Read Tune In Tokyo:The Gaijin Diaries for Free Online Page B

people, unless a student pays extra to have individual instruction. We have ten minutes between classes, during which we’re meant to grade each student on a number of points (listening, grammar, confidence, pronunciation, poise, dress sense, etc.), make recommendations, pass the file on to the next teacher, then get the files for our next class, open them up, and quickly choose a lesson that each hasn’t done yet or needs to do again based on comments written by a previous teacher.
    It’s all very stressful and crowded in the tiny teachers’ room as we scramble for the limited number of seats, sometimes ending up writing our files while leaning against the file cabinet that other teachers keep needing to use or sitting on someone’s lap. This sense of pandemonium coupled with the smell of burgers, fries, and chicken fingers wafting through the room sometimes makes me feel as if I’m not actually an English teacher at all, but a fry cook.
    Needless to say, we teachers have been forced to become intimate with one another, much like actors and actresses filming a love scene. Except our love scenes are every forty-five minutes and generally involve not two people, but ten.
    And to make our lives that much more exciting, there’s the persistent presence of Jill, our head teacher from Australia, a woman who, in spite of her fondness for brightly colored blazers and hair bleach, possesses all the warmth and approachability of a Salem, Massachusetts, prosecutor circa 1654.
    Jill likes to lord it over us minions with a firm hand and a furrowed brow. And, sometimes, a hot pink pantsuit. Her most pronounced personality trait, besides a tendency to dribble ketchup and mayonnaise all over herself while eating BK Flame Broilers, is her staunch Australian patriotism, coupled with a similarly staunch dislike of Americans. She’s surely the proudest, most irrationally nationalistic person from Australia I’ve ever met. Of course, most Australians are proud of their country and generally get a massive kick out of being Australian, it’s just that their pronouncements about their homeland don’t sound like government-sponsored propaganda the way Jill’s do.
    I’d recently overheard her chiding a student in one of her classes in her high-pitched Betty Boop squeal: “Why do you want to go to America? America is dangerous . Australia is much prettier, and the people are so much nicer.” Apparently she also works for the Australian Tourism Board.
    In Jill’s mind, she’s not doing her job as an English teacher in Japan if she’s not riffing on the international nightmare that is the USA.
    A few days ago I’d heard her say to a class of three stern-looking businessmen, “Americans are soooo lazy!” Which is fine, we are, fair enough, whatever. Sure, statistically we work longer days than anyone else in the world, but we also, statistically, probably ingest more kinds of fried potatoes while sitting on the couch for hours on end than any other country. But the fact that this statement is coming from a woman of about five feet eight inches and surely no less than 180 pounds somehow annoys me. She may hate Americans, but she sure as hell seems to love our Ben and Jerry’s New York Fudge Chunk Swirl.
    During these chaotic breaks between classes, when we teachers are using one another’s backs as makeshift writing surfaces so we can recommend that Hiro work on his pronunciation and sentence production or that Masako give up studying English and perhaps take up a more suitable hobby like hang gliding or miming, Jill likes to barge into the teachers’ room and pick a playful fight with any available American in the room—like, for example, me—and ask inane questions like, “Why do you people refer to fringe as bangs ? That’s so annoying.”
    Though her outrage at America’s total lack of respect for such a mainstay of the English language as the word fringe is certainly understandable, I am at a loss as to how exactly we are