Bye, Minnie

Many years ago, I used to work at a daycare center as a nurse. I don't know about what other countries' daycare centers are like, but this is one custom my daycare had: GOHOBI SEAL, a reward seal.

Whether it's a cold winter, a hot summer, a windy, or a rainy day, the children must come to the daycare. Sometimes, of course, they don't feel like coming to the daycare, but when they get to the classroom, they are able to put a sticker in their attendance book which has a very pretty picture on it. It's the daycare's way of making the children want to come to school. If you could make it to the daycare for a full month without one absence, you will get a special sticker, which is shiny gold.

The satisfaction the children get by collecting the stickers helps them understand the importance of coming to daycare every day.

A few years later...

It was the last class of the month, in the last few minutes of class time. The teacher called me, "Minnie, You haven't been absent for the past month." She presented me with a piece of paper.

It was a "PERFECT ATTENDANCE AWARD" There was applause from my classmates. Yes, I was a serious student. I went to every class. I paid for these lessons myself, not my company or my parents. This was my investment, my opportunity to improve my English so I took my lessons as seriously as I could.

There are people who become too lazy to come to the lessons all the time or they lost interest in English. Some of my classmates had jobs and they sometimes had to do overtime. Therefore they might cancel a lesson. So, what is this AWARD!

It didn't mean anything to me. I even got another couple of "PERFECT ATTENDANCE AWARDS", too. Then I moved to another class. It was my first class with a native speaker.

I felt like the door was open. Our teacher was a new face at the school. She said she came from Toronto yesterday. And she's already working. After the class, we had a welcome party for her. We went to an IZAKAYA and ordered many kinds of food: Sashimi, Tempura, Okonomiyaki, ...but she was a vegetarian.

We didn't mean anything bad, but it looked like an initiation party. We asked many of questions of her like, What did you do in Toronto? What is your hobby? Etc. etc. Then came "The Question"! "What is your blood type?" "Oh boy, I'm still in Japan" I thought. This is a typical Japanese question, not just in eikaiwa classes. But it sounds creepy!! I just don't like the question personally. We had a good time but she must have been very tired that day.

After a couple of months something changed in my mind. I don't know how can I explain this feeling. I felt that my time spent at GEOS was like time spent at Disneyland. It was very childish and not very educational. I felt more like a customer than a student. I felt sorry for the teachers who really had to entertain more than teach.

I refused to continue my contract. That was campaign time, too. They showed me a picture of a mountain bike I could win if I renewed and was lucky. I still refused to continue my contract. At that time I had just passed a placement test at another language school. I hoped the new school would be more serious. It was a much better school with more attention to learning a language. It was LIOJ (Language Institute of Japan).

I didn't have to talk about my blood type anymore, either!

Yoko T.