muttermutter

About ten minutes ago I was brought a bowl of sliced pear and kiwi in a bed of white yogurt by one of the few kids in the special ed class at my junior high. The boy and a girl came in, and there was much fuss as the girl gave her bowl to the tea lady (aka lunch lady), and the boy gave his bowl to me. I don't know how I got chosen out of all the teachers, but whether it was the teacher's suggestion or the kid thought it up himself, I was touched. This is the same boy, whose name I unfortunately do not know, who I spent about twenty minutes with a few months ago.

I was conducting an afterschool "practice for the STEP test" English quiz, which was basically just a reading comprehension piece I made up earlier in the day. Six of my third year girls were trying to pass the standardized STEP English test, and came to me for extra help. The first afterschool meeting was really strange, as they all seemed really nervous to be sitting in a small, white, rectangular room furnished only with a table, chairs, and me. As they are all 14 or 15 years old, I felt a lot more like being their friends than being this strict teacher, but even if they realized that, they couldn't get past feeling nervous at having to speak a foreign language in such an intimate environment.

A few days later that same rectangular room was occupied with a teacher lecturing a misbehaving student. So, I was moved to a mysterious room farther down the hall, which had handwritten posters on the wall in English saying things like "I have a cat which is fluffy and white." It didn't matter to me much where I handed the girls their papers and let them read quietly to themselves. But as school had just ended and sometimes kids have lots of things to pack up, it took the girls awhile in coming. So as not to leave me without company, a random teacher brought in the aforementioned special ed boy. There are only four kids in the special ed class here, which throws further mystery on what the Japanese do with Those That Be Diff'ent. In my relatively little experience with the special ed students, they all seemed pretty well behaved and nice.

After surveying the wall art, I sat down at the desk and sifted through my handouts, brainstorming more questions in case the girls thought the passage was too easy. Meanwhile the Boy was wandering around the room, but I didn't pay much attention until I started noticing just how much wandering he was doing. Soon I realized he had somehow procured a VCR manual in English, and was busily transporting said item to different parts of the room, all the while muttering the same phrase over and over. After the manual had made its pilgrimage a few times to my desk, I got up, kind of feeling like maybe I was unwittingly ruining the peace of the room. I spent the next ten minutes wandering out of the way of the boy, who though often muttered near me, never actually interacted with me at all. Thank God, I don't know what I would have done if I had somehow needed to figure out just what he was muttering.