Fire-Starter

Posted by Ali-G (Ottawa, Canada) on 7 January 2007 in Abstract & Conceptual.

When I taught at a university in Japan, all the gai-jin, regardless of what subject they were teaching, had to help out marking the English Composition section of the entrance exam. Typically the kids trying to get in to this very prestigious private university would have spent six years at school plus time at cram school preparing for the entrance exams. And as a an end result most - not all - of the kids had English skills that were ... well frankly - crap.

Anyway one year one of the topics happened to be "My Worst Experience". Well this turned out to be a quite fortuitous (?) as - too late to change the exam papers - over the winter/Christmas break, there happened to be a rather large earthquake in Kobe killing in the end over 6000 people. Most kids wrote about the day their grandmother died or the day they failed the entrance exam to this very prestigious private university - hoping no doubt to pluck my heart strings and in a fit of sympathetic (empathetic? - what the hell is the difference anyway?) tears, that I would personally vouch to the university president of the merit and valour of this poor unfortunate misunderstood kid.

Only one story ever stuck with me - one kid - he wrote - got up at 5 in the morning to study for this exam (nothing unusually about that - Japanese high schools are hell; the universities are holiday camps - some kids never crack a book for 4 years) - well as it was a cold morning and Japanese homes, with no central heating and generally kept warm with kerosene heaters, he decided he needed a cigarette to warm up and get going with the studying. Just as he got his cigarette going, the Great Hanshin/Kobe Earthquake struck, knocking over and spilling his kerosene heater and causing him to drop his cigarette. Of course this resulted in an immediate fire that, as the shaking had subsided, ripped through the family home, burning it to the ground.

ok ok i admit - this story was just so messed up that i laughed myself silly - but i did give him an "A" - just in case it was true.

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