Get That Corn Outta My Face!

This just happened:

Me, in the staff room, having received some candy corn from a friend a few days earlier: Remember how we talked about candy corn the other day? Well, I got some and thought maybe you’d like to try it.

Fellow teacher with whom I had the previous discussion about not being able to help people for fear of discrimination against the poor: Put that away, a student may see it! (walks away from me quickly)

I’m not only baffled, but I’m extremely upset that I even entertained the idea of being nice to a fellow teacher.

...

Now that I’ve cooled a bit and had some good conversation with friendly Japanese people, I’ll back off a little, since I surely do enjoy living here most of the time. But I still disagree with said teacher’s response to me, which is becoming a pattern (she’s also the one who told me it’s bad to say “die” in class). It’s the fifth or sixth time she’s scolded me, and she’s a 24 year-old first-year teacher. None of the other teachers have ever responded to me like she has.

As a side note, the other day, I avoided another embarrassing situation. I was making a sheet to explain the rules for adding ’s’ to the end of third-person singular verbs, one of which was “to box”. I couldn’t remember if “to box” in Japanese required a specific article, so I looked it up on an online dictionary. Box (like a cardboard one) in Japanese is sometimes “bokkusu”, so when I saw the kkusu at the end of the definition, I hastily copied and pasted it to my chart.

I continued to work on my sheet, when I realized, “Hey, wait–they literally say ‘bokushingu o suru’, which means ‘do boxing’.” I checked back at my chart and realized that I had pasted the meaning from some slang translation of “to box”, “sekkusu suru” (“do sex”).

Crisis narrowly averted.