Bizarre Teaching Moment #11: Fifty?!

~Saturday is my most difficult day of the week. I have eight hours of classes to teach, including two classes of crazy little monkeys that I can barely control; I'm understandably exhausted at the conclusion of the day. However, there is a silver lining to my Saturdays: the first and last classes of the day are extremely easy to teach and are quite enjoyable. Starting off the day is my only adult student, who just wants to talk about American culture and food. Ending the day is a high-school student, from whom this latest Bizarre Teaching Moment originated.

This girl is extremely bright, and her reason for studying English is that she wants to study molecular biology in the United States. We usually play some word games to improve her grammar and pronunciation, and do a bit of reading out of her (too easy) textbook. We end each lesson by reading a few pages of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" by C.S. Lewis (she bought her own English copy), and locate new words to expand her vocabulary. As I said, the class is a lot of fun and easy to run.

During last week's lesson, we were playing a game from the textbook, where one person reads a sentence and has to decide if it is true or false for them, correcting it if it's false. For example, "I want to live in the city", might be true, or you might change it to, "I don't want to live in the city. I want to live in the country."

The sentence in question here was, "I want to live to be one hundred years old." It was my turn, and, being the humorous fellow that you all know and love, changed it to, "I do not want to live to be one hundred years old. I want to live to be ten thousand years old!" This got some laughs, but what was really surprising was what she said next:

"I do not want to live to be one hundred years old. I want to live to be fifty years old."

At first I thought that she'd made a mistake. "You mean, one hundred fifty?" I asked, knowing that Japan has one of the the highest life expectancies in the world. "No," she insisted, "Fifty."

I queried her as to why she only wanted to live for another thirty-two years, and got this sad, sad tale: she has no interest in getting married and only wants to focus on her education and career. She is afraid that when she is fifty and not married, she will be lonely, so she would want to die.

I should add here that she is not ugly or abrasive in attitude, nor does she strike me as depressed or sad. She's just got a very peculiar and focused mindset. I tried to make her adopt a more positive attitude on life, telling her that even if she isn't married, she will have many friends, extended family, etc., and probably won't be lonely. I hope I managed to change her attitude a bit, although sometimes I feel less like a teacher and more like a guidance counselor...~Oyasumi!