Last night I had the dreaded thing we learn about in CTESL class - a critical incident.

I had a great activity planned for the night. I had spent the afternoon making up random restaurants (like "Curry in a Hurry" an Indian take-out restaurant...can't take the credit for it tho, it was a restaurant in Waterloo) and simple menus for these restaurants. Nothing big that we hadn't learned yet. I split the class into servers and customers, and asked the customers to leave the room. The servers were given a few minutes to study their individual menus. We had Curry in a Hurry, "Penny's" family restaurant (no relation to Denny's!), Very Veggie, and Uncle Joe's Pizza. The customers outside were given slips of paper which had complaints on them. They had to complain at one of the restaurants. Complaints ranged from burnt food, cold food, the restaurant is too hot/cold, etc. They also got comment cards to fill out, as well as a wad of fake money.

So off they went, interacting with each other. At the end, I asked questions like, "who was the best server?" "Who was the slowest server?" "Who was the friendliest customer?" "Who was the most difficult customer?" (one man was easily voted as the most difficult because he refused to eat at any restaurant that didn't serve wine or beer and didn't like any of the food.) And, of course, "who gave the most tips?" One lady was easily the most generous because she left a $50 tip at one restaurant! It was very fun, and everyone was having a good time.

Then we took a break and when we resumed, I had the class switch up. Servers were now customers and vice versa. That's when it happened.

As I walked in to brief the new servers, I was told by the crazy lady in my class (I know I'm not supposed to have favourites or anything, but she's definitely my least favourite) that "everyone does not like this." Now, she's pulled the "everyone" thing before where it was only HER wanting something and saying "everyone" and meanwhile the rest of the class was shushing her. But really, all the "servers" ganged up on me, and said they didn't like the activity. It was boring (odd, it was "fun" just before break...), and they didn't actually have any money to go to restaurants anyway, so they didn't feel it was useful. And, if they did go to restaurants, they would just go to Chinese restaurants because the food is "delicious" whereas Canadian food is not. One lady told me that she goes to restaurants with her son and he orders, so she doesn't have to. Does no one want to be able to make their own choices and speak for themselves?! The most incredulous excuse was that this was not language suitable for old people. This guy has come up with that excuse before, that it's not "old man" English.

Anyway, this happened with about an hour's class time left. I said, "okay fine, but we have an hour left, and I don't have anything else planned. So what do you WANT to learn?" Oh, of course they want to learn hospital stuff. It was actually in the lesson plan for tomorrow. Crazy lady said she wanted to read stuff from newspapers. I'm like, "are you kidding me?! You're complaining about a simple menu and you THINK you can read even a short newspaper article?!" I don't think so.

At this point, I was really tempted to be like, "if you really don't want to do this, feel free to go home." But FINE. So I called the customers back into the room, and they were a little confused. I explained that people don't want to do this anymore (obviously the "servers" had gone on strike). One customer said in Chinese, "but....the teacher had this planned..." I'm like, DAMN STRAIGHT I HAD THIS PLANNED!!! and kind of feeling like a small point had been scored for the good side.

But fine. The activity wouldn't have worked if the servers had all gone on strike. So we did review. We reviewed medical symptoms. But just so they wouldn't get away with the restaurant thing completely, I said, "if you ate at a restaurant and start to feel sick..." so we talked about food poisoning and food allergies. It was deathly dry, but hey, that's what they like.

I was tempted to do a week of grammar lessons to make things miserable, but they'd actually like that, and it would kill me more.

I guess the long and short of it is that I shouldn't take it personally, but that's just the way I am. I am taking it personally. The other teacher, who teaches a level above mine, asked me not to ever promote the crazy lady because she doesn't want her in her class. She made me feel better saying it was a good activity for that level and their attitude is why they don't make much progress. Now someone please translate that into Chinese...

Another week gone by. Saturday afternoon, we hopped in the car and braved the rainy weather out to Lane's cottage. There weren't many people there when we arrived, and everyone was suffering from mild cabin fever from the rain. When the rain let up a bit, the boys went looking for wood to burn. I went to try my luck fishing off the dock. I caught a small rock bass and tossed him back. Later, it took much gasoline to get the wet wood started up, but then we had our bonfire. More and more people started to show up, most of them were strangers to us, and quite late into the night, John and I realized that there would probably be nowhere to sleep. We didn't quite expect like, 30 people to be there! At almost 2am we decided that we were better off going home to sleep, so we left. Turns out at least 3 other ppl slept in their cars rather than in the cottage. We got home at about 4am and just passed out.

Sunday, I finally picked up my mail, and got my contract. I am going to what I think is the second-largest city in Okayama Prefecture (second, of course, to the Prefectural capital of Okayama City). I'll be in Kurashiki city. My base school is called Okayama Prefectural Kurashiki Minami Senior High School, although after looking it up, it might actually be a junior high school. Whatever. I've been told that it has an International Studies special program, as well as an Intensive English program. Woohoo, at least that means the kids might actually WANT to learn English!

And, the best news of all....is that instead of being hired by an individual school, I've been hired by the Okayama Prefectural Board of Education. A BoE is definitely the way to go!! This one is subsidizing my rent by Y30,000/month (about $300 Cdn). How exciting! That'll just about cover my minimum student loan repayments. :(