Mr Minamide

Todd had a low tolerance for silly, giddy girls and in particular complained about a particular class I taught. This was a group of girls who were just out of high school but not yet in university and they were in fact a frivolous, empty-headed bunch who were taking English to kill time and have a bit of a lark.  Todd had taught them before me and claimed he had found them a trial, but they were a pleasant if not a bright bunch, and I enjoyed teaching them. Every chance he got, however, Todd would comment on the girls’ stupidity and vacuity. It irritated me, but many things about Todd did, so I let it pass. 

One evening, Todd was ill and I had to substitute for him. He had a particularly obnoxious class that he was forever moaning about: none of us, he argued, had any idea how awful this group was or how difficult they were to teach. They had failed to mesh as a group partly because they were an odd assortment: two rather vague high school girls, a few scatterbrained middle-aged women, three high school boys who were not interested in anything but high school girls, and one retired businessman, Mr Sakamoto, who was loud, opinionated, and full of himself. I privately thought that he sounded exactly like Todd, but after teaching the class I had to admit that the businessman made Todd look pretty good.

Mr Sakamoto was short and bald with a bar-code comb-over and a wide pock-marked face. He ogled the girls and treated the women in the class with a patronizing contempt, interrupting them frequently and overriding their opinions whenever possible. The high school girls were as meek as mice and huddled together whenever one was asked a question, and the high school boys were -- well, high school boys.  By the end of the class, I found myself taking furtive looks at the clock:  the class really did present a teaching challenge.  I think I'd managed to get the three high school boys to say about one sentence each, and the high school girls had acted like rabbits being menaced by a wolf. The middle-aged women didn't stand a chance with Mr Sakamoto around. And the thought of having to deal with Mr Sakamoto several times a week was so awful that I began to feel downright sorry for Todd.

The next evening, as we all walked to the station, I said as much to him. I described everything Mr Sakamoto had done and said, his unctuously flirtatious manner with the girls, his rudeness to the women. I assured him that the class really was a challenge and said that I was grateful that I didn't have to teach them several times a week like he did.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘they drive me nuts. I can’t wait till next semester when somebody else gets to have them.’

Todd then went his separate way, but Marjorie, oddly enough, told him that she would catch up with him; she wanted to have a word with me. I was surprised: perhaps she was warming up to me after all!

‘Mary,’ she began tentatively, as though she was about to ask me for a favor.

I nodded, all ears. ‘Yes?’

‘I know you didn’t mean any harm just now. . .’.

I stared at her, astounded. ‘About what?’

Marjorie’s voice took on a chatty, confidential tone. ‘It’s just that, well, we all feel that our own students are a little special. Maybe it’s because we’re teaching them, maybe it’s because we share a little part of their lives, after all, and we’ve given them something of ourselves.’

All I could do was continue to stare at her, flabbergasted.

‘And what you said just then about Todd’s class; I know that you didn’t mean to hurt his feelings, but –’  We had come to a stop in front of the ticket machines, and we were facing each other.

‘But he’s always saying – he’s always complaining about that class himself  – !’ I spluttered.

She shook her head dismissively, smiling as though I was particularly thick. ‘We all complain about our students, Mary. You complain about yours too.’

This was true, I did; but so did Todd. He demeaned my students all the time. To my face.

She smiled again. 'You see, we all talk about our students, Mary. We complain about them from time to time -- that's only human. But we don't like it when other people bad-mouth them.'

‘Marjorie, I was commiserating with Todd!  That class is not an easy class to teach – all those different ages and levels. And -- and -- Mr Sakamoto. Todd’s said it any number of times himself. I wasn’t making fun of anyone or being nasty –’ I had to stop. I was close to tears.  He bad-mouths my students all the time, too! I could have said. If I had trusted myself to.

Marjorie regarded me with pitiful eyes, still shaking her head. ‘Like I said, Mary, I know you didn’t mean to hurt Todd. You were just being insensitive. And I just wanted you to know that, well, you’re not the only person who has feelings. Okay?’

This was too much for me. If I’d had a stick, I’d have knocked her head off. Instead I nodded, stupidly, my heart racing, willing the tears to stay back.

Unctuously, Marjorie smiled again. ‘So – just keep it in mind, Mary. Okay? No hard feelings, right?’

I stared back at her. ‘See you tomorrow, Marjorie.’  And I turned and walked away.

I didn’t nod. I was damned if I was going to nod anymore. I was all nodded out.

