For the Irish Taxpayer who so kindly pays for our university education, it would be a tragic day for them to wittness the depts to which some ex-patriots have sunk.
I came to Japan armed with a degree, (a fairly mierable one I confess, but still, it took a bit more effort than simply collecting seven biscuit-wrapper barcodes to get through it. ) and a year of teaching in Quebec.
Three years later, as I stand in a classroom, holding myself up with the help of the wall, masking my mind-numbed yawns with my textbook, I am as useless as a used lightbulb in a cake recipe.
I am nothing but a human-taperecorder. My one true value is that I need not be rewound. The teacher also can play with the speed.
This is what this idiot of a teacher thinks team-teaching is.
This lady who I so often chat to about the importance of education, and of incorporating the four elements of language in one class, and of this and of that, draggs me off to class, to stand there. And then she wonders at the end why my look is censured, why I frown?

No more than the American dream now so dissipated and miserable in the eyes of those it has lied to, the Japanese ideal is sure to collapse soon. No other country would take the wonderful language tool that a native speaker is, and leave them standing in silence, circumscribing the students advancement in the English language learning, and hence rendering them incapable of ever leaving japan and discovering that a much nicer world exists elsewhere.

And now she sits sulking, this lady who was annoyed when I declared that there was no point in my coming to her second class, to stand and and survey and frustrate myself even further tot he point of wishing yo furl the book in my hand and smash across something or someone.

apartfrom that though…it`s a grand day.
Good drying.