My Predecessor
Now Playing: Damion Rice
I rang the doorbell of an apartment door that’s in the same complex as mine and K-sensei answered the door, smiling and saying, “Hey,” drawing out the vowel. She’s my predecessor, having been the ALT at my school for three years prior to my arrival over a month ago. It’s a complete coincidence that we’re in the same complex.

She’s a good-looking woman of part Japanese and part Chinese ethnicity. Over the next hour she goes through her things asking me if I want them. She has a Winnie the Pooh bathroom set, a desk that’s too small, a broken futon, and a host of other random things that I nod my head to.

We head out on bikes to get some food—she shows me a really good omelet place in the mall. These are Japanese omelets though, so that means there’s like fifty or sixty different kinds. I get one with some kind of vegetables in the middle and a white sauce, on Koko-sensei’s recommendation.

We have a good talk about her experience teaching and she was very open about her opinions and everything, under some prodding from me of course, but I find people genuinely like to talk about themselves so they usually don’t need much encouragement. She had a lot of trouble working with a certain H-sensei, who blew up at her one day, a year-and-half into her 3-year stint here. “No more Karate! You have lessons to prepare!” He then cancelled all his lessons with her and refused to speak with her. There was nothing in particular that set him off other than her going to karate practice that day, which she had done for the last year-and-a-half, but we surmised it was an accumulation of things. One, she was a stronger kind of woman—you know, the kind that can convince you the world is flat if they have at you long enough, and H-sensei wasn’t used to that. Two, she challenged his translations and things in class, and he being quite arrogant about his English knowledge, is not a good idea. Lastly, she had taken such a rough class load, larger than any other teacher in the department, that she was beginning to garnish a lot of respect very quickly, which, combined with her Japanese ability, began to threaten H-sensei’s ability.

It’s hard to believe that someone so young could be so good a teacher, but even more unbelievable is how someone as experienced as H-sensei could go on without realizing how lucky we are to work with young people, or as K-sensei put it better than I’ve ever heard or read in any textbook, to “learn from the students.”