The teacher stepped in poo

I learned something important last week. Although it is tempting to buy cute notebooks to use: DON’T do it. Most likely you will end up with the same notebooks the students turn into the teachers for homework. They will probably have shopped at the same dollar store as you. Also important, DON’T leave your cute notebook on the desk when other notebooks are being graded. Most likely, your notebook will end up in the pile of student notebooks and be distributed to a class. Which, unfortunately, is exactly what happened to me. My Japanese practice notebook with crazy looking kids on it happened to look exactly like one of my student’s notebooks, and because I left it on my desk it got swept up in the frantic grading and redistribution of notebooks. So, everyone got to see exactly what phrases I was writing down in my notebook.

Here is what happened:

I was sitting at my desk minding my own business, when my teacher turns to me and says, “Oh, Adriene what does your notebook look like?” She wasn’t wondering what my notebook looked like, by the way, she knew and was introducing the story to follow.
Me: “Well, sensei my notebook looks like the student’s notebooks and has children with party hats on it.”
Sensei: “Oh, really, I think that your notebook got mixed up in the students notebooks.”
Me: “What? Really, but my notebook has been here on my desk the whole time.”
Sensei: “Well, your notebook got mixed up in the second year notebooks last week….”
Me: “Oh?”
Sensei: “And the second year teacher kept trying to figure out which student’s notebook it was. He kept asking, ‘Is this yours, is this yours?’ So he finally opened up the notebook to read what was inside….”
Oh, no heart pounding at this point trying to remember exactly what I had written. WHAT HAD I WRITTEN???
Sensei: “The sentences were very strange and he realized it was your notebook. And you wrote some things that I have never heard in Japanese.”
OH NO!
Sensei: “I was very surprised by the phrases. You wrote, ‘Sensei ga unko wo fumu.’”
Dang it! Now I have to turn my example, “The teacher steps in poop,” into a positive. How to do this, and highlight a difference between ‘fumu’ (to step on/in) in English in Japanese?
Me: “Hahahaha. I am so sorry, but can remember grammar better when it is strange or funny.”
Sensei: “I have never heard that said phrase in Japanese before. This is the first time. And when the second year teacher saw it he laughed a lot, and then he shared it with all of us in the staff room and we all laughed. No one had heard this before.” (she laughed, don’t worry she thought this was hilarious)
Grrrreat. ONE WEEK AGO! ONE WEEK AGO the entire staff room laughed about my ridiculous examples in the notebook and then silently put the notebook back on my desk like nothing had happened. Then waited to tell me the story!
Me: “I am sure that they haven’t! I chose the strange example to remember the grammar for ‘fumu’. In English, you step ‘in’ soft or mushy things but step ‘on’ hard things. So in English we say ‘Step in poop,’ but Japanese always is ‘wo’ not ‘ni’. If I use a funny phrase like, ‘Sensei ga unko wo fumu,’ is easy to remember.”
And the conversation went on for a while. But, oh-my-goodness gracious was I embarrassed! So, I learned not to write things you might be embarrassed about people reading, write your name on your notebook in extremely big letters (my wasn’t on my notebook), DON’T buy a notebook a student has, and most of all DON’T leave your notebook on your desk. I still can’t believe that they put it on my desk and didn’t tell me about it! And when I confronted the second year teacher who had read my notebook to the staff room, he denied it at first. Then, after he saw I thought it was funny he suddenly remembered that he had read, “The teacher steps in poo.”

*Okay, so addendum to the story. Apparently it was read aloud to the kids too. I wasn’t told this but when I went to lunch today a kid taunted me!!!! He kept saying, “Unko, unko, unko.” Meaning “poop, poop, poop.” Great. Just great. Now the second years (the loudest and most misbehaved year) will say poop to me. Granted, the kid who taunted me is a part of the table tennis team (ping pong), and those kids tend to be at the bottom of the social ladder so I doubt he will ignite a “poop” greeting among the second years. If it is him alone, I think I will be able to handle it.