I love Japan

My 1st year students at one of my junior high schools were required to write sentences about me to practice a grammatical point as homework. As you can imagine, this was clearly not my idea. I prefer my students to not write about me but I suppose I'm way more interesting than Demi, Yumi, & Mark from the textbook so I allow it (I'm Judge Ito, I'll allow it). I usually get bland, generic sentences anyways, like:

"Shawn sensei plays soccer."
"She likes sushi."
"She likes tenpura."
"She likes blue."

It's super fun to correct pages & pages of these btw, you know you want to!

But one of the girls wrote:

"She's a beautiful woman and really cool."

Ok, only partly true (^o^) but it still made me grin like a madwoman. Also for me this really highlights the difference between teaching in Japan versus the States. First off, in the States, I'd never assign something where the students had to write about me, the teacher. I'd get things like:

"She eats turds for dinner and loves it."
"She fondles animals' private parts."
"She has a secret diarrhea fetish."

And so on, but worse. You get the picture. In Japan, even if they were thinking this (which surprisingly a majority of them actually aren't), they probably wouldn't write it. They write super complimentary, nice, nothing-even-remotely-contraversial things. It's times like this where I sit back, sigh, & think, "God I love Japan."