Met up with Ashley no problem and arrived in Seoul last night.

There was apparently a big earthquake in northern Iwate prefecture that closed the Tohoku Shinkansen (bullet train) on the morning I would have flown out. This happened to be the same day my visa expired. I wouldn’t have made it to the airport on time if I hadn’t had the amazing psychic foresight to spend the night before in Tokyo.

So I’m here. Had a little trouble finding the youth hostel (the same one I’d stayed at 3 years ago) but an elderly gentleman helped us out.

Today I have no idea what we’re gonna do. Maybe just bum around, eat, and drink. We shall see.

I’m running in circles. Four days left until I have to move out of my apartment, four days until I leave the country, and eight days until I arrive back home. Cleaning, packing, making arrangements to say my goodbyes to everyone. That last one has become more and more difficult, to the point where I have scheduled each one of my lunches and dinners for the past few days.

On top of that, I’m trying to do the following, all at once:

• Buy parts for a new computer, through a credit card company and retailer in another country
• Cancel my phone, internet (both ISP and physical line), gas, electricity, water, and bank account
• Send all that money home
• Pack 2 boxes for sending clothes and stuff home
• Send said boxes
• Figure out how to stuff everything else into my 2 suitcases
• Clean the entire apartment tip to tail
• Sneeze madly while doing the above, from the toxic amounts of dislodged dust
• Get rid of all the excess junk I’ve accumulated over the years, along with several pieces of junk which were here when I arrived
• Make arrangements to ship one of the boxes to be picked up after I come back from Korea, but before I have to board my flight home
• Sell my car
• Not forget important things like my camera, laptop, passport, or towel

Holy shit. I was gonna sleep in this morning but Planet Earth had other ideas. A magnitude 7.0 quake centered pretty much on my goddamn apartment woke me up some minutes before 9am. The room started shaking violently, to the point where I leapt from my bedding and dove for the doorframe. The shaking continued for about 30 seconds.

During the quake, several pieces of furniture pretty much moved away from the wall on their own. Two mugs fell from the shelves and shattered on the floor, my 50 pound CRT walked itself about a foot across my desk, the microwave nearly fell from the top of the refrigerator, and my motorcycle, which was on its stand, completely fell over.

The plural form in English is very difficult for many language students to master, especially if their native language has no plural form. Most of the time it just sounds wrong, but plurals have some very subtle connotations that can change the meaning of a sentence substantially. Read the following sample sentences:

I like dogs.
I like dog.

The first is a statement about pet preference, and the second about your choice of cuisine. Sometimes the difference is more subtle:

Hamburger is enjoyed by many people.
Hamburgers are enjoyed by many people.

In this case it works, because “hamburger” is both a type of meat and a discrete countable food item. But usually it doesn’t work:

Is pen used in outer space?
Are pens used in outer space?

The second sentence uses the plural form to express generality; a “pen” is a generic type of object which may or may not be used in space. But the first sentence doesn’t use a plural, so when a native speaker reads the first sentence a specifier is required. Which pen? This pen? Your pen? The sentence as written is incorrect because that information is missing.

The complicated part is that some objects are discrete and countable, while others are not. This leads to much confusion. “Sushi” for some reason is not countable. Neither is “money”– but you can count “dollars”. “Rice” isn’t discrete, but we can count “grains of rice”. Animals are countable, but the meat product derived from them is not. Liquids are not countable, but containers and measurements of them are (and we go to great lengths to make plurals like “bottles of soda” or “gallons of gasoline”). Water of course isn’t countable, but the waters of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers combine to flow into the Gulf of Mexico. Quite confusing, isn’t it?

This morning I actually taught a middle school lesson as I wanted to for the first time. It was to a class of one, a “troublesome student” who doesn’t want to study with the rest of her class. In my mind she’s one of the smartest first years I’ve met; she’s already figured out that the school system is largely a load of crap. The trouble wasn’t that she thought this way– many students slack off in class, fall asleep, or otherwise just tune out. But she actually said something about it, and she quietly maintains her position despite a lot of pressure from above. For this reason she’s been put into a separate room by herself, because while she still comes to school I guess nobody really knows what to do with her. Another English teacher at the school described her as “haughty, with a superiority complex”. She’s a true independent thinker in a sea of drones.

The vice principal, figuring she’s a lost cause and at least I couldn’t do any harm, asked if I wanted to go in and talk to her this morning. I didn’t speak a word of Japanese. Like any student I’ve met here she was nervous and afraid to make mistakes, but her pronunciation was actually pretty good. Using only hand gestures I got her to start thinking in English, just for a moment. The moment of clarity struck when I got her to not just repeat “My book, your book” but to use them correctly in context. After that I had her write her name on her textbook (which she hadn’t opened or used yet) and taught her how to write uppercase and lowercase letters on a sheet of primer paper.

About halfway through the lowercase letters, after the vice principal had left the room, she stopped and made a remark in Japanese that she hated studying. I chuckled and agreed that studying was annoying, and asked her what her long term goals were. We talked for a bit about short term and long term goals, and I mentioned that in order to reach her long term goals, in the short term she would need to learn certain things in school and use those as stepping stones. I told her about my long term goals in teaching her English: speaking, listening, reading, and writing, and while I think she grasped the necessity of learning to write the alphabet, she also said that she has trouble keeping both her long term goals and short term goals in mind. We finished up quickly, and I told her that tomorrow we’d practice speaking some more.

I think that motivation is going to be the toughest part. Since she doesn’t want to study, I think the best tactic is to couch things in a manner that isn’t normal studying. Speaking and listening should be easy, but writing is going to be tough; I’m going to avoid directly using the textbook. I’m going to try to put into practice all the things I’ve wanted to– speaking practice, using the language in context, phonics, getting her to think on her feet…. If I expect a lot I should get a lot. For the first time in awhile, I feel challenged.

You know, sometimes there are moments in the staffroom when you’re sitting around and there’s no students to interact with and everyone is doing their best to look busy so the boss doesn’t yell at them. It’s moments like these that are just ripe for a good prank.

I’ve been recording my voice for a set of video tutorials and at one point in the middle I paused, sneezed loudly into the headset microphone, and then continued. I cut it out of the tutorial of course, but that same isolated sneeze was too perfect to just discard. I added about 7 seconds of silence to the beginning and saved it as an audio file. Then I walked over to one of the “public” staffroom computers and set that sound to pretty much every built-in Windows sound. I unmuted the volume control, fixed the speakers (which had been plugged into the wrong jack) and turned up the volume. I then walked back to my desk.

What I didn’t expect was for some automated program to trigger the “exclamation” sound on its own about every hour or so. Every so often the computer would emit a quite convincing sneeze, at which point everyone looked around, and assumed it was someone else. It worked so well because the sound was so brief that nobody could tell where it was coming from. After several hours of this someone walked over and started using the computer, and the trap was sprung. A short while after a program was opened, the computer would sneeze. When a program was closed, the computer would wait and then sneeze. The sound was distant enough from the triggering event that nobody figured out they were associated, and in fact the poor sap using the computer was having a tough time convincing everyone else he wasn’t actually sneezing. Eventually they figured out it was coming from the computer. As the murmuring in the staffroom grew and the resident computer expert fiddled through menus trying to figure out where the sound was coming from, the desktop went through a sort of digital hay fever; every 7 seconds a sneeze was heard. Finally a rather bright English teacher turned off the speakers, and the joke was played out.

Much better than taping aluminum foil to a cubicle.