Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Cause, really, what are my goals...

The last few days I have just been cleaning and moving. I also have been paying bills and attended a Business class at Sac City College.

In other news, I have decided that I want to apply to the JET program next year and return to Japan to teach English for a while. I was considering it before, but I have decided I should just do it. I could survive in Japan, and I have no other plans for next year anyway. However, the thing that really convinced me that I wanted to do JET was actually meeting some people who had done it. I was struck, not by how cool they were, but how uninterested they were in having anything other than a free ride to Japan. It then occurred to me that that was the original reason that I had become interested also. What follows is a philosophical rant, typed in purple to keep any of it from being taken too seriously. Skip if you wish.
It was then that I decided that my new goal should not just be to go and experience Japan, but to do that, AND teach, BUT not suck at it. It seemed so sad to me that, while I was in Korea and Japan, hardly anyone tried to talk to me in English even though in theory, they could, and in reality many probably wanted to. I felt sorry that so many people had been bullied by their English teachers into thinking if you did not say just the right thing it was worse than saying nothing. I vowed to change that if I ever became an English teacher. Then I realized that I do the same thing. I will rarely speak to people I want to talk to, no matter the laughs because I have been convinced that saying nothing is better than saying something improperly. Then I remembered why I started to take Japanese again in the first place: it is easier for me to talk to someone in a foreign language because I can't be expected to know how to do it right. And while people are not always forgiving if you screw up, at least you can feel like you did your best to try to share thoughts with another person. And that is really what language is about. It is a thrill when you and another person share a thought, but this thrill is harder to get in your native tongue. Foreign languages are like a drug that you haven't gotten used to yet. And by the time you get used to it, you usually have a reason to speak it.

Sorry about that. Anyway, not much happening.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

keep doing the blog

Trenton said...

Thanks