Do I need to know this???

So today was our first teachers meeting. Need I remind you that since I'm in Japan it was ALL in Japanese. Thankfully they gave the english teachers a translator, but did she translate everything....NO!

I finally asked, what's he saying, and she would tell me one sentence for the last 5 minutes of talking. REALLY?!?!?

While the meeting was going on Bridgette, my roommate and co-worker was smart and brought papers to grade while sitting there. She was grading Dictionary quizzes that we decided to give every one of our classes. The purpose of the test was to make sure they all had dictionaries, and to make sure they knew how to use them. So for each word they had to write the Japanese word, and then write a sentence in English using the word they had to look up. One of the words was neck....want to know what the student put? My cat is necking me. When I read this I started laughing... IN the middle of the teacher's meeting. Also I should add that in Japanese culture, you have to be respectful of those talking. So I initially felt bad for laughing but I couldn't help it. To make matters worse the lady that was supposed to be translating tapped me and said shhh he's talking about how the students have been having bad behavior, you shouldn't be talking or laughing. After she said that I was a little annoyed because out of the 10 minutes this new TOP (what they call principles, and authority figures in the school) sensei (teacher) all she told me was that they had been talking about student behavior. Did they tell us how to handle it? (Not that I have really had any problems in my classes) Did they mention behaviors to be looking for? She didn't tell me a thing. I was clueless.

THEN, after an hour I was thinking surely they have been saying more important things than, keep your desk clean, and watch for girls trying to fix there hair during class and chapel. So I asked the translator, "Is he saying anything we need to know?" She told me yes...and that was it. Not yes, he's telling us ..... She just said. "Yes" So at that point I completely quit listening and started counting ceiling tiles, or looking around the room to see how many teachers had fallen asleep, because Japanese people can sleep whenever and where ever they feel tired. When I looked around I could only see 3 sleeping, and I can't remember how far I got on the ceiling tiles before it was time to go. Afterwords my rommie and I decided we didn't feel like walking home in the rain and fixing dinner so we went out for Pasta, and got a cab for the ride home.