Recently, at a family wedding, I was very distressed to find out that my year and a bit worth of teaching experience has not improved my ability to talk to children. I met a rather cool three year old (he could talk three languages and sing most of Frere Jacques) and, when called upon to talk to him, I decided to try and employ some of the tricks that I had no doubt mastered in my time as a teaching assistant.<\/p>\n
None came to mind.<\/p>\n
I think part of the problem here is that all my tricks are specifically for interacting with Japanese children. Their Japanese-ness, the fact that they don’t speak English as a first language, supercedes their youth in my mind: any time that I interact with them, I am accutely aware that most of what I say will go over their heads, in fact I’m counting on it.<\/p>\n
If you’ve met me in real life, and I hope for your sake that you haven’t, you’ll know that most of my conversation is made up of rote, base and wholly unwarranted sarcasm. In a Jane Austen novel, I’d be the undesirable lout of only five thousand a year who thinks he’s top drawer; in a Young Adult franchise, I’d the bitchy first teen that the protagonist meets, who later learns a lesson or gets torn apart by werewolves or something; in a Joss Whedon film…I think I’d actually do okay.<\/p>\n
Most adults can understand my conversation and thus tolerate it- children, however, don’t really get what I’m doing (I promise that I understand that that’s my fault and not theirs). I remember once saying to my neighbour’s son that I lived on Mars and he immediately made plans to follow me in my rocket ship home.<\/p>\n
I am ashamed to confess that I have not really altered this conversational tactic at all for when I am speaking with the little Japanese children. I still say things that are blatantly untrue in an unwavering deadpan- the good thing is, most of the time they don’t listen. Normally, they just want to hold my hand or pull my hair.<\/p>\n
But this three-year-old at the wedding spoke English (and German and Danish!) and he wasn’t one for just ignoring what the adults in his vicinity said. I tried to watch what I was saying (another favourite conversational trope of mine is profuse swearing), but it just meant that I ended up finding nothing at all to talk about and that I just didn’t feel like myself.<\/p>\n
I think sarcasm is now the load-bearing wall of my existence- without it, there’s no structure, just ego and drywall. The children at the wedding all thought me horribly dull because, unlike the other adults, I really couldn’t offer them anything. The parents, of course, were all prepared with a battalion of games and distractions- I wondered if I should try some of my standard time-fillers from the classroom, but they generally need a chalk board or some passing familiarity with Anpanman. Even the other childless grown-ups could at least find something fun to point out in the environs; my go-to dialogue set-piece with children is to say they have pretty hair (years ago, a kid responded to this with ‘I know’. I imagine he went on to great things.)<\/p>\n
When I saw some of my younger students after the wedding, I resolved to be better from there on out and not to use sarcasm anymore. I tried talking to them about the game they were playing and they responded with blank looks before jabbing me in the stomach, causing me to remark “yep, that’s what I thought.”<\/p>\n
Oh well, some habits die hard.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Recently, at a family wedding, I was very distressed to find out that my year and a bit worth of teaching experience has not improved my ability to talk to children. I met a rather cool three year old (he could talk three languages and sing most of Frere Jacques) and, when called upon to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false},"categories":[48,451,24],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5911"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/113"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5911\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hyogoajet.net\/hyogotimes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}