Perhaps it is the market that draws the norm into the open
When I was in junior high, a classmate teased me for “actually paying attention in class.”
It happened after English class. Japan’s English curriculum includes a program called ALT — an Assistant Language Teacher, a short-term visiting instructor whose first language is English, sent to give students exposure to real conversation and to the shape of the sounds. Our ALT was from Australia. His name, I think, was Kelly. He was the one who first put Vegemite in front of our thirteen-year-old mouths.
Kelly was warm and open, but my classmates did not really listen to him. One reason was that our English wasn’t good enough. We couldn’t follow a native speaker’s speech well, and Kelly was not fluent in Japanese. The point of the ALT program, of course, is to build exactly that kind of difficult contact zone — but with us, it didn’t take. The other reason was that we were in the middle of adolescence, and still childish. In a lecture-based class that our peer group had quietly agreed to file under “boring,” actively participating — doing your best — felt like something uncool. Everyone turned their faces away.
One afternoon, after one of Kelly’s classes, a classmate teased me in front of a friend from another homeroom.