Confessions of a Gaijin: Episode 16 – Fumbling in the Dark

I have a secret I’d like to share with you.

I’m doing my best to keep it under wraps at work. So far none of my co-workers have managed to  spot it, but I wouldn’t want to be so blasé as to assume I’ll get away with it forever. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Either way, I feel like I need to come clean in some way. So here’s my secret:

Most of the time I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m largely making it up as I go.

Man, it feels like a relief to finally get that off my chest. I’ve been carrying it around for a while, mainly since the late summer, when the workload became too big and and too intense for me to deal with in its entirety without running myself into the ground. Lessons are meant to be planned days in advance so as to assure their near-perfection, but unless you’re a teaching ninja who can function on four hours sleep a night, that simply isn’t feasible. So instead of settling for near-perfect, I decided that “good enough” would have to be good enough. On an especially trying day, “good enough” gets modified to “this will have to do for now”. And one way or another, I am able to make the whole big damn mess work in my favour.

I very often walk into a classroom with little or no idea of how certain chunks of that 50-minute running time will pan out. This is especially true for the kids classes, which are the most demanding of all as you have to come up with enough games and props to keep the little bastards entertained for the best part of an hour. The rest is lucid bullshitting on my part.

It may sound like I’m cutting corners because I can’t be arsed, and I can assure you that really isn’t the case. If anything, I can be arsed, hugely so at times, but there’s simply too much to do. In some parallel universe there is another version of me that has all the time in the world to plan and prep to his heart’s content. In this universe, lessons are flawless masterclasses with perfectly-timed beginnings, middles and endings. There are flawless segueways and in-jokes. Even if you can speak fluent English it would be the most entertaining 50 minutes of your goddamn life. You would be so impressed you would make it the subject of glowing status updates on Facebook (“Just had the best English lesson EVER!!!”) and rush home afterwards to tell all your friends and loved ones.

But instead, in this universe, there is a well-meaning, barely-organised young man standing in front of a whiteboard, doing his best to get comfortable with discomfort. There’s always too much to do here (even the most senior staff get at least one thing wrong per week) and if I let all that bear down on me then it will crush me like a bug, so I improvise and think on my feet and rarely, if ever, know how good or bad a working day is going to be when I wake up at the start of it. Potential car crashes often result in triumph. Sure things regularly fall through. All I can say about my days right now is that they go quick and I am still learning.

It helps that when I’m teaching lessons, the only people in the classroom are me and the students. If I can conjure up enough smoke and mirrors to make them think that I’m a consummate, capable professional then my work is done. On the occasions when a staff member is paying attention or I know one of my lessons will be observed, then I go the extra mile. Keeping up appearances is all part of the game sometimes.

I didn’t even know when I was going to write this. I didn’t mark it in down in my iPhone calendar or anything, I woke up early, had a shower, made myself some tea and realised I had enough time to get a few hundred words down before I had to leave the apartment.

I’m all for planning and discipline. Most of the time. I think in some cases, life is simply far too arbitrary and haphazard for a person to effectively plan their way through all of it. Turns out I’m not alone; Peter Jackson effectively fumbled his way through shooting The Hobbit trilogy without any pre-production (which explains an awful lot) and Robery Downey Jr apparently made up 80% of his lines in the first Iron Man movie.  Maybe more of us are fumbling in the dark than we care to admit.

At the time of writing there are only four months left on my contract. Nothing is speaking to my heart yet in terms of what I want to do next with my life. At this point the most appealing idea I have on my slate is a post-employment victory lap that takes in Taiwan, Hong Kong, South-East Asia and America’s west coast before coming back to the UK in a blaze of glory. And after that? Fuck knows.

It is the short term that I must live in for the time being, always alert but never looking too far ahead. I am improvising life right now, and hoping that by fumbling in the dark for long enough, I will eventually find a light switch.