Not long after this incident, our nervous boss, Mr Tachiyama, was transferred to another school. The man who replaced him as manager was one of the shortest men I have ever met in my life, Mr Minamide. I don’t think he was even five feet tall, but after a few weeks, I completely forgot about his height.  He was also one of the nicest men I have ever met, and his English was both completely natural and impeccable.

A lot of Japanese – men in particular – have a certain pompous, ostentatious air about them when they speak English.  You get the feeling that communication isn’t as important to them as showing off is. Mr Minamide spoke the best English I’d ever heard a Japanese person speak, and everything he said was thoughtful and reasonable. I never once felt as though he was showing off or lording it over the others who couldn’t speak English as well as he could. From time to time, he would speak Japanese to me too, always managing to pitch it at the right level, yet never patronizing or talking down to me. Someone told me that he had been a junior high school teacher before he started at Sony, and very popular with his students. I could easily see why. The longer I worked with him the more I came to respect him.

It was my great fortune that Mr Minamide seemed to instinctively like me too. He came into the office one evening and announced that he wanted to rewrite some of the educational materials we were using and he needed someone who had a good ear for natural English.

Everyone in the office wanted to give it a shot, especially Todd. ‘I’ve got a good ear for language,’ he put in. ‘I was the editor of our school newspaper,’

A few of the others, too, mentioned that they had done proofreading and editing before. I didn’t say anything. I’m the sort of person who yearns to be ‘It:’ the one the teacher picks to clean the blackboard erasers, the lead in the school play, the soloist in the concert. And I am the sort of person who fades right into the background when the choices are being made, so I kept my head down and continued to plan my lessons.

Mr Minamide pursed his lips and looked around the office. His gaze came to rest on me. ‘How about you, Mary? Would you be interested in helping me?’  I could not believe my ears. I was so certain that I didn't stand a chance of being picked that I had barely bothered to look up at him.  I nodded,  pathetically grateful.

'Good. We'll start this evening.  I'll tell the secretaries not to schedule anything for you on Tuesdays between 5:00 and 7:00.'

Todd took it particularly hard. He let me know on several occasions just how unfair he thought it was that only one of us got to do this. At the very least, he insisted, we  should take it in turns. Plus, he had seniority, and what made Mr Minamide think that I was the only person who could do it anyway? His irritation made my small victory all the sweeter.

It is hard to explain what a tremendous morale boost this was for me at the time. Not only did I get out of teaching a dreadfully dull class which Marjorie had to cover for, but I got to watch the rest of my colleagues file out of the staffroom to teach while I sat and did something I loved: commenting on written English. I don’t flatter myself that what I did was especially hard or took any exceptional skill, but I do think that no one else there would have enjoyed doing it as much as I did. We worked through idioms, separable and inseparable phrasal verbs, slang, and false cognates and I had a whale of a time. I learned a lot, too.

‘So you say “get over” is an inseparable phrasal verb. Because you cannot say “When my teacher died, I never got it over,” right?  “It” cannot go between the two parts of the verb.’

‘Yes, that’s right. You’d have to say, “I never got over it.” So “Get over” is definitely an inseparable phrasal verb.’  I was very satisfied with myself for being able to explain this.

‘Hmm. But you can say “Get the ball over the net,” can’t you?’

‘Um…yes, you can.’

‘So if you want to replace “ball” with a pronoun, you can say “Get it over the net.”’

‘Ah.  Well – yes. I mean – yes, definitely, you can say that.’

‘So – sometimes inseparable, sometimes separable – right? Depending on which meaning.’

I sat there, my mind going into overdrive, pondering the business of ‘get over’ and how it was really two verbs – ‘recover from’ and ‘succeed in physically passing.’ Never had I paid this idiom and its two meanings the slightest bit of mind; never had I realized how complex phrasal verbs were and how hellishly difficult they must be for non-native speakers of English to learn.

I quickly discovered that Mr Minamide’s extrinsic knowledge of English grammar was far superior to mine, and his stock rose even higher in my eyes. 

My colleagues still largely ignored me. Marjorie continued to snort in disgust at my opinions, interrupt the punchlines of my jokes, and affect disinterest on the rare occasions when Todd and I discussed the Modern Japanese Language School and what progress we were making in Japanese.  While I sat at my desk, I heard them refer to shared meals, restaurants they were planning to visit together, people they knew in common outside school -- and it still hurt. But things were looking up: at least I knew that Mr Minamide had given me his vote of confidence.