Holy Christ!! Tomoki's Back!!

Boy, was I in for a shock when I got to school today. It seems that one of my students did a homestay in America for a year, and just returned to the land of the rising sun. I heard her voice (I've known her for a long time, as she used to be one of my JHS students), and just about jumped for joy when I realized that I would finally be able to speak ENGLISH in school!! I sat with her at lunch time, and we chatted while all the other students in the class just stood around gaping, with looks of shock because one of their classmates could actually understand what this crazy monkey was saying!!

Luckily for her, she's planning on going to college in America when she finishes highschool, so she won't have that fantastic English ability knocked clean out of her like so many of her peers who do homestays for long periods in foreign countries. I've noticed a steady decline in one of the other students' English abilities after she did a year in America. She spoke amazing English when she returned, but now she's been back for over a year, and prefers to speak in Japanese again. Ahhh, the wonderful English education system of Japan!

As I said to my homeboy Steve, now that one of my students has finally learned English (and I've had at least 3000 students in my three years here), I can return to America knowing that I've made a difference, and really folks, isn't that what the JET Programme is all about (coughs, trying to mask his laughing fit)?