crashed in bed with a massive tension headache.  The nap helped, but I know that my body, mind and spirit are craving a longer rest.

So now, I transition.  I'll start thinking of the 2011-2012 school-year as "last year" and begin to consider the school-year as a whole (very tough to do in the moment when there are still immediate challenges to be dealt with and tasks to be accomplished).  That reflection will lead me to think through what I want to change, what I want to improve about my classes, what I need to add or subtract or practice to become a better teacher for my students.  I often feel a sense of purposelessness during the summer, but as each passing year ends, I am left with a clearer picture of my growth and my areas of need.  As this year has drawn to a close, I now commit my time of rest, reflection and growth to God.  May He grant me the wisdom and patience that I need to become who He wants me to be, both within and outside of the classroom.