School Life
Observation: Prisoners in America have it made… See I think that they complain too much. If we really want to make the criminals in America pay for their crimes. Then we should send them to public school in Japan. I never knew cold until I stepping into school on Monday. You know its cold when you just want to turn around and go back outside.
Fact:
Prisons in America have some kind of heat. Schools in Japan have none.
No, I didn’t make a mistake. There’s no heat in my school. I have to race
down with my the hallways so I can beat the drafts that are nipping at my
heels.
Then I see the
students. They make me even colder.
Here, I am bundled up looking like I’m about five months pregnant and
they’re wearing shorts and a thin long sleeve zip up that someone had the
nerve to label a jacket. The girls that aren’t going to and from gym
class have to wear skirts. Now this is when I want to go
all-Scottish on the Japanese men who run the school system. They
should all have to wear skirts (sans hose) in the middle of winter.
Their bonny legs would be knocking harder than a Toyota in bad need of a
tune up.
So here I sit in the computer room typing out this email and I’m popping cough drops like they’re a last meal. I work up feeling fin this morning walked into school and was welcomed into class with a chorus of coughing. Can we say: tuberculosis, pneumonia, influenza, flu, and sinusitis? Yes all those things and more. When I took an informal poll about how all my students were doing.
Out
of 100 kids almost 75% said they were cold while
the rest said
they were sick. I was impressed because usually they don’t respond,
but this last week they’ve been quick to say one word: COLD. So when
I get some free time or when my fingers stop shaking, I will write my
Congressman a letter suggesting that prisons should not be heated and that
all the money saved by the taxpayers should go to save the shivering kids
and teachers in Japan.
PS. As I was tying this letter I noticed that there is also no heat in the computer room. Then I realized it’s only November and I have to walk alongside the train tracks to and from school for the rest of the term. After I had finished coughing up at least half of my congested lungs a Japanese teacher informed me in a highly amused voice that the coldest month in Japan is February. Sitting here looking at the frost inside the window, I wonder if I will survive that long.
