Tales of an Engrish teacher, ichi ban.

It's nearly impossible to get Corin to write a blog post, as evidenced by every post on this blog, thus far, having been written by me. However, he generally comes home with much better stories than I do so I'm going to start compiling them here for posterity's sake. 

Case in point: The best story I have from class involves a very good English student at Meiki insisting on being called "Linda." I have yet found the right moment to inform him that Linda is, in fact, a girl's name. 

See? Not very good. But Corin, Corin has some killer stories. He goes to some of the "other" schools in the Kushiro area, those basically full of the students that didn't have high enough test scores to attend school within Kushiro's city limits. He has students who are entirely undisciplined in the classroom, the teachers having all but given up controlling them. On top of his unpredictable high school students, he also has worked with elementary and junior high school students at past English camps. One of these camps produced one of the best ESL blunders to date. It's amazing how changing one little letter can do to the meaning of a sentence. 

At the end of camp, all of the students and ALTs were asked to write cards for each other. Corin made some super cute cards featuring characatchers (<----is that even a word?) of himself and Sadie, another ALT in our area who was his partner during camp. He received some very sweet cards in return. One of them was from a little boy who was, as Corin puts it, "a space case." This kid had written a very nice card, one that I'm sure was an attempt at expressing his happy sentiments in making part of the farewell dinner with Corin and Sadie. The farewell dinner had been held the night before, each group of junior high and elementary school students taking care of a different part of the meal. Corin's group's assignment had been to prepare salads and rice crispy treats for the dinner. The preparing had gone fairly well and I believe the boy intended to write "thank you for helping us cook salad and rice crispy treats" on Corin's card. However, he didn't complete one pesky letter in the word "cook" and he will now be remembered for eternity as the kid who made Corin look like a pedophile.

I won't actually write what he wrote because the type of people who might put that particular phrase into a search engine, and possibly be led to this post, are not exactly the sort I want finding our personal blog. So thus, a picture of the card must suffice. It's probably better that way anyway...

Sorry, I can't get the photo to rotate...but you get the idea!

Corin also had an exciting class earlier this week in which he was supposed to play a game of Jeopardy. The teams were supposed to come up with their own names, and in true bad boy/girl fashion, the students wanted to be the Mother F***ers and the B*tches <insert incredibly bad katakana Engrish here>. Yes, these are students who can barely say "My name is ...." and yet they are coming up these options for team names. Being the awesome man he is, and taking their very poor pronunciation into consideration, Corin wrote "Mazda Hawks" and "Three Cheeses." God, I love this man.