二本

My special needs students are awesome. As my co-worker Adam put it today at work, "The special needs class are easily the coolest kids in the entire school." They're the most fun to teach and also the most fun to just hang out with. I've taken to crashing their midday break time a couple of times a week.

I don't know which one makes me laugh the most, the Kendama Whiz who often lets out an exasperated "Sensei!" at my attempts to imitate her skills, the Tickle Torture Queen, or the Secret Genius, who speaks three languages and is a truly gifted artist. There's no question of who my favorite is, though. She was the first student I ever met at my middle school. When I showed up on my first day of work, she was sitting in the principal's office, a new arrival like me, waiting to go before the entire staff room to make her self-introduction. We chatted for a while, and I asked her her name. When she told it to me, I repeated it back. However, my pronunciation was apparently dis-satisfactory, for she made me repeat it several times before she gave her approval.

Since then, she's become well-integrated into the student community, being one of the friendliest and most outgoing people I've ever met. She always greets me with the brightest smile and a cheery "Hello!" when we pass in the hallways at school. I always make sure to emphasize the part of her name that I originally mispronounced, just because this always makes her laugh.

This morning, however, my favorite barely looked up when I waved and greeted her on the way to class. Something had her down today. I made a mental note to check in with her after lunch to find out what was up. When the after-lunch break rolled around, though, she was nowhere to be found. It turned out that the second and third-year students were having a meeting in the gymnasium, so I hung out with the first-years, getting them to teach me how to write the characters in their names.

At last the other students appeared, having finished their meeting (one of them tried to explain what it had been about, but she used too many big words. :_( The student I had been waiting for shuffled in slightly behind the others, sliding over to her desk without looking up from the floor. I tried to call her over to show me how to write her name, but she just shook her head, mumbled something and then slid over to the other side of the room to fiddle with her book bag.

"She's in a hurry," one of the other students explained.

"She seems a little down today," I ventured. The girl I was speaking to nodded and then turned to our friend across the room. "Hey! Are you all right?" she asked. The other girl nodded and then quickly left the room.

I wanted to follow her and ask her what was up, but the other students were crowding around, showering Adam and me with questions, and besides, she apparently had something to get done quickly.

Then, a few minutes later, I looked up and realized that she was standing right next to me, clutching a piece of paper, which from the looks of it was homework. I gave her a smile, wrapped up the conversation I had been having, and then turned to her and asked, "Did you need help with that?" She nodded and then spread the paper out before me. It was an English worksheet. She pointed at one section and said, "I don't understand this at all."

With a sigh of relief, I set about explaining the activity and then helping her complete it. English was a problem I was definitely well-equipped to deal with. Finally, we got to the last question. It was a fill-in-the-blank exercise, and the last sentence was "There are ____ ____ in the box." I looked at the picture that we were using for reference. The box in question contained a volleyball and a beach ball.

"All right," I said, "so what's in the box?"

She looked at the picture. "Booru?" she replied, using the Japanese pronunciation of the word.

"Right, I said. But how many are there?"

Her eyes lit up and she filled in the first blank with the word "two." Then she shifted her pencil over to the second blank, poised it to write and then frowned. I waited for her to ask for help, but she just kept staring at the blank. After a minute, she tentatively wrote "b."

"Good," I congratulated her. And then, just to be helpful, I enunciated carefully, "balls." And then I started giggling, because deep down inside I'm no better than the middle school kids that I teach. Fortunately, she didn't notice my inappropriate laughter, instead opting to continue her attempt to spell the intractable word. "Bour," she wrote and then gave me a hopeful look. I shook my head. She erased the last three letters and then waited.

"A," I suggested. She wrote "a." Then I made a beautifully rendered L-sound (which, in Japan, is really just showing off), hoping that she would be able to guess the appropriate letter just from the sound. No such luck. "R," she wrote.

"No, 'L,'" I said. She added a second "r" after the first one. "'L,'" I repeated, turning and writing it on the chalkboard behind me. I added an "r" next to it and then demonstrated the sounds each letter made a few times until she seemed to grasp the distinction. She erased the "r"s and then proudly inscribed a single "L" on the page.

"There are two of them," I said in English, holding up two fingers to demonstrate. She frowned, cocking her head to one side. "Two 'l's," I repeated. She looked down at her paper and then back up at me. I cast about in my brain, looking for the language that could communicate what I was trying to tell her. Then inspiration struck.

"二本エルがある," I said.

"Ohhhhh!" she said, inscribing another "l" after the first.

"And 's,'" I added. And at last her paper read "two balls," perfectly spelled and everything. And then I giggled.

Is "本" even the proper counting word for "l"s? IS there a proper counting word for English letters? I have no answers to these questions. All I know is that "二本エル" got my point across, and that's good enough for me.